Abstract
Exploiting a unique panel of student respondents surveyed both shortly before and after the March 2016 bombings in Brussels, this paper analyzes the effects of terrorism on social identities and preferences over security policy. Social identification—including individuals’ feelings of connection to social groups such as countries or regions—is often considered a possible determinant of political and economic preferences. In turn, it is widely supposed that social identities may be subject to influence by acts of terror; indeed, our respondents report stronger connections to Belgium after the attacks than before. Problems with endogeneity and causality can confound analyses of those relations. Our novel pre- and post-attack responses help disentangle causality between terror and country connection: respondents feeling affected severely by the attacks show stronger connections ex-post at the country level, but close ex-ante connections do not predict stronger feelings of affectedness. Feelings of terrorism’s influences also correlate significantly with preferences over security policy and police resourcing, unmediated by jurisdictional connections.
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Notes
Note that in their survey Krieger and Meierrieks (2011) consider (mixed) evidence regarding identities—particularly religion, ethnicity, and language—as potential determinants of terrorism. Kurrild-Klitgaard et al. (2006), for instance, find positive associations between countries’ probabilities of experiencing terrorism and their linguistic (but not ethnic) fractionalization.
See Khan et al. (2017) for a categorization of theories regarding individual responses to terrorism, including tendencies to withdraw or turn inward in order to ‘manage’ the threat (e.g. Solomon et al. 1991), or to adopt more conservative or traditionalist attitudes (e.g. Jost et al. 2003). See also Moskalenko et al. (2006) and related discussion below.
Note, however, that in particular the handling of the aftermath of the attacks by the then-governing People’s Party and a hasty condemnation of ETA led to accusations of willful suppression of relevant information and large-scale protests.
Moskalenko et al. (2006) base their results on three survey rounds with different student samples, which raises issues of selection and cohort effects. While we expect terrorism to increase identification, observations of the same individuals from before and after the Brussels attacks allow us a more robust within-subject test.
Online appendix D contains details on the matching procedure. No demographic variables differ statistically across surveys. See Table OA4 in the online appendix.
Three matched, control group respondents gave incomplete responses to control variables in (only) one survey, resulting in the unbalanced panels reported here. One respondent gave incomplete responses to both surveys and drops from this analysis entirely. The results change negligibly upon restricting the sample to the 30 control group participants with complete data for all controls in both surveys to obtain a fully balanced panel.
Omitting (sets of) the controls does not alter the qualitative findings throughout. We observe some significant effect estimates for control variables, chiefly for attitudes toward Flemish independence and Flemish autonomy, see online appendix E.
Online appendix Table OA5 presents corresponding mean connection levels by treatment group and survey for the matched sample.
Omitting from the regression four subjects who reported very low ex-post assessments of the attacks' severity (see below) strengthens this result considerably. The estimated post-attack effect on Belgian connections remains the strongest, at 0.978, with p = 0.021.
Note also that the total differences in connection levels for the treatment groups (relative to the control group in survey 1), after both priming and the attacks, are obtained by summing the prime coefficients with their respective post-attack interaction coefficients. In, e.g., the case of Belgian connection, Wald tests indicate that the total difference for the Belgian prime group is significantly positive and that neither prime group’s total difference diverges significantly from the control group’s pre- to post-attack difference (although the Belgian prime group’s is somewhat larger and the Flemish prime group’s is somewhat smaller). Thus, while the evidence could be taken to suggest that the primes may have some persistent effect across surveys, final Belgian connections do not differ significantly across treatment groups. See online appendix F for further discussion.
Our analysis emphasizes country-level connections. That approach follows both from our own prior beliefs regarding jurisdictional identities affected by terrorism, and from a large literature linking terror and (stronger) national identities, often in the form of patriotism or a rally ‘round the flag effect. Still, we acknowledge that concerns regarding potential multiple testing issues may arise in light of our study of five different jurisdictional levels. In particular, when applying Bonferroni corrections for the five tiers, the results for connection to Belgium in columns (7) and (8) of Table 2 fall below conventional levels of statistical significance, narrowly so in the case of column (8). We argue that our findings remain informative in light of our limited sample size, established priors about the country level’s importance, and the consistency of the findings across the different variables of interest.
Participants were also asked if they were in Brussels on the day of the attacks. Controlling for their whereabouts does not influence our results.
An alternative specification interacts the severity measure with the post-attack dummy in a random effects panel model, testing directly whether pre- to post-attack connection changes are most evident among subjects who report being affected strongly by the attacks. That is found to be the case—again, most powerfully for Belgium—with results corresponding closely to those presented in Table 3. Our thanks to an anonymous referee for the suggestion.
Note that, to keep the results comparable to previous sections, we use the 11-point scale scores for perceived attack severity in this subsection. The results change little when estimating ordered logit models, or when the continuous measure of attack severity is replaced by a below/above-median dummy.
The same holds when all five jurisdictional connections are included in a single regression, both for the control group and the full sample.
Omitting connection to Belgium from models (2) and (6) also leaves them effectively unchanged.
Again, we repeat the same estimations with (changes in) connections to Belgium and the other tiers, but still find no significant effects.
Adding the various measures for (changes in) other connections causes even less of a change in the coefficient estimates for perceived attack severity.
Consistent with prior work, we also find evidence that perceptions of attack severity correlate with a small rightward shift in participants’ positioning on the left-right ideological scale, significant at the 5% level. As was the case with jurisdictional connections, we find no evidence that (changes in) left-right positioning mediates the effect of the attacks on security preferences.
The limitations of the sample available for the current paper should, however, be kept in mind, and future research should verify the observed effects.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Øyvind Aas, Thomas Apolte, Caroline Buts, Benny Geys, Bruno Heyndels, and Marc Jegers for their comments on previous versions of this paper. We are also grateful for the feedback received at the following conferences: the 2017 Annual Meeting of the European Public Choice Society (Budapest, Hungary), the 2017 International Meeting on Experimental and Behavioral Social Sciences (Barcelona, Spain), the 21st Annual Conference on Economics and Security (Brussels, Belgium), and the 13th Annual Workshop of the Households in Conflict Network (Brussels, Belgium). Special thanks to Lieven De Moor, Luc Hens, Kelly Steenackers, Marie-Laure Vandenhaute, Jente Van Belle, and Leo Van Hove for their support in practical matters. Colin R. Kuehnhanss (PhD Fellowship 2014–2018, Grant No. 11V2117N) and Joshua Holm (Postdoctoral Fellowship, Grant No. 12Y0618N) are also grateful to the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) for financial support. Colin R. Kuehnhanss is also an official at the European Commission. However, this contribution is authored in private capacity and expresses exclusively the personal opinion of its authors. It does not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the European Commission.
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Kuehnhanss, C.R., Holm, J. & Mahieu, B. Rally ’round which flag? Terrorism’s effect on (intra)national identity. Public Choice 188, 53–74 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-020-00803-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-020-00803-8