Abstract
Democratic governments have argued that their ability to counter hybrid threats—threats that come from irregular agents such as violent extremists, criminal networks, and cyber attackers—depends on their ability to monitor all forms of online communication. This presents a conundrum for democratic citizens: either governments surveil their communications or they risk endangering the security of their societies. To assess the tradeoffs people make between freedom, privacy, and security, we analyze survey data from seven NATO countries in Europe to assess whether, to what extent, and why European citizens are willing to trade privacy for security. We find that women (rather than men) and the internationalists (rather than the nationalists) are the people who most sharply draw a distinction between targeted surveillance, which is acceptable to them, and blanket surveillance, which is not. We also find that favorable views of the United States and confidence in President Obama make European citizens more willing to support US surveillance programs targeting not only terrorist suspects but also ordinary people and their political leaders. Pro-US attitudes may ease US statecraft, but they do not necessarily foster a healthy balance between freedom and security in the age of asymmetric threats.
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Notes
Based on the concept of a “supercitizen” that was coined by David Rothkopf (2012) to describe private individuals with tremendous power and global reach.
The survey found 49% of Britons were in favor; 24% thought the balance between more or less surveillance was already correct; and 15% thought the government should do more to protect privacy.
The estimates were obtained by running three chains of the Gibbs sampler. Each chain ran for 50,000 iterations after an adaptive phase of 1,000 iterations, and a burn-in phase of 4,000 iterations. Every fifth iteration was kept for inference, which yielded a sample of 10,000 draws per chain from the posterior distribution of the model parameters. Both visual inspection of the traceplots for the chains and more formal tests of convergence indicate that the chains appear to have reached the stationary distribution. For more details see the online Appendix.
To measure the ideology of the leaders in power, we follow the classification scheme developed by Brambor and Lindvall (2018).
In the online Appendix, we summarize the same trends about the age cohorts from a different perspective: we report the posterior predicted probabilities of supporting US surveillance programs for different cohorts.
The posterior estimates of the probability that an individual was Muslim in our sample are as follows: 4.5% in France, 1.5% in Germany; 0.9% in Greece, 0.3% in Italy, 0.1% in Poland; 0.6% in Spain, and 2% in the UK.
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We would like to thank Jeff Carter, Monti Datta, Joe Grieco, Peter Katzenstein, Andrew Reddie, Jonathan Swarts, Rob Trager, Yantsislav Yanakiev, and the CPSR reviewers for comments and suggestions. Data, replication files, and an online appendix, which includes information on the statistical models, the data, the measurement of the variables, and the descriptive statistics, are available at https://www.chiozza.org. Mistakes, omissions, and other assorted infelicities are our own responsibility.
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Atkinson, C., Chiozza, G. Hybrid Threats and the Erosion of Democracy from Within: US Surveillance and European Security. Chin. Polit. Sci. Rev. 6, 119–142 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41111-020-00161-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41111-020-00161-2