What drives national attitudes towards the threat of violence? Cross-sectional evidence from foreign tourism in Israel

Abstract

We explore the factors explaining cross-sectional variation in changes in international tourist arrivals into Israel during the Intifada. Much of the variation is attributable to identifiable socio-economic characteristics, providing evidence on what drives public sensitivity to violence around the world.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the support of ESRC Grant RES–000–22–0312, which funded the project of which this article is a part. Thanks also to Paul Frijters, Paul Hansen and Frank Stähler and to seminar participants at the Universities of Leicester, Canterbury and Otago for comments on previous drafts of this article. All remaining errors and omissions are our own.

Notes

¹ Israelis also market religious tourism packages for Christians, but Christians are unlikely to have the same political commitment to the State of Israel. If we include in the regression an estimate of the percentage of the population that attends church regularly, taken from the World Values Survey, it is not statistically significant.

² Other measures of human development such as literacy and life expectancy are not statistically significant when added to our regression equations. Neither are indices of inequality such as the Gini coefficient.

³ For three countries – Hong Kong, Malaysia and Italy – the ratio is less than 20%. These are outliers in the distribution of Δln(x), making it nonnormal. However, with only 57 observations in all we do not have enough degrees of freedom to model nonlinearities in the lower tail. For this reason we adjust the figures for the three countries, raising Δln(x) to −1.5 (implying a ratio of 22% in Table 1).

Table 1. Ratio of 2001–2002 tourist arrivals to 1998–1999 tourist arrivals