Attitudes towards Muslims and fear of terrorism

ABSTRACT

This article looks at explanatory approaches of fear of terrorism. Until now, empirical studies looking at determinants of fear of terrorism have used the theoretical framework from the field of research regarding fear of crime. We argue that the cognitive link between terrorism and Islam is currently so strong that explanatory models should include measures of attitudes towards Muslims. On an argumentative level, the fear of crime theoretical framework is unconvincing. Our empirical analysis using structural equation modelling shows that fear of terrorism shares almost no determinants with the fear of violent crime. Negative attitudes towards Muslims are the strongest determinant of fear of terrorism and totally mediate all other effects. Discussions about tackling the issue of fear of terrorism should consider these findings as solutions may otherwise be inappropriate, at best. At worst, solutions based on an improper understanding of the determinants of fear of terrorism may serve only to exacerbate the problem.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamophobia
• terrorism
• fear
• crime
• attitudes
• beliefs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The topics of Muslims’ fear of Islamic-related terrorism as well as fear of terrorism that is carried out by non-Muslims merit examination as well. However, they are beyond the scope of this paper. In the conclusion, we discuss the results of this paper with regard to this, as well as provide some outlook for future work.

2. Participating countries were Germany, Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Poland and Hungary; n varied between countries from 1,000 to 1,011.

3. We did test alternative models in which the influence of the predictors of positive and negative attitudes towards Muslims was mediated by fear of terrorism. In the constrained model (i.e. the strictest mediation model) with no direct paths of the other predictors to attitudes to Muslims (the equivalent of model 1 below), the model fit was markedly worse (CFI = 0.942, RMSEA = 0.035, SRMR = 0.038) as opposed to model 1 reported in Table 2 (CFI = 0.990, RMSEA = 0.016, SRMR = 0.026). This suggests fear of terrorism is less suited as a mediator of attitudes towards Muslims than the other way around.

4. We tested models in which attitudes towards Muslims were modelled as a single latent factor with both attitude indicators but the model fit was slightly poorer than if the two indicators were modelled separately and the standardized factor loading for the “appreciation” indicator was sub-par (0.499 and 0.509, respectively). While the two are surely related (r = −0.412), we agree with Breyer and Danner’s assertion that the indicators represent slightly different latent constructs.

5. This was seen as unproblematic because only three respondents in total belonged to another religious denomination.

6. Later it was found that the man had likely intended to use the pipe bombs found to blow up cigarette machines (Tagesschau 2015).

7. We also tested a model using a full information maximum likelihood (FIML) estimator instead of listwise deletion method and observed stable results (n = 381).