Does Democracy Decrease Fear of Terrorism?

ABSTRACT

Fear is an integral part of terrorism. Fighting fear can thus be a crucial part of counterterrorist policies. In the case of terrorism, citizens look to the state for protection. Yet, most studies of terrorist fear emphasize individual-level factors. We lack studies that link fear to features of the state, especially whether democratic states are capable of reducing fear among its citizens. Our study aims to fill part of this research gap by asking whether democratic government reduces or increases fear of terrorism. We find that there is substantial cross-country variance in citizens’ fear of terrorism. The results suggest that fear is more widespread among citizens in non-democratic countries compared to citizens in democratic countries. Actual exposure to terrorist attacks has no impact on citizens’ fear of terrorism when we account for whether the country is a democracy or not. Hence, democratic government displays resilience towards fear mongering.

KEYWORDS:

• Democratic government
• fear
• fear mongering
• resilience
• terrorism

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Norwegian Research Council. We would like to thank Jan Oskar Engene and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

Notes

¹ The unpredictable nature of terrorist threats might have led us to use the term “anxiety” instead of fear. Whereas fear is aroused by some identified danger or evil, anxiety is a state of apprehension or uneasiness not caused by a specific threat. Yet, even if the specific threat is unpredictable, it is recognizable and relatively specific. Much in the same way as people fear traffic accidents they will fear terrorist acts. Normally they do not know if or when the threat will materialize, but they have a picture of what it might entail if it were to happen. Hence, we have chosen to employ the term fear, not anxiety. Moreover, “fear” is used in the survey question that we use as our dependent variable.

² The full dataset includes 83,070 respondents across a total of 57 countries. Due to missing values on some of our explanatory variables the following eight countries are excluded from the analysis: Qatar, Taiwan, China, Kuwait, Singapore, New Zealand, Jordan and Cyprus. The 49 countries in the analysis are Algeria, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Egypt, Ecuador, Estonia, Germany, Ghana, India, Iraq, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Rwanda, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, The Netherlands, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, United States, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and Zimbabwe.