Terrorist warnings affect political attitudes

[Tanuki]

confirmed by social science research:


http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/news/releases/2009/09/01/terrorist-warnings-affect-political-attitudes-says-vanderbilt-researcher.88193

>"When citizens in the United States and Mexico are confronted by terrorist threats, they cope in ways that can put significant stresses on the nations’ democracies, according to research by political scientists at Vanderbilt and Claremont.

.........


The researchers first focused on individuals’ attitudes toward one another and found links between terrorist threats and decreased social trust. Survey participants had less sympathy for gays and immigrants and took tougher stances on crime when they experienced a terrorist threat. In their experiments, the researchers found that those who were predisposed to conformity and established authority were at greater risk of expressing intolerance and preferences for punitive measures.

Second, a terrorist threat caused individuals to view a relatively more conservative, incumbent party’s candidate as a more charismatic and stronger leader, while they perceived the incumbent’s rival less favorably. “During times of terrorist threats, people put these leaders on a pedestal and seek to protect them from negative attacks,” Zechmeister said.

..........

The third coping strategy during a terrorist threat that the researchers confirmed was increased support for an interventionist foreign policy aimed at engaging countries abroad while protecting the homeland. This includes citizens’ willingness to give up some civil liberties for greater security. The researchers found this to be true in the United States as well as Mexico.

......The book points out two major reasons for citizens to be concerned about the responses to terrorist threats that they detect in their study. One is that even temporary shifts in support for various policies might result in permanent legislation. In addition, unlike traditional wars, there is no clear end date to the threat of terrorism. Also, “the magnitude of the effects of a terrorist threat are likely to be much larger in real life than those we find in a lab or survey data, and this gives us all the more reason to be concerned about the political consequences of terrorist threats,” Zechmeister said.

(more at link)
(edited for typo)