Terrorist Attacks and Trust in Institutions: Micro Evidence From Europe

Chandan Kumar Jha and Ishita Tripathi

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2025, vol. 69, issue 7-8, 1340-1371

Abstract: The existing literature on terrorism focuses on the “rally-around-the-flag-effect†– a relatively short-term phenomenon. The non-immediate effects of terrorist attacks on trust in institutions, however, remain largely unexplored. Arguing that maintaining law and order and upholding peace is considered the responsibility of the political and legal institutions in democracies, we theorize the “accountability effect†suggesting that terrorist activities indicate institutional failures in preventing casualties, undermining residents’ trust in these institutions. Using over 350,000 individual-level observations from the European Social Survey, we find evidence of the accountability effect showing that exposure to terrorist activities undermines self-reported trust in various national and international institutions, including the parliament, legal institutions, the police, politicians, political parties, the European Parliament, and the United Nations. Whereas this negative relationship does not weaken with additional terrorist attacks, strong governance and high trust in institutions mitigate these adverse effects. Lastly, terrorist attacks do not affect trust among people.

Keywords: accountability; terrorism; trust; institutions; governance; conflict; D74; D90; O17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00220027241289843 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jocore:v:69:y:2025:i:7-8:p:1340-1371

DOI: 10.1177/00220027241289843

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Conflict Resolution from Peace Science Society (International)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().