Terrorism and Political Self-Placement in European Union Countries

Athina Economou () and Christos Kollias

No 73, Economics of Security Working Paper Series from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: Terrorism is widely regarded as a public bad vis-à-vis security - a public good - affecting the subjective well-being of citizens. As studies have shown, citizens' risk-perceptions and risk-assessment are affected by large scale terrorist acts. Reported evidence shows that individuals are often willing to trade-off civil liberties for enhanced security particularly as a post-terrorist attack reaction as well as adopting more conservative views. Within this strand of the literature, this paper examines whether terrorism and in particular mass-casualty terrorist attacks affect citizens' political selfplacement on the left-right scale of the political spectrum. To this effect the Eurobarometer Surveys for twelve European Union countries are utilised and Ordered Probit models are employed for the period 1985-2010 with over 230 thousand observations used in the estimations. On balance, the findings reported herein seem to be pointing to a shift in respondents' self-positioning towards the right of the political spectrum.

Pages: 24, 8 p.
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa and nep-pol
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Related works:
Journal Article: Terrorism and Political Self-Placement in European Union Countries (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diweos:diweos73

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