Terrorism and Political Self-Placement in European Union Countries

Studies have shown that 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 self-placement on the left-right scale of the political spectrum. To this effect the Eurobarometer surveys for 12 European Union countries are utilized and ordered logit models are employed for the period 1985-2010 with over 230,000 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.