2022/01/19 by Amélie Godefroidt · 142 citations
Medicine · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Affect (linguistics) #Conservatism #Criminology #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Field (mathematics) #Hostility #Law #Medicine #Meta-analysis #Outgroup #Political science #Political violence #Politics #Psychology #Social and Intergroup Psychology #Social psychology #Survey data collection #Terrorism #Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/ajps.12692
published in American Journal of Political Science 67(1), 22-38 (Wiley)
openalex publication_date 2022/01/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
Abstract How does terrorism affect citizens’ political attitudes? Over the years, many scholars have tried to answer this question. This article performs a meta‐analysis on this literature, reviewing about 325 studies conducted between 1985 and 2020 on more than 400,000 respondents. The findings confirm that terrorism is associated—to a small but significant extent—with outgroup hostility, political conservatism and rally‐‘round‐the‐flag effects. At the same time, the effects of terrorism vary widely, with studies on Islamist violence, conducted in the United States or Israel, and using cross‐sectional data yielding stronger results on average. Finally, the review reveals remaining gaps in this field of study, including a lack of research on non‐Islamist violence or conducted in non‐Western contexts. Taken together, this meta‐analysis consolidates existing evidence, determines which results hold across contexts, and identifies key gaps in our current knowledge. Its data can also be accessed interactively via a Shiny App .