Terrorist Events and Attitudes toward Immigrants: A Natural Experiment

2013/03/01 by Joscha Legewie · 1 voice · 36 citations
Social Sciences · #Migration, Refugees, and Integration #Social and Intergroup Psychology #Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence

paper · doi:10.1086/669605

openalex publication_date 2013/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31

Abstract

Using a quasi-experimental research design, this study examines the effect of terrorist events on the perception of immigrants across 65 regions in nine European countries. It first elaborates a theoretical argument that explains the effect of events and points to economic conditions, the size of the immigrant population, and personal contact as mediating factors. This argument is evaluated using the fact that the terror attack in Bali on October 12, 2002, occurred during the fieldwork period of the European Social Survey. The findings from this natural experiment reveal considerable cross-national and regional variation in the effect of the event and its temporal duration. The analysis on the regional level supports the argument about contextual variations in the response to the event and a second analysis based on the 2004 Madrid bombing confirms the study’s conclusions. Implications of the findings for societal responses to terror attacks, the literature on attitudes toward immigrants, and survey research are discussed.

Citations

• Who trusts? Race, gender, and the September 11 rally effect among young adults
• Prejudice as Group Position: Microfoundations of a Sociological Approach to Racism and Race Relations
• The relationship between outgroup size and anti-outgroup attitudes: A theoretical synthesis and empirical test of group threat- and intergroup contact theory
• Prejudice as a Response to Perceived Group Threat: Population Composition and Anti-Immigrant and Racial Prejudice in Europe

Cited by

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• The Effect of the Brexit Vote on the Variation in Race and Religious Hate Crimes in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland
• Terrorism and Migration: An Overview
• HIGH TIMES FOR HATE CRIMES: EXPLAINING THE TEMPORAL CLUSTERING OF HATE‐MOTIVATED OFFENDING
• The Increase in Refugees to Germany and Exclusionary Beliefs and Behaviors
• Susceptibility to threatening information and attitudes toward refugee resettlement: The case of Japan
• Out-Group Threat and Xenophobic Hate Crimes: Evidence of Local Intergroup Conflict Dynamics between Immigrants and Natives
• Discrete Events and Hate Crimes: The Causal Role of the Brexit Referendum
• Seeded Topic Models in Digital Archives: Analyzing Interpretations of Immigration in Swedish Newspapers, 1945–2019
• Do Terrorists Get the Attention They Want?
• How Terrorism Does (and Does Not) Affect Citizens’ Political Attitudes: A Meta‐Analysis
• Can Terrorism Abroad Influence Migration Attitudes at Home?
• Hostility on Twitter in the aftermath of terror attacks
• Beyond national identity: The positive role of local identity in shaping attitudes to international and internal migration
• When Political Pivots Shift Behaviors but Not Beliefs: Evidence from Trump’s Position Reversal over Facemasks during the COVID-19 Crisis
• Immigration and Public Support for Social Policy: Accounting for the Gender Composition of Immigrant Populations
• Mechanisms of change: How focus events reshape online meaning-making
• The effect of terrorism on religious minorities: evidence from the German Socio-Economic Panel
• Does a tragic event affect different aspects of attitudes toward immigration?
• Causal Inferences from Digital Behavioral Data
• Unexpected Event during Survey Design: Promise and Pitfalls for Causal Inference
• The framing of 9/11 in American, French, and Dutch national newspapers (2001–2015): An inductive approach to studying events
• Migrant Deaths at Borders and Immigration Attitudes: Evidence from the 2013 Lampedusa Shipwreck
• The Normalization of the Radical Right
• International Terror Attacks and Local Out-Group Hate Crimes
• Ethnic Diversity, Inter-group Attitudes and Countervailing Pathways of Positive and Negative Inter-group Contact: An Analysis Across Workplaces and Neighbourhoods. [europepmc]
• Nonlabor Income and Age at Marriage: Evidence From China's Heating Policy. [europepmc]
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• Increase in concerns about climate change following climate strikes and civil disobedience in Germany. [europepmc]
• The shadow of fear: hate crime victimization and stress after Charlottesville. [europepmc]
• When ethnic minorities hit the headlines: The longitudinal associations between news features and adolescents' ethnic prejudice. [europepmc]
• The emotional effect of terrorism. [europepmc]
• COVID-19 threat and negative attitudes toward outgroup and ingroup others: A multilevel analysis with coarsened exact matching [europepmc]
• Social networks in COVID-19 America: Americans remotely together but politically apart [europepmc]

Discussions

• I would put Legewie's "Terrorist Events and Attitudes toward Immigrants: A Natural Experiment" on this list. Little bit outside of political behaviors but beautifully written and a big methodological [bsky, 1 points, 1 comments]

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