Attitudes and Action: Public Opinion and the Occurrence of International Terrorism

Abstract

The predictors of terrorism are unclear. This paper examines the effect of public opinion in one country toward another country on the number of terrorist attacks perpetrated by people or groups from the former country against targets in the latter country. Public opinion was measured by the percentage of people in Middle Eastern and North African countries who disapprove of the leadership of nine world powers. Count models for 143 pairs of countries were used to estimate the effect of public opinion on terrorist incidents, controlling for other relevant variables and origin-country fixed effects. We found a greater incidence of international terrorism when people of one country disapprove of the leadership of another country.

Terrorism Driven by High Population Growth

“…These topics are basic in modern society because terrorism is growing both in rich and developing nations (Newman, 2006;Reardon, 2015). Many studies endeavour to clarify the direct and indirect determinants of terrorism (Abadie, 2005;Crenshaw, 1981;Newman, 2006;Freytag et al, 2011;McAllister and Schmid, 2011), though predictors of terrorism are often unclear factors in different societies (Krueger and Malečková, 2009). Some sources of terrorism are economic factors (Blomberg et al, 2004;Krueger and Malečková, 2003), political factors (Coggins, 2015), social factors (Krueger and Malečková, 2003), etc.…”

Public opinion and terrorist acts

“…We created the units of observation by making pairs of countries (n_pairs = Y X ⋅ ) (Krueger and Malečková 2009). Not all countries X were asked about countries Y; in total, we created 121 pairs.…”

“…The dependant variable takes values from 0 to 23 15 and the value zero represents almost 73% of the total 120 observations, therefore, we tested whether the zero-inflated negative binomial model provides a fit (Krueger and Malečková 2009). We performed the Vuong test and found that negative binomial model is favored at the 10% significance level.…”

“…In Table 5 we use a negative binomial model similar to Krueger and Malečková (2009) to estimate the relationship between justification of suicide attacks and unfavorable opinion toward target countries on the one hand and the occurrence of terrorism on the other. Assuming it is not the case of reverse causality, we find that there is a positive relationship between justification of suicide bombing in country X and the number of attacks originating from that country.…”

“…In a recent article, Alan Krueger and one of the authors of the present paper have examined the effect of public opinion in one country toward another country on the number of terrorist attacks perpetrated by individuals or groups from the former country against targets from the latter country (Krueger and Malečková 2009). Linking data from the Gallup World Poll from Middle Eastern and North African countries on the performance of the leaders of nine world power to the NCTC data on the number of terrorist events, we found a greater incidence of international terrorism when people of one country disapprove of the leadership of another country.…”