Torture, Terrorism, and the Police

• In Event: The Comparative Politics of the Police

Abstract

Support for the police is likely to be a sensitive topic, particularly in authoritarian or newly democratic settings. The resulting social desirability bias may have important implications for testing existing theories, such as the effects of torture and terrorism on attitudes toward the police. This paper uses a survey of over 7000 Tunisians to examine support for the police both directly and indirectly through a list experiment. Before those questions, the survey also included a priming experiment that primed Tunisians to either think of police abuses, or the police’s success in countering terrorism. Results suggest that police abuses genuinely decreased support for the police – in both the direct question and in the list experiment. By contrast, priming respondents about the police’s success in countering terrorism increased support in the direct question but not also in the list experiment, suggesting that that expressed increase may have been driven by social desirability bias.

Author

• Sharan Grewal, College of William & Mary