Institutional Trust and Concern About Terrorism in Different State Models

• In Event: Trust

Abstract

In this paper, we compare the relationship between institutional trust and concern about terrorism in European states as exhibited in cross-national survey data. Our key hypotheses are that institutional trust will correlate negatively with concern about terrorism, as expressed by the priority given to terrorism-related policies by individual citizens in the European Commission’s Eurobarometer survey, and that this effect will be greater in the high-trust Nordic states than in other European states of comparable affluence and development. This innovates from previous studies by inverting the more common causal framework: rather than investigating the impact of terrorism on societal integrity, we explore the role that social and institutional cohesion plays in preventing terrorist campaigns from achieving their goal of spreading concern among citizens and increasing their political salience.

Terrorism poses a number of interrelated challenges to the Western liberal-democratic model of statehood and its subtypes. Beyond the direct consequences of individual acts (e.g. the killing of civilians, destruction of public infrastructure and private property, disruption of daily life), terrorist campaigns seek a further impact by propagating a culture of fear in the target society that can be leveraged in pursuit of a political goal. Where liberal democracies are targeted, this creates a dual hazard for the state: while it strives to protect against terrorist organisations and to repudiate their goals, it must also be vigilant against overreach and the violation of its own norms, such as commitments to human rights and due process. The dilemma for the State becomes more difficult as the salience of terrorism grows in the minds of the citizens; thus, increasing the salience of terrorism is a persistent goal of terrorist groups.

The tension between the desire to protect against terrorism and the moral imperative to maintain state norms creates a potential point of rupture between the state and its citizens (as well as between different social groups within the citizenry) that may be exploited by terrorists. Growing the salience of terrorism as a political issue is a standard terrorist goal in and of itself, but it is particularly pertinent to making this rupture more likely. Societies with greater levels of institutional and social trust, it is assumed, can withstand the strain of this tension to a greater extent and thus are more resistant to rupture on this point.

Thus far, studies of this type have generally focused on either the dynamics at individual level within a single national case study, or effects at the country level exclusively. However, an emerging trend in the literature now stresses the importance of accounting for both individual-level and country-level effects simultaneously in multilevel models. Consequently, we investigate the relationship between institutional trust and concern about terrorism among citizens of European states using a multilevel logistic regression, controlling for individual-level variables such as demography and country-level measures of affluence and development. Our findings show significant differences between the results of single-level and multilevel models, providing empirical support for these theoretical arguments.

Authors

• Luke Field, University of Iceland

• Margrét Valdimarsdóttir, University of Akureyri

• Gudbjorg Andrea Jonsdottir, University of Iceland