scholarly journals Using a natural experiment to estimate the electoral consequences of terrorist attacks

2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (42) ◽  
pp. 10624-10629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laia Balcells ◽  
Gerard Torrats-Espinosa

This study investigates the consequences of terrorist attacks for political behavior by leveraging a natural experiment in Spain. We study eight attacks against civilians, members of the military, and police officers perpetrated between 1989 and 1997 by Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), a Basque terrorist organization that was active between 1958 and 2011. We use nationally and regionally representative surveys that were being fielded when the attacks occurred to estimate the causal effect of terrorist violence on individuals’ intent to participate in democratic elections as well as on professed support for the incumbent party. We find that both lethal and nonlethal terrorist attacks significantly increase individuals’ intent to participate in a future democratic election. The magnitude of this impact is larger when attacks are directed against civilians than when directed against members of the military or the police. We find no evidence that the attacks change support for the incumbent party. These results suggest that terrorist attacks enhance political engagement of citizens.

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 4298
Author(s):  
Alissa Kain ◽  
Douglas L. Van Bossuyt ◽  
Anthony Pollman

Military bases perform important national security missions. In order to perform these missions, specific electrical energy loads must have continuous, uninterrupted power even during terrorist attacks, adversary action, natural disasters, and other threats of specific interest to the military. While many global military bases have established microgrids that can maintain base operations and power critical loads during grid disconnect events where outside power is unavailable, many potential threats can cause microgrids to fail and shed critical loads. Nanogrids are of specific interest because they have the potential to protect individual critical loads in the event of microgrid failure. We present a systems engineering methodology that analyzes potential nanogrid configurations to understand which configurations may improve energy resilience and by how much for critical loads from a national security perspective. This then allows targeted deployment of nanogrids within existing microgrid infrastructures. A case study of a small military base with an existing microgrid is presented to demonstrate the potential of the methodology to help base energy managers understand which options are preferable and justify implementing nanogrids to improve energy resilience.


2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Belmonte

AbstractThis paper investigates the consequences for inter-group conflicts of terrorist attacks. I study the 2015 Baga massacre, a large scale attack conducted by Boko Haram at the far North-East state of Borno, Nigeria, as a quasi-natural experiment and examine a set of attitudes in the aftermath of the event of Christians and Muslims throughout the country. Comparing individuals, outside the region of Borno, interviewed by Afrobarometer immediately after the massacre and those interviewed the days before within same regions and holding fixed a number of individual characteristics, I document that the informational exposure to the event rendered Christians less amiable to neighboring Muslims and Muslims less likely to recognize the legitimacy of the state. Nonetheless, Muslims increased their view of the elections as a device to remove leaders in office, event that took place 2 months later with the election of the challenger, Muhammadu Buhari. My findings indicate that terrorist attacks may generate a relevant and heterogeneous backlash across ethnic groups.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Pablo Brugarolas ◽  
Luis Miller

Abstract This letter reports the results of a study that combined a unique natural experiment and a local randomization regression discontinuity approach to estimate the effect of polls on turnout intention. We found that the release of a poll increases turnout intention by 5%. This effect is robust to a number of falsification tests of predetermined covariates, placebo outcomes, and changes in the time window selected to estimate the effect. The letter discusses the advantages of the local randomization approach over the standard continuity-based design to study important cases in political science where the running variable is discrete; a method that may expand the range of empirical topics that can be analyzed using regression discontinuity methods.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S785-S785
Author(s):  
Tze Kiu Wong ◽  
Helene H Fung

Abstract Previous studies usually found that older people are less politically engaged than younger adults, especially when considering political behavior other than voting. The current study extends the Selective Engagement hypothesis (Hess, 2014) to political engagement. 81 younger adults and 79 older adults rated 8 issues on self-relevance and their willingness to engage in political discussion, arguments and collective action on each issue. The predicted moderating effect of self-relevance was not found, but older people indeed are more willing to discuss (B = 0.07, p = 0.027) and argue with others on more self-relevant issues (B = 0.06, p = 0.031). Perceived cost of collective action was found to be a moderator, such that self-relevance was less important than other factors for high-cost actions (B = -0.016, p = 0.013). The current research sheds light on potential ways to increase older adults’ engagement in social issues.


2018 ◽  
Vol 113 (2) ◽  
pp. 442-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
DOMINIK HANGARTNER ◽  
ELIAS DINAS ◽  
MORITZ MARBACH ◽  
KONSTANTINOS MATAKOS ◽  
DIMITRIOS XEFTERIS

Although Europe has experienced unprecedented numbers of refugee arrivals in recent years, there exists almost no causal evidence regarding the impact of the refugee crisis on natives’ attitudes, policy preferences, and political engagement. We exploit a natural experiment in the Aegean Sea, where Greek islands close to the Turkish coast experienced a sudden and massive increase in refugee arrivals, while similar islands slightly farther away did not. Leveraging a targeted survey of 2,070 island residents and distance to Turkey as an instrument, we find that direct exposure to refugee arrivals induces sizable and lasting increases in natives’ hostility toward refugees, immigrants, and Muslim minorities; support for restrictive asylum and immigration policies; and political engagement to effect such exclusionary policies. Since refugees only passed through these islands, our findings challenge both standard economic and cultural explanations of anti-immigrant sentiment and show that mere exposure suffices in generating lasting increases in hostility.


2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (37) ◽  
pp. 22800-22804
Author(s):  
Amalia Álvarez-Benjumea ◽  
Fabian Winter

Terrorist attacks often fuel online hate and increase the expression of xenophobic and antiminority messages. Previous research has focused on the impact of terrorist attacks on prejudiced attitudes toward groups linked to the perpetrators as the cause of this increase. We argue that social norms can contain the expression of prejudice after the attacks. We report the results of a combination of a natural and a laboratory-in-the-field (lab-in-the-field) experiment in which we exploit data collected about the occurrence of two consecutive Islamist terrorist attacks in Germany, the Würzburg and Ansbach attacks, in July 2016. The experiment compares the effect of the terrorist attacks in hate speech toward refugees in contexts where a descriptive norm against the use of hate speech is evidently in place to contexts in which the norm is ambiguous because participants observe antiminority comments. Hate toward refugees, but not toward other minority groups, increased as a result of the attacks only in the absence of a strong norm. These results imply that attitudinal changes due to terrorist attacks are more likely to be voiced if norms erode.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 72-79
Author(s):  
Insan Praditya

This paper is a comparison of democracy structure between two Southeast Asian Nations, Indonesia and Myanmar during their early periods of Post-Praetorianism era where the state was controlled and dominated by the military. This paper found that In Indonesia, democratization after reformasi era in 1998 had successfully changed the structure of power, where the military determination in politics had been decline significantly, despite the military still hold the power to influence political and economic affairs. In Myanmar, the democratization was a result of long term transition previously planned by the military regime, so even in 2010 democratic election, the military still hold the control over the politics and tend to preserve their power within the new face of democratic system.     


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. e36510313485
Author(s):  
Luiz Otavio R. Garcia ◽  
Maria-Raquel G. Silva ◽  
Rudá Moreira França

Stress was considered by the United Nations as the disease of the 20th Century, being present in more than 90% of the world population, including military police officers. This group of professionals has been in the front-line of the pandemic caused by the Coronavirus and is exposed to daily situations of high emotional stress and traumatic work events, which can cause several health problems, namely occupational stress, sleep problems and obesity. This study aims to conduct a narrative review of the influence of psychosocial environment on the development of occupational stress and consequences on the military police officer´s health. Two platforms, namely PubMed and Google Scholar were used to search for relevant scientific publications on the topic; 148 publications from 2010 to 2020 were analyzed, 71 of which were included in this review. It is estimated that 25% to 35% of the global burden of disease may be due to environmental factors. The stress prevalence in military police officers is higher than the average in the civilian population worldwide; due to an alternate work schedule that does not always respect the circadian characteristics of each individual, and with direct influence on sleep quality and obesity incidence. Public health policies should be taken in the short term in order to improve life quality of these professionals.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Viviane de Oliveira Cubas ◽  
Frederico Castelo Branco ◽  
André Rodrigues de Oliveira ◽  
Fernanda Novaes Cruz

PurposeThe authors examine predictors of self-legitimacy for police officers belonging to the Military Police force of São Paulo (Brazil). Considering the variables mobilized by the literature on self-legitimacy, the authors seek to identify what explains the self-legitimacy of militarized police officers.Design/methodology/approachA survey was applied to 298 frontline police officers in the city of São Paulo, analyzing indicators separated into two groups: relationship dimension and organizational dimension. An ordinary least square model is used to test the “relationship” and “organizational” variables on police officers' self-legitimacy.FindingsEffectiveness is the strongest predictor for self-legitimacy. Organizational justice and distributive justice also present important effects, as the perception of citizens' attitudes toward police reinforces the conception of self-legitimacy as a dialogical construct, comprising here the public's expectations of police work as well as the police officers' perceptions that they are respected and considered important by the public.Originality/valueThere are no other studies on self-legitimacy related to Brazilian police officers or exploring these aspects among police officers submitted to a militarized structure. These results contribute to the ongoing debate on the militarization of police activities and their possible effects on police legitimacy.


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