Fear without Prejudice in the Shadow of Jihadist Threat

• Published date: 01 May 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0010414020957680
• Author: Marco Giani
• Date: 01 May 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414020957680

Comparative Political Studies

2021, Vol. 54(6) 1058 –1085

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0010414020957680

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Article

Fear without Prejudice

in the Shadow of

Jihadist Threat

Marco Giani1

Abstract

Because the prejudice of the ingroup builds into fear of the outgroup, jihadist

terrorism is expected to strengthen the politicized link between security and

immigration. I use a causal inference in a clustered cross-country analysis

to test the simultaneous short-run causal impact of the jihadist threat on

security fear and ethnic prejudice of the public in Israel, the Netherlands,

Russia, Sweden, France, and Germany. In line with common wisdom, jihadist

attacks significantly increase security fear. Against it, jihadist attacks non-

significantly decrease ethnic prejudice. This empirical pattern holds in across

different types of immigration attitudes, ethnic groups, intervals of time

and terrorist events, and is robust to placebo treatments, placebo policy

preferences, fake and failed terror attacks. These findings challenge extant

consensus, and suggest that jihadist attacks, particularly at the local level,

induce risk-aversion rather than desire for retaliation.

Keywords

race, ethnicity and politics, terrorism, migration

Introduction

Following 9/11, scholars became increasingly interested in how security

concerns, on top of cultural and economic ones (e.g., Citrin et al., 1997;

Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2014; Mayda, 2006; Pardos-Prado & Xena, 2019;

1King’s College London, London, UK

Corresponding Author:

Marco Giani, King’s College London, strand campus bush house ne wing, London, WC2R 2LS,

UK.

Email: marco.giani@kcl.ac.uk

957680CPSXXX10.1177/0010414020957680Comparative Political StudiesGiani

research-article2020

Giani 1059

Valentino et al., 2017), shape attitudes towards immigrants and minorities

(e.g., Böhmelt et al., 2020; Lahav, 2010; Legewie, 2013; Messina, 2014).

Episodes of hate crimes (Hanes & Machin, 2014), labor (Davila & Mora,

2005), housing (Gautier et al., 2009) or institutional discrimination (Shayo &

Zussman, 2011) are thought to signal a worrisome shift in public attitudes

(e.g., Elsayed & De Grip, 2018). However, whether the public at large leans

with or against such discriminatory behavior is still an open question.

This paper tests how jihadist attacks impact on the public’s “security fear,”

capturing the public’s concern for security threats, and “ethnic prejudice,”

encompassing all negative emotions or evaluations associated with immi-

grants and minorities. I propose a three-step empirical design. I begin by

defining terrorist attacks as murderous plots perpetrated by members of

known jihadist organizations and collect any attack that matches this defini-

tion from the Global Terrorism Dataset (GTD, 2017). I then systematically

check whether any such jihadist attack happened to have occurred during the

fieldwork period of any round of the European Social Survey (ESS, 2016).

Because the timing of the interviews is as good as random with respect to the

date of each attack as they were scheduled earlier through strict random sam-

pling, jihadist attacks represent plausibly exogenous variation of the level of

security threat. I can hence use a causal inference in cross-country design to

compare public attitudes before (the control group) and after (the treatment

group) jihadist attacks.

Findings are as follows. In line with conventional wisdom, jihadist attacks

significantly increase the public’s security fear. Against conventional wis-

dom, I find that jihadist attacks non-significantly decrease ethnic prejudice.

This empirical pattern holds across different types of immigration attitudes,

including those focusing on economic or cultural concerns, different ethnic

groups, including the Muslim, Gypsies and Jewish migrants, and different

specifications including varying intervals of time and terrorist event. After

conducting several robustness checks and placebo analyses, I conclude that

the public reacts to terrorist attacks with fear without prejudice.

I interpret these findings according to group-threat theory. Jihadist attacks

may de-emphasize perceived group threat, which elicits desire for retaliation

(see e.g., Kam & Kinder, 2007; Lahav & Courtemanche, 2012), while high-

lighting perceived individual threat, which elicits anxiety thereby lowering

ethnocentrism (Fischhoff et al., 2003; Lerner & Keltner, 2000). Although this

mechanism cannot be tested directly in non-experimental settings, condition-

ing attitudinal patterns on threat-exposure furthers its plausibility. Among

more directly exposed respondents, who experience stronger security fear,

the decrease in prejudice is both stronger and less partisan (Huddy et al.,

2005, 2009).