Terrorism and Political Tolerance toward “Fellow Travelers”

• Author: Mark Peffley,Marc L. Hutchison,Michal Shamir
• Published date: 01 August 2022
• Date: 01 August 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00220027211069121
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Journal of Conf‌lict Resolution

2022, Vol. 66(7-8) 1208–1234

© The Author(s) 2022

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/00220027211069121

journals.sagepub.com/home/jcr

Terrorism and Political

Tolerance toward “Fellow

Travelers”

Mark Peff‌ley

1

, Marc L. Hutchison

2

, and Michal Shamir

3

Abstract

How does terrorism inf‌luence citizens’willingness to deny basic liberties to domestic

groups alleged to be “fellow travelers”of the perpetrators of terrorism? Based on

intergroup threat theory and social identity theory, we hypothesize that political

intolerance toward fellow traveler groups is determined by three factors: (1) the level

of terrorism, (2) the degree to which domestic outgroups are alleged to be demo-

graphically or politically associated with terrorist groups, and (3) whether individuals

identify strongly with the political Right. Consistent with our hypotheses, we f‌ind that

higher levels of terrorism in Israel over a thirty-year period produce a “diffusion of

political intolerance”among Israeli Jews on the Right that extends to domestic groups

distant from the perpetrators of terrorism. Our f‌indings have important implications

for the study of terrorism, democracy, and political tolerance.

Keywords

political tolerance, terrorism, Israel, threat, political identity

How does terrorism inf‌luence citizens’willingness to extend basic liberties to disliked

domestic groups presumed to be “fellow travelers”of the perpetrators of terrorism? Can

1

University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA

2

University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI, USA

3

Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

Corresponding Author:

Marc L. Hutchison, Department of Political Science, University of Rhode Island, Washburn Hall, 80 Upper

College Rd, Kingston, RI 02881, USA.

Email: mlhutch@uri.edu

repeated terror attacks increase political intolerance toward domestic groups either

because they happen to share a common national or religious background with terrorist

groups or because they are sympathetic to domestic groups associated with terrorists?

There are all too many historical examples of threats from war or terrorism stoking

public support for repressing domestic groups who pose little objective threat them-

selves. In the U.S., the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII; the repression

of American communists and other “fellow travelers”during the McCarthy “Red

Scare”of the 1950s (Gibson 1988;Stouffer 1955); and the widespread intolerance and

prof‌iling of American Arabs and Muslims after 9/11 (e.g., Huddy et al. 2005;Jamal

2008) are striking examples. How far does intolerance travel? Can terror attacks create a

diffusion of political intolerance toward diverse fellow traveler groups distant from the

actual perpetrators of violence?

During the McCarthy era, Stouffer (1955) and others used the term “fellow trav-

elers”to refer to groups on the left (e.g., socialists, atheists, and pacif‌ists) that were

alleged by anti-communists to be philosophically supportive of communism but had no

formal association with the US Communist Party. Guided by social identity theory, we

extend the term to indicate domestic outgroups who, by dint of their sociological

makeup (i.e., their national, religious, or ethnic heritage), as well as their political

sympathies, are alleged to be supportive of terrorists.

1

Thus, instead of focusing

narrowly on the alleged philosophical or ideological sympathies of fellow travelers, as

Stouffer and others did, we focus on the social and emotional (i.e., expressive)

foundations of how reactions to terrorism lead political identity groups to target fellow

travelers with political intolerance.

Intolerance toward fellow traveler groups is clearly a global concern, particularly for

democracies facing repeated attacks. Certainly, Kurdish citizens of Turkey, Arab

citizens of Israel, Kashmiri citizens of India, and Muslim citizens of several Western

countries have all been subjected to increased surveillance and intolerance after attacks

by terrorist groups sharing a common ethnic background. Indeed, the terror attacks of

2015–2017 in Europe and the U.S. prompted populist presidential candidates like

Marine Le Pen in France and Donald Trump in the U.S. to propose sweeping measures

targeting the civil liberties of Muslims.

2

Based on intergroup threat theory and social identity theory, we hypothesize that

intolerance toward fellow traveler groups is determined by three factors: (1) the level of

terrorism, (2) the degree to which domestic outgroups are demographically or polit-

ically associated with terrorist groups, and (3) whether individuals identify strongly

with the political Right. To test our hypotheses, we turn to Israel to examine how attacks

primarily by Palestinians in the occupied territories erode tolerance among Israel’s

Jewish citizens toward its Arab citizens and Arab political groups,

3

as well as sym-

pathetic Jewish political groups. As we argue below, our study contributes to the

literature in several ways. First, while prior studies assess tolerance after terror attacks

in a single survey cross-section (e.g., Huddy et al. 2005), a short-term panel (e.g.,

Canetti-Nisim et al. 2009) or an experiment (e.g., Gadarian 2010), our study combines

terrorism data with survey data on tolerance over a thirty-year period, allowing us to

Peff‌ley et al. 1209