Time: 2:00 - 4:00pm Venue: QMUL, Peoples Palace, LG01
Exogenous shocks - like terrorist events - can affect specific components of political behaviour, such as citizens' support for liberal democracy. Considering typical insights into this relationship come from natural disasters or 9/11, the systematic increase in terrorist events across Europe stimulates the need for more European-specific insights. This study examines the evolution of the support for liberal democracy in France (2014-2017), analyses three of its principal determinants (affinities towards authority, political trust and anti-immigration opinions) and sheds light on how the November 2015 terrorist events affected this evolution. Results systematically confirm the predictive powers of our three determinants and suggest that particularly the effects of political trust and anti-immigrant opinions become affected by terrorist events. We find this is primarily driven by the responsiveness of higher educated strata. Overall, our findings suggest that terror in Europe provokes quite different reactions compared to the literature's principal focus, namely 9/11.
Free to attend
Speaker: Steven Van Hauwaert (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz)
Seminar centred on the working paper "Terrorism and the legitimacy of liberal democracy: An empirical analysis of the. November 2015 terrorist events in France" by Steven Van Hauwaert and co-authored with Robert Huber (ETH Zürich).