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27-09-2016

Terrorism’s effects on social capital in European countries

Authors: Paschalis Arvanitidis, Athina Economou, Christos Kollias

Published in: Public Choice | Issue 3-4/2016

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Abstract

Studies have shown that major terrorist events have the potential to exert significant influence on citizens’ risk-perceptions, (in) security sentiments, values and behavioral attitudes towards state institutions and their fellow citizens. Within this growing strand of literature, this paper, allowing for a cohort of demographic and socioeconomic traits, examines the extent to which major terrorist events in four European countries affected two key aspects of social capital, namely institutional and social trust. The data used are drawn from European Social Surveys for the years 2004, 2012 and 2014. Results reported indicate that terrorist incidents can trigger social dynamics that affect trust attitudes; however, these effects are short-lived and dissipate rapidly.

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Media coverage of terrorist events will support these qualities. As such, fear is cultivated further within a society and its effects are amplified.

This is because perceptions of state performance and responsiveness are most often identified as key determinants of political trust (e.g., Keele 2007).

The ESS are regarded as the most reliable cross-national surveys of this kind owing to their rigor in sampling methods, questionnaire design, translation, fieldwork, face-to-face interviewing and pilot testing (Kohler 2007).

Other researchers (such as Zmerli and Newton 2008) examine exactly the same institutions in their composite measure of political trust.

Rosenberg (1956) first uses them to form a reliable and valid trust scale.

Earlier studies (such as Paxton 1999) conclude that combining these items is an acceptable means of assessing interpersonal trust.

Details of the P-PCA results and the associated eigenvalues are to be found in Table A1 in the Online Appendix; the Scree plots for each of the two composite indicators are shown in Figures A1-A8.

Detailed descriptions of the variables in are available in Table A2 of the Online Appendix.

This was the case for Spain, where elections were held three days after the Madrid terrorist attack.

The variables’ means per country and incident can be found in Online Table A3.

This is based on the estimated effect on the standardized institutional trust variable.

One trust question is drawn from the World Values Survey and a dummy variable for terrorist attacks is drawn from the ITERATE dataset.

A probit/logit pooled model is estimated for all countries. Tables A4 to A7 in the Online Appendix present the ordered logit model estimates separately for each sub-index of social trust applied in this study. Stronger effects of the terrorist events on social trust are observed, as expected, for Spain and for Belgium (for interpersonal trust).

Again the literature provides mixed evidence on this point. Some studies find females to be less trusting than males (Alesina and Ferrara 2002; Blomberg et al. 2011; Freitag and Buhlmann 2009) and others find females to be more trusting than males (Delhey and Newton 2003; Newton and Zmerli 2011), depending on the time frame and the countries examined.

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Title: Terrorism’s effects on social capital in European countries
Authors: Paschalis Arvanitidis
Athina Economou
Christos Kollias
Publication date: 27-09-2016
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Public Choice / Issue 3-4/2016
Print ISSN: 0048-5829
Electronic ISSN: 1573-7101
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-016-0370-3

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