1. Introduction

This chapter argues that an exaggerated perception of terrorism threat can affect people’s political attitudes via social versus individual mechanisms. Social mechanisms affect people’s sense of belonging to groups. Individual mechanisms affect the people’s psyche. This chapter discusses the similarities between Europe, Australia and North America as case studies to examine the impact of terrorism threat on political attitudes via social and individual mechanisms. It provides the definition of terrorism that is adopted throughout the volume, followed by an overview of the design, samples, dependent and independent variables used in the empirical studies presented in the book. This chapter concludes with an overview of the volume and chapter outline.