You failed! Government Satisfaction and Party Preferences Facing Islamist Terrorism

Nowak Anna

Abstract

International crises like dramatic terror attacks leave their mark on society in various ways. According to the existing literature, some of these consequences include two seemingly conflicting responses: increasing as well as decreasing support for the incumbent government. To make sense of this seeming contradiction, this study combines these observations in one empirical framework. We investigate the effects of Islamist terrorism on citizens' evaluation of the national government by logistic regression analyses using data from the European Social Survey (ESS) for Germany from 2014 to 2017. Our analyses demonstrate that support for the government significantly increases in the aftermath of Islamist terror attacks. However, the intensity of such support decreases with repeated exposure to terror attacks, and these effects even reverse when a certain level of terror is reached. Further, we find that radical right parties benefit from the issues accentuated by terrorism.