Note to users. If you're seeing this message, it means that your browser cannot find this page's style/presentation instructions -- or possibly that you are using a browser that does not support current Web standards. Find out more about why this message is appearing, and what you can do to make your experience of our site the best it can be.

Science 18 September 2009:
Vol. 325. no. 5947, pp. 1534 - 1536
DOI: 10.1126/science.1170867
Prev | Table of Contents | Next

Reports

Attitudes and Action: Public Opinion and the Occurrence of International Terrorism

Alan B. Krueger1,*,{dagger} and Jitka Malecková2

The predictors of terrorism are unclear. This paper examines the effect of public opinion in one country toward another country on the number of terrorist attacks perpetrated by people or groups from the former country against targets in the latter country. Public opinion was measured by the percentage of people in Middle Eastern and North African countries who disapprove of the leadership of nine world powers. Count models for 143 pairs of countries were used to estimate the effect of public opinion on terrorist incidents, controlling for other relevant variables and origin-country fixed effects. We found a greater incidence of international terrorism when people of one country disapprove of the leadership of another country.

1 Department of Economics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
2 Department of Near Eastern and African Studies, Charles University in Prague and Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, 110 00 Prague, Czech Republic.

* After this article was submitted to Science, Professor Krueger was appointed Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the U.S. Department of Treasury. The contents of the paper do not necessarily represent the position of the U.S. government.

{dagger} To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: akrueger{at}princeton.edu

Read the Full Text

To Advertise     Find Products

Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)