The past, Brexit, and the future in Northern Ireland: a quasi-experiment

The UK’s decision to leave the European Union has raised questions about whether Brexit might bring “the Troubles” back to Northern Ireland. We exploit the timing of a unique survey to examine how the EU referendum campaign and its outcome shaped perceptions about the past conflict and preferences for the future in Northern Ireland. The survey reveals that, after the Leave vote, people were more likely to perceive the partitioning of the Island of Ireland and illegitimate rule of Westminster as important conflict causes. Respondents surveyed after the referendum were also more likely to see reunification with Ireland as desirable, and changes in conflict perceptions contributed to this change in preferences for the future. At the same time, public responses seem to be the result of a gradual change during the campaign rather than a shock effect to the outcome, and effects decay quickly. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the micro-foundations driving post-Brexit public opinion in Northern Ireland and the potential consequences of holding contentious referendums more generally

The Crowdsourced Replication Initiative: Investigating Immigration and Social Policy Preferences. Executive Report.

In an era of mass migration, social scientists, populist parties and social movements raise concerns over the future of immigration-destination societies. What impacts does this have on policy and social solidarity? Comparative cross-national research, relying mostly on secondary data, has findings in different directions. There is a threat of selective model reporting and lack of replicability. The heterogeneity of countries obscures attempts to clearly define data-generating models. P-hacking and HARKing lurk among standard research practices in this area.This project employs crowdsourcing to address these issues. It draws on replication, deliberation, meta-analysis and harnessing the power of many minds at once. The Crowdsourced Replication Initiative carries two main goals, (a) to better investigate the linkage between immigration and social policy preferences across countries, and (b) to develop crowdsourcing as a social science method. The Executive Report provides short reviews of the area of social policy preferences and immigration, and the methods and impetus behind crowdsourcing plus a description of the entire project. Three main areas of findings will appear in three papers, that are registered as PAPs or in process

How Terrorism Does (and Does Not) Affect Citizens’ Political Attitudes: A Meta-Analysis

This project performs a meta-analysis on the literature on terrorism and citizens' political attitudes, reviewing about 325 studies conducted between 1985 and 2020 on more than 400,000 respondents

Trust and Terror: Social Capital and the Use of Terrorism as a Tool of Resistance

status: Published onlin

How the Idea of Terrorism Is Changing Us

How does terrorism affect citizens' social and political attitudes? And how can we explain differences in attitudinal reactions between individuals and across societies? Scholars, policymakers, and the public alike often assume that terrorism is effective to the extent it is able to influence the electorate. As a result, an impressive body of literature has accumulated—especially since the 9/11 attacks—on citizens' attitudinal responses to terrorism. Yet, most of these studies focus on individual-level explanations within Western or Israeli settings. How terrorism changes citizens across different, and especially within non-Western, societies remains unknown. By combining comparative research designs with an in-depth case-study of the Boko Haram conflict in Nigeria, this dissertation explores (1) how citizens across the globe react to terrorism, (2) how both citizen and perpetrator characteristics regulate such terrorisminduced reactions, and (3) how journalists are shaping an image of 'the terrorist enemy.' The findings suggests that it might not be terrorism as such that is changing citizens, but rather the idea of terrorism—an idea determined to a large extent by specificities of the intergroup context in which threats or acts of violence take place. In short, this dissertation is a multimethod and interdisciplinary story—straddling the fields of social and political psychology, political science, and media studies—about the formation of attitudes in times of terror. The findings are not only relevant for scholars studying how citizens respond to terrorism but also make substantial inroads in how the discipline studies terrorism effects and how various stakeholders can design effective strategies to counter potential democratic backlashes in times of terror.status: publishe

'Contact met mensen van een andere religie maakt ons weerbaar tegen angst voor terreur'

status: publishe

How Terrorism Does (and Does Not) Affect Citizens’ Political Attitudes: A Meta-Analysis

How does terrorism affect citizens’ political attitudes? Over the years, many scholars have tried to answer this question. This article performs a meta-analysis on this literature, reviewing about 325 studies conducted between 1985 and 2020 on more than 400,000 respondents. The findings confirm that terrorism is associated—to a small but significant extent—with outgroup hostility, political conservatism, and rally-‘round-the-flag effects. At the same time, the effects of terrorism vary widely, with studies on Islamist violence, conducted in the United States or Israel, and using cross-sectional data yielding stronger results on average. Finally, the review reveals remaining gaps in this field of study, including a lack of research on non-Islamist violence or conducted in non-Western contexts. Taken together, this meta-analysis consolidates existing evidence, determines which results hold across contexts, and identifies key gaps in our current knowledge. Its data can also be accessed interactively via a Shiny App

How fear drives us apart: Explaining the relationship between terrorism and social trust

© 2018, © 2018 Taylor & Francis. A central aim of terrorism is to drive people apart and destroy social trust. Still, there is little empirical research which has systematically investigated the relationship between terrorist attacks, fear of terrorism, and social trust. In addition, the impact of terrorism is usually assumed to be uniform across different individuals and societies. In order to investigate the impact of terrorism as well as the fear of future terrorism on trust levels of different types of individuals and societies, we combine individual-level survey data of the most recent World Values Survey (WVS, Round 6, 2010–2014) with several indicators at the country-level. Our findings show that social trust is principally damaged by the fear of future terrorist attacks, more so than by past terrorist attacks. Moreover, this deleterious impact of the fear of terrorism on social trust is most prevalent in more democratic countries and among individuals who are more frequently exposed to television news. Hence, with relatively limited capabilities and resources, terrorists may therefore evoke disproportionate fear effects within democratic societies which are, at least partially, fueled by media exposure.status: Published onlin

Killing people, dividing a nation? Analyzing student perceptions of the Boko Haram crisis in Nigeria

The causes and consequences of the Boko Haram insurgency as well as its possible solutions have been subjected to different interpretations among scholars, politicians, and journalists. Little is known, however, about how the Nigerian populace thinks about the uprising. The present study contributes to the literature on Boko Haram by analyzing the perceptions of Nigerian students vis-à-vis Boko Haram’s agenda and the government’s response. The results demonstrate a north-south divide with Christians or Igbo and Muslims or Hausa-Fulani holding different ideas on the causes of the crisis, being differently affected by it, and slightly disagreeing on the desirability of military government responses. In conclusion, perceptions on Boko Haram lay bare ethno-religious fault lines reflecting existing grievances, thereby possibly undermining efforts at nation-building and peaceful coexistence in the multi-ethnic Nigerian society.peerreview_statement: The publishing and review policy for this title is described in its Aims & Scope. aims_and_scope_url: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=uter20status: publishe