Countering Fear: Democratic States’ Ability to Ease Citizens’ Fear of Terrorism

Abstract

Fighting fear is a crucial part of counterterrorist policies. Faced with terrorism, citizens look to the state for protection. Therefore, our chapter links fear of terrorism to features of the state, especially whether democratic states are capable of reducing fear among its citizens. We employ a cross-national comparative approach using data from the 2014 World Values Survey on a sample of 57,294 individuals across 49 countries. We find that there is substantial cross-country variance in citizens’ fear of terrorism. The results suggest that fear is more widespread among citizens in non-democratic countries compared to citizens in democratic countries. Actual exposure to terrorist attacks has no impact on citizen’s fear of terrorism when we account for whether the country is a democracy or not.