Links Between Terrorism, Authoritarian Attitudes, And Democratic Backsliding

This article by Patricia Y. Sanchez is published by PsyPost. Here is an excerpt:

The threat of terrorism has been shown to shift societal norms toward authoritarianism. Research published in Political Psychology analyzed data from the 2017 British Election Study (BES) and found that terrorism threat shifts libertarians toward more conservative attitudes. On the other hand, normative threats (i.e., perceptions of dissatisfaction with established authority) widen the gap between authoritarian and libertarian attitudes.

“Authoritarianism was one of those topics that I found particularly interesting in a class on Political Psychology at graduate school. This was in the late 1990s – we read Altemeyer and some of the other work from the 1980s and 1990s like Doty et al,” said study author Daniel Stevens, a professor of politics at the University of Exeter.

“After graduate school, although authoritarianism was never my main area of research, I kept coming back to it in one form or another. I published an article with Ben Bishin and Rob Barr in 2005 that looked at authoritarianism among Latin American elites, and a book with Nick Vaughan-Williams on perceptions of security threats in Britain in 2012, in which authoritarianism was one of the key explanatory variables.”

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