Right-wing Terrorism and Out-group Trust: The Anatomy of a Terrorist Backlash

Terrorism Out-groups Trust July 22

How did the July 22 attacks affect attitudes towards out-grups?

Øyvind Bugge Solheim https://www.oyvindsolheim.com (C-REX - Center for Research on Extremism)https://www.sv.uio.no/c-rex/english/
2020-08-01

Open Access Project page

Terrorist attacks often lead to public backlashes. Following the attacks on July 22, 2011 in Norway, Norwegians showed support for democratic values such as “openness,” “democracy,” and “tolerance” in the public debate and in the commemorations across the country. They also reported higher out-group trust. This paper explores two possible reasons for this increase in trust using a unique panel fielded before and right after the attacks. The first is that cognitive dissonance led people to dissociate from the terrorist and his ideology. The second is that the increase in trust was a response to the public backlash after the attacks. The increase in trust was not caused by cognitive dissonance. Rather, people who were already positive towards immigration, or who saw positive effects of the attacks, became more trusting than others did, and Progress Party supporters increased their trust less than others. These findings are interpreted as a response to the attacks and the political characteristics of the backlash. The study concludes by discussing implications for our understanding of the different consequences of attacks for the terrorists’ imagined constituencies and for the broader public.

Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Solheim, "Solheim: Right-wing Terrorism and Out-group Trust: The Anatomy of a Terrorist Backlash", Terrorism and Political Violence, 2020

BibTeX citation

@article{solheim2020right-wing,
  author = {Solheim, Øyvind Bugge},
  title = {Solheim: Right-wing Terrorism and Out-group Trust: The Anatomy of a Terrorist Backlash},
  journal = {Terrorism and Political Violence},
  year = {2020},
  note = {https://www.oyvindsolheim.com/publications/Anatomy/},
  doi = {10.1080/09546553.2018.1457526},
  volume = {32},
  issue = {6}
}