Our International Relations Colloquium hosts Dr. Jaroslav Tir for a talk titled, “Does Terrorism Produce Rallies? (Quasi-)Experimental Evidence from Three Countries.”
One of the most well-known arguments in political science research concerns the rally around the flag phenomenon. In the face of threat challenging a country’s security, its populace rallies behind the leader, increasing government approval and incumbent voting. Available evidence generally focusing on a relatively small number of attacks and countries suggests that terrorism, such as the September 11th attacks, generate rallies. Yet, given that terror attack have taken places across a range of countries and cover different methods (e.g., suicide bombings, assassinations) begs the question of whether terror-induced rallies reliably manifest across varying terror attack circumstance. We leverage pre-registered survey experiments conducted in Canada and India, as well as a natural experiment from the Netherlands, in an attempt to gather causal evidence of rally effects. Covering common terror scenarios, namely a warning of an imminent attack, a mass-casualty suicide bombing, and a high-profile public assassination, we provide evidence that terrorism provokes responses consistent with feelings of threat. Yet, rally effects themselves fail to materialize across our studies, both overall and when we subset our data by partisanship, ideology, or gender. Rally effects thus may well be more limited than the overall literature seems to indicate.
