Replication Data for: Terrorism, Perpetrators and Polarization: Evidence from Natural Experiments

We analyze whether affective polarization -- the extent to which individuals feel positively towards one party and negatively towards another one -- can be aggravated by terrorism violence. Terrorist attacks intensify pre-existing ideological worldviews and partisan leanings and bring divisive political issues to the fore. Yet, they can also generate strong feelings of cohesion, solidarity and unity, as individuals from the entire political spectrum come together. To identify causal effects, we exploit a series of natural experiments in Great Britain and leverage the timing of fatal far-right and Islamic terrorist attacks and the date of interview of respondents in the British Election Study. We find that Islamic attacks increase affective polarization whereas far-right attacks depolarize the electorate. We provide evidence that this discrepancy can partly be explained by the perceived salience of attacks and different attitudes towards contentious and polarizing issues.

我们旨在探究情感极化（affective polarization）——即个体对某一政党抱有正面观感、对另一政党抱有负面观感的程度——是否会因恐怖主义暴力行为而加剧。恐怖袭击会强化个体既有的意识形态世界观与党派倾向，并将引发分歧的政治议题推至舆论前台。尽管如此，由于来自整个政治光谱的个体能够凝聚为整体，恐怖袭击也可能催生强烈的凝聚、团结与统一的集体情感。为准确识别因果效应，我们依托英国开展的一系列自然实验，借助致命极右翼恐怖袭击、伊斯兰恐怖袭击的发生时点，以及英国选举研究（British Election Study）中受访者的访谈日期作为研究识别工具。研究结果表明，伊斯兰恐怖袭击会加剧情感极化，而极右翼恐怖袭击则会降低选民的党派分化程度。我们提供的实证证据显示，这种差异可部分归因于民众对袭击的感知显著性差异，以及对争议性与极化议题的不同态度。