Changes in Public Opinion and the Occurrence of International Terrorism

This paper is a contribution to the study of the impact of public opinion and evolutions in opinion on the occurrence of international terrorism. First, we replicate Krueger and Malečková’s (2009) model of the relationship between attitudes towards world leaders and occurrences of international terrorist incidents, using more recent data-the Gallup Survey data from 2010 on public opinion in Middle Eastern and North African countries and the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) data on international terrorism from 2009 to 2011. The analysis confirms the model of the earlier study, although, due to the distribution of terrorist incidents in the new sample, the evidence of the correlation between terrorist attacks and public opinion weakens. Second, we exercise an out-of-sample prediction of terrorist attacks using the estimated model based on the data from the 2004 to 2008 period to predict the occurrence of attacks in 2009–2011. The findings suggest that Krueger and Malečková’s (2009) model is unstable, either due to the instability of the process or the problematic nature of terrorism data. Further research is necessary to explain and test these results.