The Consequences of Terrorism on Migration Attitudes across Europe

How do terrorist attacks influence migration attitudes? This article argues that the influence of attacks depends on the location of whoever receives the terrorist news, and derive two hypotheses from this logic of spatial conditionality. First, if terror attacks affect citizens’ views of migration through sensations of imminent danger and fear, then proximity to the terrorist attack would be the main conditioning factor. Second, rather than distance to attack, the local migration context of the news receiver might condition the effect. In homogenous societies with little immigration experience, citizens may be more receptive to discourses linking migration to terrorism and thus more susceptible to negative attitude change. The authors evaluate the observable implications of these claims with the 2015 Bataclan attack using data from a Eurobarometer survey. While they find evidence for the second hypothesis, they find no evidence for the first, with important implications for policy debate in Europe.