Considered Effective? How Policy Evaluations Affect Support for Surveillance in the Context of Terrorism and Threat

Scholarship on political support in Western democracies stipulates that effective policy implementation contributes to citizens’ support of incumbent governments and satisfaction with democracy. Focusing on state surveillance, we examine the relevance of policy effectiveness for citizens’ policy support. Specifically, we argue that effectiveness perceptions have a large impact on policy support, but that citizens differ in the way they take information on policy performance into account depending on their feelings of threat. To derive our hypotheses, we refer to different theoretical perspectives on individual information processing under threat. Using data from a factorial survey experiment in Germany, we find that policy effectiveness is the most relevant predictor for citizens’ support of surveillance measures. Moreover, we demonstrate that respondents who feel threats to their liberty rely much less on policy effectiveness as a criterion for supporting policies compared to those low in threat perception. This points to an information suppression mechanism of threat perceptions when it comes to surveillance policies.