Who supports counter-terrorism measures in the Nordic countries? The influence of demography and trust on attitudes towards different policies.

Terrorist crises pose a number of interrelated challenges to contemporary states, particularly those in the Western liberal-democratic model of statehood and its subtypes. When such states are targeted by terrorism, they experience a dual hazard: they must strive to protect against terrorist organisations, but they must also be vigilant against overreach and the violation of their own norms, such as commitments to human rights and due process. The tension between the desire to protect against terrorism on the one hand, and the moral imperative to maintain state norms on the other, creates a potential point of rupture between the state and its citizens (as well as between different social groups within the citizenry) that may be exploited by terrorists. Perhaps as a response to this tension, recent trends in research on public opinion and terrorism have demonstrated a focus on attitudes towards counter-terrorism measures. Evidence has been found for the influential role of both demography and more malleable individual-level traits, such as trust and fear, on these policies; however, such research has largely treated the policies themselves as monolithic, with a tendency to look at support for (or opposition to) the extension of counter-terrorism measures in general rather than attitudes towards specific policy characteristics. At the same time, there is a rich research tradition exploring public attitudes towards particular forms of security policies outside of a specific focus on terrorism, including policing techniques and other relevant policy measures. In this paper, we draw together these strands of inquiry to explore the dynamics within public attitudes towards specific forms of counter-terrorism measure. Our key explanatory variables are gender, educational attainment, social trust, and institutional trust. We examine how these variables shape support for two contrasting types of counter-terrorism measure: measures that tend more towards physical invasiveness (such as indefinite detention/internment, stop-and-search policies), and measures that tend more towards covert surveillance (such as phone-tapping and email monitoring). We present theoretical arguments that findings from prior research on general policy preferences, based on our explanatory variables, are likely to persist into this specific domain. To test these arguments empirically, we use public opinion data gathered from surveys in the Nordic countries. We find that gender, educational attainment, social trust, and institutional trust not only shape general support for increased counter-terrorism measures in spite of infringements on civil liberties, but that this relationship is different in the separate cases of physically-invasive and covert-surveillance measures. The results offer mixed support for the assumptions derived from broader research into policy preferences, and make a strong case for pursuing further research using this approach of differentiating between distinct forms of intervention when examining public opinion on counter-terrorism measures.