How Islamist and Far‑Right Attacks Pull Voters in Opposite Directions

What the Study Asks: Vincenzo Bove, Riccardo Di Leo, Georgios Efthyvoulou, and Harry Pickard investigate whether terrorist violence changes affective polarization—whether citizens feel warmer toward their own partisan side and colder toward opponents—and whether different kinds of attacks produce different reactions.

How the Authors Identify Causal Effects: The authors exploit a series of natural experiments in Great Britain by linking the timing of fatal far‑right and Islamic terrorist attacks to the interview dates of respondents in the British Election Study. This design treats exposure as effectively random around the interview date and isolates short‑term changes in respondents' partisan affect that can be attributed to the attacks.

Key Findings:

• Islamic (Islamist) attacks increase affective polarization: respondents become more divided in their feelings toward co‑partisans versus opponents following these incidents.
• Far‑right attacks have the opposite effect: the electorate shows signs of depolarization after fatal far‑right attacks.
• The authors present evidence that these contrasting effects are partly explained by differences in how salient the attacks are perceived to be and by variation in attitudes toward contentious or polarizing issues that the attacks bring to the fore.

Why This Matters: These results show that the political fallout of terrorism is not uniform: the identity and perceived meaning of an attack shape whether it intensifies partisan animosities or temporarily brings people closer together. The paper contributes a causal, survey‑based perspective on how violent events interact with partisan identities and public opinion, with implications for political communication, social cohesion, and how scholars measure short‑run shifts in polarization.