American Political Science Review
- American Political Science Review / Volume 108 / Issue 03 / August 2014, pp 588-604
- Copyright © American Political Science Association 2014
- DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0003055414000288 (About DOI), Published online: 28 July 2014
Research Article
Terrorism and Voting: The Effect of Rocket Threat on Voting in Israeli Elections
ANNA GETMANSKYa1 c1 and THOMAS ZEITZOFFa2 c2
a1 Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya
a2 American University
Abstract
How does the threat of becoming a victim of terrorism affect voting behavior? Localities in southern Israel have been exposed to rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip since 2001. Relying on variation across time and space in the range of rockets, we identify the effect of this threat on voting in Israeli elections. We first show that the evolution of the rockets’ range leads to exogenous variation in the threat of terrorism. We then compare voting in national elections within and outside the rockets’ range. Our results suggest that the right-wing vote share is 2 to 6 percentage points higher in localities that are within the range—a substantively significant effect. Unlike previous studies that explore the role of actual exposure to terrorism on political preferences and behavior, we show that the mere threat of an attack affects voting.
Correspondence
c1 Anna Getmansky is Lecturer, Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy, and Strategy, Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, Israel. While working on this paper, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International Relations in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University (agetmansky@idc.ac.il).
c2 Thomas Zeitzoff is Assistant Professor, Department of Justice, Law and Criminology, School of Public Affairs, American University (zeitzoff@gmail.com).
Footnotes
We thank Neal Beck, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Baruch Fischoff, Esteban Klor, John Miller, Uzi Rubin, Tolga Sinmazdemir, the reviewers and the editor of the APSR for their helpful suggestions. We also benefitted from the comments of participants of 2012 Peace Science Society (International), and the Symposium on Political Violence at the University of Pittsburgh. Finally, we thank the Israel Social Science Data Center and the GIS Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for providing us with election results data and shape files, respectively.
