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Abstract

Research on post-9/11 counterterrorism policy preferences in the West has focused primarily on the role of emotions and the magnitude of threat perception. In this article, I demonstrate the central role played by perceptions of the nature of the terrorist threat. Specifically, I focus on the divergence between the dominant depiction of terrorist irrationality in elite discourse in Australia and the strategic model in the academic literature. Reporting on the results of a randomized survey-experiment (N = 803), I find that exposure to excerpts from the academic literature significantly increases perceptions of terrorist rationality. Perceptions of terrorist rationality, in turn, correlate with lower levels of support for military responses to terrorism. While exposure to descriptive text about a terrorist attack increases support for military responses to terrorism, subsequent exposure to excerpts from the academic literature mitigates this effect, reducing support for military responses to terrorism.

foreign policy, terrorism, counterterrorism, rationality, framing
© The Author (2017). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
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