Elevated threat levels and decreased expectations: How democracy handles terrorist threats

A persistent concern in democracies is that terror threats make the public willing to restrict freedoms for increased safety. But a large literature has struggled to determine how terrorist threats affect the public's policy preferences. To more credibly estimate the effects of terror threats, we exploit elevations of the U.S. government's color coded alert system. Using this design, a statistical model for texts and a new collection of news stories, we show that media outlets allocate substantially more attention to terrorism after an alert. The alerts have, however, only a limited effect on the public. The terror alerts raise the public's perceived likelihood of a terror attack, but opinion about President Bush's job performance, preferences for foreign intervention, or willingness to restrict civil liberties changes little in response to the alerts. Rather, the only consistent result is decreased economic expectations-consistent with the strong economic downturn after the 9/11 attacks and the types of stories published after the terror alerts are elevated. Terror alerts, then, did not exercise direct influence on the public's policy preferences. Instead the alerts changed the topic of conversation.