This paper explores the research puzzle if states, in the name of security, conduct policy changes due to terrorist attacks and whether theses policy changes has an affect on the level of democracy. The research examines the cases of France and the UK during 2014-2016. France experienced several terrorist attacks in 2015 while the UK experienced none. The hypothesis, that the exposure of a terrorist attack/terrorist attacks leads to a decrease in democracy, received strong support. France saw a greater number of democratic restrictions than the UK in 2016. However, the support was reduced to a moderate level since the empirics indicate that countries often conduct anti-democratic policy changes due to previous experienced terrorist attacks and a perceived threat of terrorist attacks. This was the case in both countries 2014 and the UK 2016 where no terrorist attack was observed. An alternative explanation is that crises in general constitute a reduction in democracy rather than specifically terrorist attacks. Another objection is that the result might suffer from low reliability due to the case's similarity in terms of being European democratic countries. Therefore, to generalize the result a broader number of cases have to be examined.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-464740 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Stulic, Lisa |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för freds- och konfliktforskning |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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