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43 Chapter 2 the Puzzle of Counterterrorism Policy attitudes h ow has the american public responded to new laws and policies of the post-9/11 era? in the previous chapter, we situated the rise of counterterrorism policies first under the administration of President Bush and in their later continuation following the election of a democratic Congress and democratic President Barack obama. We also highlighted the long historical backdrop against which countersubversive movements and politics have periodically occurred. as we saw, these earlier episodes have both points of similarity and differences with the 9/11 era. the question of how the mass public views counterterrorism policies connects to this history and raises questions that go to the heart of some of the most important and long-standing debates within the field of public opinion research. Scholars have puzzled over questions of rights and civil liberties support since the mcCarthy era, and a variety of competing theories have been advanced. Studying public opinion on counterterrorism is important not only for understanding the trajectory of policy but also for its implications for scholarly research on mass opinion more generally. there is no question that the events of 9/11 were of considerable significance for most americans. But the precise direction and duration of these impacts is the subject of ongoing research and unresolved controversies . Widespread media reports and some very early survey results seemed, for instance, to suggest that americans were responding to attacks by coming together in unprecedented ways. in the essay “Bowling together,” the political scientist Robert Putnam seized on evidence of a rebound in public trust in institutions, arguing that after the 9/11 attacks “we rediscovered our friends, our neighbors, our public institutions, and our shared fate” (2002, 20). But such predictions did not last long. almost immediately, survey analysts found public trust in Congress, Brooks.indb 43 11/27/2012 9:55:26 AM 44 Whose Rights? banks, and business declining to pre-2001 levels (Rasinski et al. 2002), and additional research reported no lasting trends in community involvement or feelings of civic attachment (Schmierbach, Boyle, and mcLeod 2005). moving to post-9/11 war on terror policies themselves, the puzzle is why americans would support policies and practices that depart from long-standing civil liberties and rights protections. has the passage of time—that is, as we move ever further away from the events of 9/11— shifted americans’ attitudes toward less support for such practices as torture or the use of military commissions in place of regular criminal courts for terrorism suspects? or have americans come to accept these policies as more or less permanently necessary to ward off further terrorist attacks, even at the expense of constitutional protections and liberties? these key questions connect with a richly diverse set of theoretical perspectives on american public opinion. our goal in this chapter is to see how these perspectives can inform the research we present in the rest of the book. our point of departure is scholarship on the liberalization of attitudes toward civil liberties (for example, Smith 1990; Sniderman et al. 1996). the opinion liberalism literature parallels broader arguments about the emergence of a set of global institutions and organizations that have been described as the “world society” (meyer et al. 1997). Both bodies of literature offer powerful insights and both are notably optimistic about the strength of rights-based commitments. But, as we will see, this scholarship faces some significant difficulties when we turn to figuring out why the u.S. government would implement, and why americans might welcome, policies that would seem to rein in established rights and liberties. things become more complicated as we allow for the possibility that “rights talk” and citizens’ democratic values are in tension with the strategic deployment of terrorist threats on the part of political elites. in general, the communication of threats tends to enhance prejudice, solidify group boundaries, and mobilize authoritarian sentiments (Rousseau 2006). in the post-9/11 era, an important body of threat-priming scholarship has analyzed how politicians’ messages about terrorism threats shape policy attitudes (merolla and Zechmeister 2009). this well-grounded perspective is one that we will need to engage. We then turn to a third set of possibilities, rooted in research on the cognitive-psychological processes through which individuals reason about policy and political questions. in the partisan heuristics tradition, citizens focus in on which political party is responsible for, or associated with, a policy (Bartels 2002; Bafumi and Shapiro 2009...

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