During the last decades, Europe and the Middle East were targets of a wave of Islamist terrorist attacks, sparking intense debates on immigrating in politics and the media. Understanding how societies respond to terrorism is crucial for informing policy decisions aimed at political stability and mitigating the rise of populist parties. However, existing evidence on whether citizens’ attitudes are affected by terrorist attacks remains inconclusive and suffers from various shortcomings. Our project seeks to fill these research gaps and investigate attitudes towards immigrants before and after terrorist attacks.

To do so, we analyze the effect of terrorist attacks on posts written in online media and the citizen responses to attitude questions in large-scale surveys. We trace the public discourse by analyzing posts written on YouTube and Facebook using text mining and evaluate attitudes in responses to the European Social Survey using statistical methods for identifying causal relationships. Combining these online and offline sources will provide us with unique insights into how these attacks are perceived in both the public and the private sphere.