Trust, Efficacy and Opposition to Anti-terrorism Police Power

Australia in Comparative Perspective

Datos Bibliográficos

ID6235073
AutoresDavid Denemark (0000-0002-3248-2927, The University of Western Australia, autor de correspondencia)
Año2012
Volumen47
Número1
Páginas91-113
Fecha de publicación2012-03-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAustralian Journal of Political Science (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1036-1146 • E-ISSN: 1363-030X
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/10361146.2011.643163
OpenAlexW2027521958
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas9
Referencias citadas13

This paper explores the impact of political trust and efficacy on citizens' opposition to government anti-terrorism police powers in Australia and five other nations with different levels of overall trust and confidence in government. Survey data are used to examine patterns of opposition to unlimited detention, random stop-and-searches, and telephone wiretap surveillance. While trust in government represents a powerful constraint on citizens' support for extending police powers in nations with historically low levels of trust, such as Russia and Taiwan, it plays almost no role in high-trust nations such as Australia, where citizens seem more concerned about governmental policy performance than abuse of authority. Overall, because citizens' trust and confidence in government vary nation by nation, the introduction of government anti-terror policies is received in distinctly different ways, allowing important insights into the nexus between political trust and governmental performance and authority. Keywords: anti-terrorism police powersAustraliacitizen attitudescivil libertiesgovernmental efficacypolitical trustpost-9/11 security Notes 1The ISSP Role of Government (2006) module was put in the field in different nations at different times. In Great Britain, for example, the survey was conducted in June–November 2006, 11 months after the July 2005 London bombings. In Australia, the survey was put in the field a year later and in Denmark another half-year later yet. As a result, these multi-nation data are likely to contain historical effects due to cross-time variability in the realities surrounding these policies and the people affected by them. 2A previous version of this paper, presented at the World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Santiago, Chile, July 2009 (Denemark 2009), used the ISSP 2006 Role of Government data to sketch univariate and bivariate patterns of opposition to anti-terror police powers in 33 nations. Those sweeping cross-national patterns, because they are difficult to test in multivariate models, are used here only to select six nations as representative of high and low levels of trust. 3See the International Social Survey Programme website for details on the ISSP 2006 Role of Government survey: http://www.gesis.org/en/services/data/survey-data/issp/modules-study-overview/role-of-government/2006/. 4Among 33 nations surveyed by the ISSP in 2006, British respondents had mean trust scores in the centre of the distribution of national scores. Among these same 33 nations, the British were the least opposed to expanded detention powers, the third least opposed to wider stop-and-search powers, and the seventh least opposed to greater telephone wiretapping powers. 5While research in the US (Davis and Silver 2004; Huddy et al. 2005) and Great Britain (The Guardian 2005) has shown that citizen attitudes toward anti-terror policies and the trade-off between civil liberties and security have a conservative/liberal distinctiveness, I have not introduced a factor for conservative party support in the six-nation models as it was not clear what this partisan variable would measure in Russia and Taiwan. Instead, I introduce it in the last two Australian analyses (Tables 4 and 5) as a way to test for the independent impact of party ideology on support or opposition to these policies that has been shown in other Anglo-American democracies. Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid Denemark David Denemark is a Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Western Australia

Government (linguistics · Nexus (standard · Opposition (politics · Political science · Politics · Terrorism · Crime Patterns and Interventions · Law · Policing Practices and Perceptions · Public Administration · Wildlife Conservation and Criminology Analyses