American Political Science Review Vol. 109, No. 4 November 2015 doi:10.1017/S0003055415000441 c  American Political Science Association 2015 The Impact of Persistent Terrorism on Political Tolerance: Israel, 1980 to 2011 MARK PEFFLEY University of Kentucky MARC L. HUTCHISON University of Rhode Island MICHAL SHAMIR Tel-Aviv University H ow do persistent terrorist attacks influence political tolerance, a willingness to extend basic liberties to one’s enemies? Studies in the U.S. and elsewhere have produced a number of valuable insights into how citizens respond to singular, massive attacks like 9/11. But they are less useful for evaluating how chronic and persistent terrorist attacks erode support for democratic values over the long haul. Our study focuses on political tolerance levels in Israel across a turbulent 30-year period, from 1980 to 2011, which allows us to distinguish the short-term impact of hundreds of terrorist attacks from the long-term influence of democratic longevity on political tolerance. We find that the corrosive influence of terrorism on political tolerance is much more powerful among Israelis who identify with the Right, who have also become much more sensitive to terrorism over time. We discuss the implications of our findings for other democracies under threat from terrorism. H ow do persistent terrorist attacks influence po- litical tolerance, a willingness to extend basic liberties to one’s domestic enemies? After 9/11, several studies in the U.S. and elsewhere documented a sharp increase in public support for policies restricting a range of civil liberties, such as warrantless govern- ment searches and surveillance and indefinite deten- tion of terrorism suspects without charge or trial. As Merolla and Zechmeister (2009) argue, these and other public responses to terrorism pose a real threat to the health of democracy because not only are laws passed that compromise democratic values and practices for years to come, but the “war on terrorism” is unlike traditional wars in that there is no clear end date and the threat of terrorism is unlikely to recede in the near future. And in more extreme cases, such as Sri Lanka in the early 1980’s and Peru in 1992, terrorist threat can quickly destabilize democracies and interrupt demo- cratic sustainability. Mark Peffley is Professor, Department of Political Science, Univer- sity of Kentucky, 1653 Patterson Office Tower, Lexington, KY 40506 (mpeffl@uky.edu). Marc L. Hutchison is Associate Professor, Department of Politi- cal Science, University of Rhode Island, Washburn Hall, 80 Upper College Rd., Kingston, RI 02881 (mlhutch@uri.edu). Michal Shamir is Professor, Department of Political Science, Tel-Aviv University, P.O. Box 39040, Tel-Aviv, Israel 6997801 (m3600@post.tau.ac.il). Earlier versions of this article were presented at the annual meet- ings of the Kentucky Political Science Association in Lexington, KY, the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago, IL, the Inter- national Society of Political Psychology in Rome, Italy, and the Min- nesota Speaker Series. We acknowledge with gratitude Yochanan Peres, Eppie Yuchtman-Yaar, and Noah Lewin-Epstein for their willingness to share their survey data with us. We are indebted to Yasmin Alkalai, Yael Proaktor, Jason Kehrberg, and especially Yu Ouyang for their technical assistance. We thank Robert Rohrschnei- der, Abby Cordova, Paul Goren, John Sides, Amaney Jamal, Do- minique Z ´ ephyr, Clayton Thyne, Tiffany Barnes, David O. Sears, James Gibson, Dan Myers, Anna Getmansky, John Poe, Jason Gain- ous, Brian Krueger, Kristin Johnson, and Ping Xu for comments and advice on earlier drafts. Finally, we would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their comments and suggestions that greatly improved the final manuscript. Of course, all errors remain the responsibility of the authors. While studies in the U.S. and elsewhere have yielded valuable insights, they are limited in two important respects. First and foremost, the attacks from inter- national terrorists in the U.S. in 2001, like those in Spain in 2004 and the U.K. in 2005, were singular and massive attacks, whose magnitude was without precedence or recurrence. It is therefore difficult to determine whether Americans’ response to the 9/11 attacks can be generalized to countries where terrorism is a more frequent occurrence. Indeed, scholars have been left to speculate about whether additional attacks would seriously erode political tolerance and support for democratic values among U.S. citizens (Davis 2007; Gibson 2008, 97; Hetherington and Suhay 2011, 558). Thus, the question of the impact of persistent terrorist attacks on political tolerance remains unsettled. Another limitation of U.S. studies is that most sur- veys that followed on the heels of the 9/11 attacks focused on the public’s support for civil liberties poli- cies, such as approval of increased surveillance (see Berinsky 2009, Brooks and Manza 2013, Davis 2007, Hetherington and Suhay 2011) instead of what is com- monly considered to be the essence of toleration—i.e., “putting up” with groups and ideas one opposes, as assessed by the least-liked political tolerance measure 1 (Sullivan et al. 1982). The distinction is an important one because as Gibson (2013) makes plain, the two measures—support for restrictive policies and least- liked tolerance—are only weakly related, and their association with various covariates suggests they are tapping substantially different constructs. Although both measures have their use, in addition to provid- ing a proper test of political tolerance, the least-liked method has been used extensively in the U.S. (e.g., Gib- son 2008) and in cross-national research (e.g., Gibson 1998, Gibson and Gouws 2003, Sullivan et al. 1993). 1 As described more fully below, the least-liked approach allows respondents to pick the domestic political group they like the least from a list so that political tolerance questions are tailored to that group. 1