About this Research Topic

Background

The Covid pandemic has increased the visibility of tensions between government measures aimed at protecting public health on the one side, and civil liberties on the other. It has also put the spotlight on the conditions under which these measures are accepted and complied with, such as heightened levels of threat to public health, safety and security. Not only the Covid pandemic or terrorism and crime (e.g. data piracy), but also long-term developments such as climate change, migration streams, and political extremism can be perceived as threatening. Such potentially threatening developments prompt different kinds of government responses in current democracies. In addition, new technologies provide companies and governments around the world with an unprecedented tool kit for the surveillance of citizens and other measures challenging personal liberties. Given that popular support for such policies is relevant not only for citizens’ compliance with new regulations but also for the legitimacy of our democracies, it is important to expand research along the following question: Why do people support or reject surveillance and other policies that might challenge different dimensions of civil liberties?

In this Research Topic we aim to bring together social scientists working on how threats and government responses to these threats (such as surveillance) shape citizens’ attitudes and behaviors toward the political system or particular policies. Specifically, we encourage scholars to submit research addressing one or more of the following questions:

- How do citizens respond to state surveillance during threatening times?
- What are the consequences of threats and/or state surveillance for public attitudes toward the political system?- How do social and political trust affect attitudes towards far-reaching government measures?
- Do citizens psychologically process different forms of threat differently? What are the political consequences of these perceptions of individual and collective threats?
- Do citizens deliberately outweigh goals such as provision of security, personal freedoms, and democratic principles? How do contextual factors influence this process?
- How does a citizen's position on surveillance and/or other domestic security policies influence their engagement in different forms of political participation?
- To what extent do experiences with and support for state surveillance differ between sub-groups (e.g., visible minorities)?
- How do new technologies and forms of data collection transform state surveillance and attitudes toward surveillance and other potential restrictions of civil liberties?
- What determines citizens’ (non-)compliance with far-reaching government measures to contain different kinds of threat?
- What are the public’s ethical concerns of new technologies for state surveillance, especially regarding democratic legitimacy?

Contributions to this Research Topic should address a combination of at least two of three elements: threat, surveillance, political attitudes/behavior. We welcome both single-country cases and comparative analyses. We are particularly interested in receiving contributions based on experiments (e.g. survey experiments, natural experiments), as well as on big data (e.g., text as data, social media data).

Keywords: threat, surveillance, political attitudes, civil liberties, security, political psychology

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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