There is a large body of literature analyzing the relationship between objective economic conditions and voting behavior, but there is very little evidence of how perceived economic insecurity impacts on political preferences. Using seventeen years of household panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we examine whether job loss fears impact on individuals’ party identification. Consist...

Extremist infiltration of armed forces, and the spread violent radicalization among service members former soldiers, are a growing international concern. With an increased number active duty soldiers involved in extremist terrorist milieus, public fears that national security might be compromised by potential terrorists using their training, equipment, networks against countries they swore to p...

Research on the psychology of terrorism has argued against the idea that most terrorist behavior is caused by mental illness or by a terrorist personality. This article suggests an alternative line of inquiry - an individual psychology of terrorism that explores how otherwise normal mental states and processes, built on characteristic attitudes, dispositions, inclinations, and intentions, might...

Conflicting interests among group members are common when making collective decisions, yet failure to achieve consensus can be costly. Under these circumstances individuals may be susceptible to manipulation by a strongly opinionated, or extremist, minority. It has previously been argued, for humans and animals, that social groups containing individuals who are uninformed, or exhibit weak prefe...

The existing research on lone wolf terrorists and case experience are reviewed and interpreted through the lens of psychoanalytic theory. A number of characteristics of the lone wolf are enumerated: a personal grievance and moral outrage; the framing of an ideology; failure to affiliate with an extremist group; dependence on a virtual community found on the Internet; the thwarting of occupation...

Contemporary communication technologies are thought to facilitate the growth of the small autonomous terrorist groups indicative of ‘modern’ terrorism. In this study, the Animal Liberation Front provides an example of a culturally distinct organisation from which an extremist force—the Animal Rights Militia—emerges to pose the threat of violence. Agent-based modelling is used to simulate this e...

This chapter investigates al-Qaeda’s use of Web 2.0 as a tool for radicalization and recruitment. The media network of al-Qaeda is described in order to demonstrate the impact of their well structured media strategy for harnessing the power of the Web. They use a strategy that makes them stand out from other extremist groups, who in most cases lack an overall approach towards branding and Web c...