POLITICAL SCIENCE: EMPHASIS ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS STUDYING THE SUPPORT FOR MORE DRASTIC NATIONAL SECURITY POLICIES BASED ON THE FEAR OF CITIZENS

The hypothesis of this study is that when citizens feel as if their families and/or countries are in danger, they will support more drastic National Security policies to ensure their safety. More specifically, citizens will support these measures when they feel a strong sense of national solidarity even if these policies are not considered “ethical” in the traditional sense of the word. In order to discover the ways in which citizens think about the implementation of more drastic National Security policies, these citizens must be in the most controlled environment possible, therefore an online survey was implemented. The independent variable was the threat citizens feel towards their respective country by outside forces. The participants were randomly assigned into three groups: the threat group, the nonthreat group, and the control group. Qualtrics uses a computer-generated randomization process to randomize the condition that each respondent receives. The threat group was shown a threatening newspaper article about ISIS, the non-threat was shown an article regarding a refugee family settling into a new country in a positive manner, and the control group was shown a completely arbitrary article. All three groups filled out the same survey, which was then analyzed