The final decades of the twentieth century witnessed a dramatic upsurge in the pace and scale of technological innovation, economic globalization, environmental change and political transformation. The impacts of these processes are varied and complex. On many fronts--from literacy to life expectancy--humankind has experienced remarkable and well-documented gains. But our interconnected and rapidly changing world is also being challenged by an expanding list of transnational threats such as climate change, infectious disease and global terrorism.
Political scientists are working to understand how these global threats are affecting democratic values, institutions, and practices. Social psychologists are studying the range of responses traumatic events elicit among individuals within a society. It is important to weave these two strands of research together to investigate the extent to which traumatic events and perceptions of global threats may evoke different political responses that in aggregate can influence democratic values, institutions and practices. We will bring our two fields together by studying how an individual's age and age cohort influences his or her responses to terrorism and other security threats and the perceived likelihood of future threats. Because the United States is aging at a time of great turbulence in the global security landscape, it is important to consider how this phenomenon influences our country's support for the use of force, conscription, and many other security-related issues. It also raises important general questions about issues such as trust in government, agenda setting and policy formulation in an aging democracy.
In collaboration with a Web-based survey research company, we will collect data from a nationally representative longitudinal panel of 1500 adults at three waves.. The specific aims of this research are to explore the relationships among (a) aging and age cohorts; (b) individual interpretations of and responses to security-relevant forms of global turbulence and transformation; and (c) social and political outcomes such as changes in support for or protest against the use of force abroad, attitudes towards surveillance at home, and one's level of trust in government. We will use the threat of transnational terrorism as the primary example of global turbulence and transformation, but we believe the findings generated by our research are equally relevant to issues such as infectious disease, severe weather events, and transnational crime.
