@inProceedings{ohberg-etal-2022-unifying-324073, title = {Unifying or Divisive Threats? Anxiety about Political Terrorism and Extremism among the Swedish Public and Parliamentarians, 1986–2020}, abstract = {This paper contributes to the history of political terrorism through a data-driven study of the worry about the threat of terrorism and political extremism among the Swedish public and in the Parliament, 1986–2020. The aim is to explore the intersection of public opinion as expressed in national survey data and data on political action in the form of motions by Members of the Parliament (MPs), focusing on trends over time and the significance of political sympathies. Our study points to the impact of the attacks in the USA in 2001 and the wave of Islamist terror attacks from 2014 and onwards on both the public’s anxiety and the MP’s activity. It also shows the significance of political sympathies in this context with both citizens and MPs on the right being more worried about terrorism than those on the left, whereas the pattern is repeated in reverse when it comes to worry about political extremism. Through the investigation we highlight the benefits of combining parliamentary data and survey data as well as the importance of the parliamentary context, in exploring the relationship between public opinion and MPs activity on terrorism. An underlying argument is that the analysis of parliamentary data should be grounded in the context of the institutional and historical framework of the political system. }, booktitle = {DHNB 2022: Proceedings of the 6th Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference (DHNB 2022), Uppsala, Sweden, March 15-18, 2022, CEUR-WS vol. 3232 }, author = {Öhberg, Patrik and Brodén, Daniel and Fridlund, Mats and Wåhlstrand Skärström, Victor and Ängsal, Magnus Pettersson}, year = {2022}, publisher = {CEUR-WS.org}, address = {Aachen}, }