Achievement

The bomb attacks that killed 52 Londoners in July 2005 are widely seen to have changed attitudes towards British Muslims. Andrew Kelly (IGERT trainee) and his colleague present the first systematic analysis of how ordinary Britons responded to the attacks, using the Citizenship Survey that was in the field when the attacks occurred and includes 14,000 respondents with 5,000 ethnic minority respondents. They estimate the effects of this event using an interrupted time-series design. They find that the attacks caused increased perceptions of both anti-Muslim and race-based prejudice, but that different ethnic and religious groups responded in distinct ways. They then disaggregate the post-bombing respondents by the date of interview to examine how political attitudes evolved in the post-bombing period.