Did the 2011 Terror Attacks in Norway Change Citizens’ Attitudes Toward Immigrants?

Abstract

In the afternoon of July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb near the central government building in Oslo, Norway, killing eight people. About an hour later, he arrived, disguised as a policeman, at the social democratic summer camp on the small island of Utøya near Oslo, shooting another 69 people, mostly teenagers. The survivors hid in bushes, played dead beside their dead friends, or swam to the mainland. In the morning of the next day, the police announced that Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian islamophobic right-wing extremist, had been arrested for the attacks. The terror attacks received a lot of attention in both the international and Norwegian press.1 According to the compendium of texts, which he distributed on the web a few hours before the attacks, Breivik regarded Islam as the main enemy and argued for the deportation of all Muslims from Europe (Kremer, Stigset, & Treloar, 2011). The political debate in the aftermath of the attacks was calm and temperate, and the media coverage in Norway of the ruling social democratic party and the prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, has been characterized as objective and positive (Bihlar & Brathell, 2011).2 In this article, we examine whether the attacks had observable effects on Norwegians’ attitudes toward immigrants.