Check out this article by Álvaro Suárez Vergne, Héctor Cebolla Boado, Michael Lund and Inmaculada Serrano in Comparative Migration Studies. The paper asks a clear question: what happens to anti-Muslim hate crime in Europe after two major types of shock, Islamist terrorist attacks and radical-right electoral gains? And do radical-right victories contain hostility by channelling it into institutions, or do they legitimise it?
To answer this, the authors use monthly data from 30 European countries between 2016 and 2022. Their dependent variable is the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes recorded each month, drawn from the OSCE’s ODIHR civil society database. This dataset standardises definitions and validation procedures across countries, which makes cross-national comparison possible. Hate crimes are defined broadly and include violence, verbal abuse and property damage motivated by bias.
For terrorist attacks, the authors use monthly data on Islamist attacks and code their severity using the number of casualties, based on the Global Terrorism Database. For radical-right success, they use the percentage of votes won by radical-right parties in the most recent national election, from the ParlGov database. They control for unemployment rates and refugee populations, and estimate fixed-effects time-series models at the country-month level. This design isolates within-country changes over time and focuses on whether hate crime increases in the same month as a shock.
The results are consistent and precise. Terrorist attacks are associated with an immediate increase in anti-Muslim hate crime, and the effect grows with the number of deaths. Radical-right electoral success also increases anti-Muslim hate crime. There is no evidence of a containment effect. Instead, electoral gains appear to legitimise hostility. Substantively, one additional death in a terrorist attack increases anti-Muslim hate crimes by 0.11 in the same month. A one-percentage-point increase in radical-right vote share increases hate crimes by 0.037.
Context matters. Higher unemployment amplifies the effect of terrorist attacks on hate crime, consistent with scapegoating dynamics. By contrast, under high unemployment, the effect of radical-right electoral success is moderated. The authors suggest that in economic downturns, radical-right discourse broadens beyond identity politics, which may dilute its direct impact on anti-Muslim hostility.
For policy, the message is direct. Both terrorism and radical-right electoral gains can create permissive environments for hate. Political rhetoric, media framing after attacks, and economic insecurity all shape whether tensions escalate into violence. For research, the study shows the value of cross-national, standardised data and encourages further work across longer time periods and other regions.