Jamal Bouoiyour
email: jamal.bouoiyour@univ-pau.fr

Refk Selmi

Terrorism, Colonialism and Voter Psychology: Evidence from the United Kingdom

Keywords: Terrorism, Colonialism, Voter behavior, Elections, the United Kingdom. JEL Classification: H56, D74

Extant theory suggests that terrorist groups strategically plan their attacks around elections. This study investigates the impact of terrorism on voting behavior in the United Kingdom (UK). To address endogeneity concerns related to the possibility that terrorism may be a response to the elections results, we have conducted an instrumental variables approach that relies on the political participation of Commonwealth-origin migrant voters, taking into account the fact that the strength of the Commonwealth's commitment to its principles and values -including the promotion of human and political rights, tolerance, respect for diversity, coexistence, equity and fairness-may affect terror dynamics. In other words, we have connected terrorism to colonial policies and practices. In fact, the colonial rulers had established effective application of economic, social and cultural rights, as well as civil and political rights which would contribute to the success of counter-terrorism strategies. The results indicate that terrorism significantly affects the electorate's preferences. We have also found that the vote of the right-wing party is likely to be higher in localities near the home base of a terror incident and in localities adjacent to international borders, and lower in cities with a noticeable percentage of Muslims. The current UK economic conditions do not work to the advantage of the right-wing party. The results are statistically significant and robust across a multitude of model specifications and differing measures of terrorism.

Introduction

According to the last edition of The Global Terrorism Index from the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP), the world has witnessed a rise by 69 percent in terrorist attacks within a single year. Terrorism is viewed as the curse of our times, and researchers are probing this common evil in several ways to find a remedy. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, a particular attention has been devoted to the historical and institutional causes, forms, and strategies of terrorism, offering valuable insights into the link between terrorism and the economy, the government policy, and the democratic freedoms; also into the determinants of terrorism and the issues faced by governments in their efforts to counteract terrorism (see, for example, [START_REF] Krueger | Kto Kogo?: A Cross-Country Study of the Origins and Targets of Terrorism[END_REF]Krueger and Maleckova 2003;[START_REF] Berrebi | Evidence about the Link between Education, Poverty and Terrorism among Palestinians[END_REF]. So far, the empirical research on the effects of terrorism on people's evaluation of their political leaders' performances remains rather limited (Davis and Silver 2004[START_REF] Shambaugh | Public Prudence, the Policy Salience of Terrorism and Presidential Approval Following Terrorist Incidents[END_REF][START_REF] Guilmartin | Terrorist Attacks and Presidential Approval from 1949-2002[END_REF][START_REF] Ludvigsen | The Cost of Ruling Israel: Measuring the Political Cost of Terrorism[END_REF]. Several questions on this issue still need answers. In particular, is terrorism a tactic to achieve political goals? How does the phantom threat of terrorism influence voters' preferences? Are voters more likely to support parties that favor expanding heavier concessions to terrorists to prevent further violence? or are they more likely to vote for parties that oppose concessions and that favor more aggressive policy towards the perpetrators? Addressing these questions may have relevant implications for conflict resolution and to understand better the role that plays terrorism as a political tool (in particular, electoral terrorism). Research that concentrates on the exposure to terrorism and political preferences has been mixed with some researches showing that terrorism leads voters to accommodate terrorists' demands more, and others revealing a hardening of attitudes in the electorate. Various works documented a significant correlation between terrorism and the voting behavior and the electoral opinions [START_REF] Pape | Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism[END_REF][START_REF] Berrebi | Are Voters Sensitive to Terrorism? Direct Evidence from the Israeli Electorate[END_REF]Kibris 2011;Montalvo 2011;Holmes and Gutiérrez de Pineres 2012;Robbins et al. 2013). These analyses were concentrated on the cases of Israel [START_REF] Ludvigsen | The Cost of Ruling Israel: Measuring the Political Cost of Terrorism[END_REF][START_REF] Berrebi | On Terrorism and Electoral Outcomes: Theory and Evidence from the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict[END_REF][START_REF] Fielding | What Causes Changes in Opinion about the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process?[END_REF], Spain [START_REF] Bali | Terror and Elections: Lessons from Spain[END_REF], the U.S. [START_REF] Guilmartin | Terrorist Attacks and Presidential Approval from 1949-2002[END_REF][START_REF] Shambaugh | Public Prudence, the Policy Salience of Terrorism and Presidential Approval Following Terrorist Incidents[END_REF], and some European countries such as Spain [START_REF] Bali | Terror and Elections: Lessons from Spain[END_REF]. Some of these researchers found that right-wing incumbent parties receive more votes following terrorism [START_REF] Berrebi | On Terrorism and Electoral Outcomes: Theory and Evidence from the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict[END_REF][START_REF] Berrebi | Are Voters Sensitive to Terrorism? Direct Evidence from the Israeli Electorate[END_REF]Getmansky and Zeitzoff 2014). This also ties with Kbris (2011) and Onreat et al. (2013); they deduced that to deal with terror threats there is a turn toward right-wing attitudes. On the contrary, the terror attacks played a significant role on the win of the Socialist Party over the Spanish 2004 elections [START_REF] Bali | Terror and Elections: Lessons from Spain[END_REF]. Although the Israeli case showed that the right-wing is likely to see its votes raise in the face of terrorist incidents, according to [START_REF] Bali | Terror and Elections: Lessons from Spain[END_REF] the Spanish case underscored that this support is still sensitive to public approval of potential policy areas. This outcome was confirmed by Koch and Cranmer (2007) and Williams et al. (2013) demonstrating that left-wing governments are less likely to survive transnational terrorist attacks.

The aim of this essay is to investigate this claim and test whether terrorism is an effective way to sway elections by delving into the last UK elections. The United Kingdom is one of the unfortunate countries for which dealing with terrorism has long become the top priority issue. Since 1970, the UK has faced the most deaths as a result of terrorism in Western Europe totaling 3,395, followed by Spain with 1,261 deaths since 1970 according to data from the Global Terrorism Database (see Figure A.1,Appendix). In 2017 and in particular after the Manchester attack (22 May), the UK's intelligence agency, increased its threat level from severe to critical1. It is in this country that warnings about terrorism, nowadays, find the most resonance with politicians, journalists and public alike. Following the terrorist incident at Ariana Grande's concert in Manchester and at London Bridge a few days later, it is clearer the target is the general elections of June 8. Terrorism was and continues to be on the minds of the UK public even before these last attacks. Based on a recent poll, many voters have suggested that security and terrorism are the principal issue determining how they will vote.

Nevertheless, the voters had differing opinions on which party would deal with the issue better and more seriously, with some saying they felt the Conservatives were stronger on security and counter-terrorism strategy, and others asserting that Theresa May had failed as Prime Minister. The present research utilizes the variation of terror attacks across time and space to estimate the magnitude of the impact of terrorism on the electorate's preferences while focusing on the UK case. To causally identify the relationship between terrorism and voting behavior, we have applied an instrumental variables approach using the number of Commonwealth2 migrants eligible to vote as an instrument for terrorism. The organization has continually emphasized its focus on adaptability, hence the idea is whether the Commonwealth has adapted sufficiently to deal with terrorism predominant in the world today. Our results provide strong empirical support for the hypothesis that the electorate shows a sensitive response to terrorism. In particular, terrorism causes an important increase on the support for the right wing of political parties. Furthermore, we have documented that the right-wing party's vote-share is 2 percentage points greater in localities near to the home base of a terror incident, 9 to 11 percentage greater in localities with an international border, and 7 to 10 percentage lesser in cities with wider Muslim share of the population. We have also found that the electorate's voting behavior depends on the socio-economic conditions, while it seems insensitive to the education level.

We have structured the remainder of this research as follows. In Section 2, we describe the methodology and the data. In Section 3, we summarize and discuss our findings and check their robustness. In Section 4, we control for possible endogeneity problem. Section 5 provides some concluding remarks.

Methodology and data

The model

The present work empirically analyzes the strength of the effect of terrorism on the voting behavior or the electorate's preferences with special references to the case of United Kingdom. A potential problem that emerges in any essay to investigate the impact of terrorism on the voting behavior is that the estimates may be biased owing to the dynamic interactions among the two variables: terrorist incidents may exert a significant impact on the electorate's preferences, but terrorism may also be a response to those political preferences. This interaction precludes academics from effectively determining the effect of terrorism from other shocks to the voters' behaviors and beliefs by focusing only on time variation. Specifically, the correlation between terrorism and the electorate's preferences cannot be interpreted as a measure of the magnitude of the electoral effects of terrorism. Adding to our investigation the variation across space allows us to avoid the intrinsic difficulty of the task at hand. Indeed, following [START_REF] Berrebi | On Terrorism and Electoral Outcomes: Theory and Evidence from the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict[END_REF], we use the variation of terror attacks across time and space as an instrument to analyze the electoral impacts of terror incidents, even if we control for possible time and location specific effects. The model we estimate for the identification of the effect of terrorism on electoral outcomes is denoted as:

(Right Bloc Share) i,t = α(Terror Fatalities) i,t + β(Total Fatalities) t + γX i,t + ε i,t (1)
where (Right Bloc Share) i,t is the right-bloc share of the two-blocs vote in locality i in elections t; (Terror Fatalities) i,t is the number of fatalities in locality i prior to the elections in t; (Total Fatalities) t is the total number of terror fatalities in UK before elections t. X i,t is a vector of political, socio-economic and demographic control variables that vary across localities and time. These variables include the net migration as percentage of voters, the geographical distribution of terror fatalities (localities near to the home base of attacks, localities with international border, regional capitals), and the attention to Brexit.

Based on related literature, α is expected to be significantly positive if localities within the range have a higher right-wing vote-share than localities outside the range (in particular, [START_REF] Berrebi | On Terrorism and Electoral Outcomes: Theory and Evidence from the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict[END_REF]Getmansky and Thomas Zeitzoff 2008). A terrorist incident triggers residents of a locality to change their daily routine as a result of insecurity and change in their behavior toward peace. Terror attacks may also exert a significant influence on the locality's economy and its residents' future income [START_REF] Gordon | Threat and Decision Making[END_REF]. However, a negative and statistically significant α would imply that localities within the range of terror attacks are less supportive of right-wing bloc, and more supporting of left-wing parties. An α coefficient that is not significant means that being in the range of terrorist incidents does not impact voting behavior. β measures the local electoral impact of terror attacks committed in other localities.

A positive coefficient may be explained even partially by the policies proposed by parties in the right bloc won it new supporters after terrorist incidents. If the coefficient is negative, it may be due to the fact that national casualties from terrorism and voters' disapproval of the policies proposed by the right bloc prompted an erosion of its support [START_REF] Berrebi | Are Voters Sensitive to Terrorism? Direct Evidence from the Israeli Electorate[END_REF]. The net migration share of the population is incorporated to control for [START_REF] Tiebout | A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures[END_REF] hypothesis. Based on this hypothesis, voters sort themselves out between the different localities according to their preferences. Adding the net migration share of each locality's population enables us to differentiate migration of voters to localities that do not suffer terror attacks from the hypothesis assuming that voters change their preferences. Further, [START_REF] Berrebi | Are Voters Sensitive to Terrorism? Direct Evidence from the Israeli Electorate[END_REF] argued that the electoral support for the right bloc drops with the distance of the locality to the home base of a terror attack and in localities with an international border.

However, the support for the right-wing party rises in regional capitals and with population density. It is very important to assess the response of electorate's preferences to the geographical distribution of terrorist incidents. For instance, if localities that are near to the home base of terrorist attack are similar to those out of the range of attacks, then any differences in voting can be attributed to living in the range of terror attacks. Assessing similarity between within and out of the terror range localities is also prominent to avoid support for the different UK political parties. We can note from the map that there is a sharp difference with respect the support for the right wing parties among cities that were attacked and the rest. The detailed data are available at Electoral commission and Data for UK 2017

General Election Results (Economist Infographic). What is surprising is that the localities which suffered most from terrorist incidents, just prior to the elections (for example, Manchester), show a larger support for the left wing (Labour), inconsistently with the literature suggesting that terrorism can raise the support for the right wing(see Figure A.5,Appendix). We have also incorporated further potential political, socio-economic and demographic variables into the investigation. Specifically, the analysis includes the distance of locality to the terrorist home base during the period under study, and dummy variables for localities considered as regional capitals and localities that have an international border.

Besides, we have integrated the net migration for each locality. We define the net migration as the total number of citizens that moved into a locality (including new immigrants) minus the total number of citizens that left the locality in a given year. The migration data are collected from the Office of National Statistics (ONS). Also, we have included the size of the population who is entitled to vote. Electoral statistics are gathered by ONS and represent the most accurate count possible of the number of people on electoral registers each year. Due to the great criticism for lacking clarity on Brexit negotiating strategy under Theresa May's government, the way in which Brexit has received interest in web is incorporated in this study, i.e., the search queries index for keyword "Brexit" has been retrieved from Google

Trends. The data on electoral results and terror fatalities as well as the demographic, economic and geographic indicators are available at the locality level for the UK. Time series are expressed in natural logarithm to lessen fluctuations in the data set and to correct for potential heteroskedasticity and dimensional differences among variables. Table A.1

(Appendix) reports all the data used and their source links.

Results

Baseline model

To empirically assess the effects of terrorism on voting behavior, our strategy consists of regressing the political preferences (proxied by the right bloc share for each locality) on the locality's terror level and the total terror fatalities, even if we account for socio-economic indicators. To establish our empirical framework, we combined the necessary data on electoral outcomes and terror fatalities with data on economic, geographic and demographic indicators that are available at the locality level in UK (see Table A.1, Appendix). Table 1 displays the estimation of the effects of terror fatalities on the preferences of the electorate as specified in the equation (1). Column 1 reports the results of a specification accounting for the terror level within one month of the elections. Column 2 offers the outcomes of the specification considering the terror attacks occurred within 3 months of the elections, while column 3 reports the findings of the regression of electorate's preferences on the locality's terror level within one year of the elections. We show that the occurrence of a terror fatality within one month of the elections is associated with a 0.32 percentage points increase in the locality's relative electoral support for the right bloc of political parties. This effect appears stronger compared to the elections within three months and one year of the elections. Three attacks happened in the UK during the time period at issue. Thus, one terror attack contributes roughly to an increase of 0.96 percentage points in the relative support for the right wing.

Given that the UK electorate is mainly split between the right and left wings (conservative and labour, respectively), the aftermath of a terrorist incident just prior to the election significantly determine the electoral results.

By assessing the effect of total terror fatalities on voting behavior, we have noticed that a terror fatality has significant electorate effects beyond the locality where it is perpetrated.

Moreover, we have found that the electoral support for the right wing drops with locality's population, the distance of the locality to the home base of a terror incident and in localities with an international border. However, the support for the right wing rises in regional capitals and depending to the net migration as a percentage of voters. Our results reveal that the net migration does not significantly influence the political preferences of the electorate after a terror incident. This implies that the local electoral impact of terror fatalities is not significantly determined by the voters changing their localities of residence-consistently with Tiebout hypothesis. The findings also reveal that Brexit is dominating the election or more accurately Brexit is likely to decide the election outcome rather than security concern. The obtained findings reveal that the particular attention toward Brexit is associated with a sharp decrease on the support for the right wing in favor of the left-wing party. The victory of left wing in the elections means that the Brexit would still go ahead. The labour party supported that the UK may attempt to go back to the negotiating table to discuss a better deal concerning Brexit. It must be mentioned that unlike the conservative party, the labour party has a

tendency toward an open, business-friendly, low-regulated economy, and then they are against a "hard Brexit" and then a second referendum on the terms of any deal is possible if they win. Several tests were performed to ascertain the robustness of the main findings reported in Table 1. A first test consists of repeating the estimations of Table 1 while incorporating further control variables (in particular, by replacing the regional capital by other wealth indicators and by incorporating other Brexit proxies). Second, we assess the sensitivity of our results to the control for Muslim proportion in total population. This step consists of estimating the relationship between terror fatalities on electoral preferences and other control variables including total population while subtracting the Muslim share.

Inclusion of further control variables

A first test aims at replacing regional capital variable by GDP per capita as a potential wealth indicator. Multiple researches on voting behavior typically employ GDP growth to measure national economic performance. While several studies have successfully established a significant linkage between economic performance and voter intent, some researchers have failed to find a solid relationship between electoral preferences and economic outcomes (for instance, [START_REF] Paldam | How Robust is the Vote Function[END_REF][START_REF] Cheibub | Accountability for Economic Outcomes[END_REF]. Others do not dispute the linkage among voting behavior and the economy, but they disagree on how voters judge the economy.

Some perceive voters as completely myopic (Kramer 1971;[START_REF] Paldam | How Robust is the Vote Function[END_REF], whereas some other academics suggest that voters are more sophisticated and base their voting decision by accounting for long periods of information (see for example, Peltzman 1990). And another economic approach based on Bayesian framework remains, suggesting that voters' vision is vulnerable on how much "noisiness" or economic instability they witnessed in the past. This implies that voters will be short-sighted if they underwent great economic instability in the past, and longer sighted if the economic changes were low (see for instance, Magaloni 1997).

By adding GDP per capita as wealth proxy, our main results are robust. We often find that an increase of terror fatalities reinforces the support of the right-wing party. We show also that the present UK economic situation is not in favor of the right-wing party, i.e., negative correlation between GDP per capita and electorate's support of the right bloc (Table 2, Equations ( 4), ( 5) and ( 6)).

Another robustness test consists of using another relevant wealth proxy which is the standardized locality mean wage adjusted for inflation is using 2006 as the base year. The incorporation of the average wage at the locality level enables us to account for possible effects of economic conditions on the relative support for the right wing party, as supported by the economic voter hypothesis (see, for example, [START_REF] Lewis-Beck | Economics Determinants of Electoral Outcomes[END_REF][START_REF] Berrebi | Are Voters Sensitive to Terrorism? Direct Evidence from the Israeli Electorate[END_REF]. Theory suggests that worsening socioeconomic conditions benefit the leftwing opposition rather than the right wing parties (for example, Getmansky and Thomas Zeitzoff 2008). For our case of study, we note that the estimated wage's coefficient is negative and significant (Table 2), highlighting that the current UK economic conditions do not work to the advantage of the right-wing party. By adding wage as a proxy of wealth, the effect of terrorism on the preferences of the electorate (right wing party) remains solid and unambiguous (i.e., positive and significant, Table 2, Equations ( 7), ( 8) and ( 9)).

The education level which is considered as one of the major predictors of turnout is also accounted for. Education improves people's commitment towards voting and enhances their interest in politics [START_REF] Nie | Education and Democratic Citizenship in America[END_REF][START_REF] Milligan | Does education improve citizenship? Evidence from the United States and the United Kingdom[END_REF]). According to [START_REF] Niemi | Civic Education: What Makes Students Learn[END_REF] and [START_REF] Niemi | Enrollments in high school government classes: are we short-changing both citizenship and political science training?[END_REF], the interest of people with higher education level differs from those with less education. They added that people with more education have a pronounced allegiance to the political system and to affirm this allegiance vote participation is crucial. In the same context, Nesbitt-Larking (1992) showed that for the case of the United States, people with a college degree are twice more likely to vote than people with only a grammar school degree or less. We have tried to test this evidence for the case of the UK by controlling for the share of high school graduates who are 17-25 years old in each locality-year. In doing so, we have found that there is no significant effect of education on electorate preferences in the UK (Table 2), inconsistently with the results for other countries like the United States. This may be attributed to the fact that Britain has a socialist party with mechanism to mobilize the vote of working class, compensating thus for low education levels (Nesbitt-Larking 1992). But what is important from our results is that the impact of terrorism on the preferences of the electorate is fairly robust to the inclusion of these variables. Specifically, we confirm that terror fatalities exert a positive influence on the voting behavior favoring therefore the rightwing party, especially within one month of terror incident (Table 2, Equations ( 10), ( 11) and ( 12)). Furthermore, we have re-examined the correlation between terrorism and electorate's preferences while replacing the uncertainty surrounding the Brexit vote by other proxies (twitter search). In addition to Twitter, we have used another indicator which is the British Volatility Index (BVIX). The interest here is to use a more appropriate index that reflects more adequately the Brexit fears. It must be stressed at this stage that the volatility index is a sentiment indicator that allows determining when there is too much optimism or great anxiety in the market. Also, we should point out that VIX responds sensitively to all events (reflecting both economic and geopolitical issues) that may cause uncertainty, and the Brexit is no exception. Our results displayed in Table 3 confirm that the great anxiety over Brexit is linked to a drop of the support for the right-wing party and then towards "hard Brexit". Our findings also indicate sharp distinguishability among Googlers (Table 1, Equations ( 1), ( 2) and ( 3)),

Twitter users (Table 3, Equations ( 13), ( 14), ( 15)) and volatility traders (Table 5, Equations ( 16), ( 17), ( 18)). Despite considerable support for the claim that computing indicators of the public's sentiment from large-scale online data may be useful and meaningful to reflect public sentiment and mood and to predict a variety of phenomena, the British VIX index can explain better the voting behavior, since it may reflect more largely the existing news and even the hidden information driving the British market [START_REF] Mao | Predicting Financial Markets: Comparing Survey, News, Twitter and Search Engine Data[END_REF]).

Control for the Muslim proportion in total population

Due to the surge of Islamophobia in Britain, it is important to assess the Muslim participation in the last UK elections. In general, the relationship between the left wing party (in particular, the Labour party) and Muslim communities in the UK has always been very

strong. The majority of Muslims who are members of political parties are likely to be related to the Labour party. 19), ( 20) and ( 21)) indicate that localities with more pronounced percentage of Muslims are less likely to increase their support for the right bloc of parties in the onset of a terror attack. These results can be a reflect of the lack of trust between the rightist government and Muslim community in Britain. Notably, the British Muslim community was alienated by the main political parties over the last elections. Several analysts asserted that holding the general elections during Ramadan implies that there could be a disproportionate influence on voter turnout in constituencies with large Muslim population. In short, all the tests conducted show that the effect of terrorism on the voters' preferences documented in Table 1 is fairly robust to alternative specifications.

Endogeneity issue

A fundamental problem that emerges when trying to quantify the impact of terrorist fatalities on the voting behavior is that the estimates drawn may be biased due to the interaction between the two variables. In particular, the terror incidents may exert a significant effect on the electorate's preferences, but terrorism may also be a response to those preferences. For instance, the terrorists may choose the location of their terror incidents strategically, and that this choice may not be orthogonal to the political preferences of the localities' electorate. To avoid this concern, it seems crucial to check that even if the electorate's preferences may influence significantly the terror organizations' decision on whether or not to perpetrate a terror attack, the location of the attack is not selected as a response to the political views of the locality's electorate. The Instrumental Variables (IV) estimation methods allow consistent estimation when the explanatory variables are correlated with the error terms of a regression. The IV model asserts that the instruments affect the dependent variable only indirectly, through their correlations with the included endogenous variables. If an instrument exerts both direct and indirect effects on the dependent variable, the instrument is ineffective and it should be excluded. Nevertheless, if the considered instrumental variable affects significantly terrorism and has any influence on voting, consistent results may be obtained. For our case of study, to account for possible reverse causality between terrorism and voting behavior, we have used an IV approach that relies on the participation of Commonwealth-origin migrant voters in the elections, considering the fact that terrorism does not comply with multicultural model based on the respect of human and political rights of migrants, tolerance and diversity.

The changing size and composition of the migrant population across the UK during the past years has had potential effects on the migrant voter base. The data presented in Table A The Commonwealth migrants and the UK citizens have a shared history, cultural links, common legal systems, business practices and much more. Commonwealth citizens who reside in Britain have held such voting rights for nearly seventy years. These rights were first granted in the British Nationality Act 1948 and have been retained through all subsequent rounds of reform to British citizenship rules. Add to this that rates of citizenship acquisition by Commonwealth migrants are higher.

This implies that wide majority of Commonwealth migrants participating in British elections will do so as naturalized British citizens [START_REF] Vertovec | The Emergence of Super-diversity in Britain, Working Paper no 25 for the Centre on Migration[END_REF]. The historical relations between Britain and the Commonwealth, and patterns of migration to Britain tracing back decades, mean that most of Britain's largest and well-established migrant communities hail from Commonwealth countries [START_REF] Spencer | British Immigration Policy since 1939. The Making of Muliti-Racial Britain[END_REF][START_REF] Vertovec | The Emergence of Super-diversity in Britain, Working Paper no 25 for the Centre on Migration[END_REF]Ford and Goodwin 2014). The steady rise in population size among key Commonwealth communities in the UK has thus been accompanied by an increase in their effect within the UK general elections. From 1949, the word "British" was omitted from the Commonwealth name. The latter was symbolic of the abandonment of British ambitions of dominance in favour of equal rights for all members of the Commonwealth. This highlights the role of the development of the multicultural model and the advancement of human rights for the integration of immigrants from the former British Empire [START_REF] Lee | Colonial Development and Good Government. A study of the ideas expressed by the British official classes in planning decolonization 1939-1964[END_REF]). It must be stressed at this stage that the Commonwealth immigrants have less of a problem with culture shock than other arriving immigrants, as they share a common history, language, and culture. In other words, the Commonwealth-origin migrants had been educated in the language and values Britain. They were therefore not foreign to British ways and values. Violent extremists generally do not comply with this model (Heggins 1997;[START_REF] Marks | International Human Rights Lexicon[END_REF]Ford and Goodwin 2014). Whatever their ideology, these groups glorify the supremacy of a particular group, whether based on religion, race, citizenship, class or conviction, and oppose the idea of open and inclusive society. In brief, the idea here is that combating and ultimately overcoming terrorism will not succeed if the means to secure that society are not consistent with human rights standards. Interestingly, a huge body of literature has focused on the differences in the orientation of the European colonial powers and have shown that the identity of the colonizing nation explains the variation in postcolonial development (for example, [START_REF] Grier | Colonial Legacies and Economic Growth[END_REF][START_REF] Bertocchi | Did Colonization Matter for Growth? An Empirical Exploration into the Historical Causes of Africa's Underdevelopment[END_REF] and democratic survival (for instance, [START_REF] Bernhard | The Legacy of Western Overseas Colonialism on Democratic Survival[END_REF]). While British, French and Spanish colonialism mainly aimed at reversing the fortunes of precolonial regions, they did so in dissimilar ways [START_REF] Lange | Colonialism and Development: A Comparative Analysis of Spanish and British Colonies[END_REF]. The British attempted to utilize indirect rule and respected the traditional customs and leaders, whereas the French and the Spanish tried to use assimilation policies that never had such features, i.e., with the purpose to destroy traditional cultural identities. Unlike areas that were colonized by France and Spain, countries that were highly colonized by Britain saw the introduction of substantial liberal institutions that tend to be characterized by tolerance and pluralism. The British colonialism ensured a rule of law and effective administration showing respect for customs and traditions. Certainly, the single rationale of colonies was to serve the interests of the mother country. Throughout this study, we have hypothesized that there are differences between the colonizing countries. In our opinion, this difference may explain the behavior of the colonized countries in their relationship with the former colonial powers. Indeed, the relations between the old-style colonized and the colonizers can be appeased, strengthening today's cooperation. Regardless of several years after independence, these relations can be vivid and often complicated. Hence the potential impact on migration. The latter is a vestige of the colonial dispute not yet settled.

The migrant, like the colonized, carries within it its history, a system of values and two-sided and contradictory references. In this sense, the situation of the migrant is reminiscent of that of the colonized. According to [START_REF] Sayad | L'immigration ou les paradoxes de l'altérité[END_REF], migration is a kind of colonization that survives.

With a double-faced reference system (country of origin, host country), the migration experience can prompt contradictory results. Indeed, migrants from former colonial countries can in some cases easily integrate into the host country because they eventually mastered the customs, and are predisposed to integrate into their new country. In other cases, their integration seems more difficult because of the negative attitudes (hatred) they may have towards their host country, because they considered that their economic difficulties come from countries that formerly were colonizers. This may partly explain, and only partially, and in extreme cases why people resort to terrorism. continue to be strongest and enduring (Roberston and Singleton 2000).

In doing so, we confirm that the occurrence of terror attack before the elections play a significant role on the voting behavior and then on the election outcomes (Table 5, Equations ( 22), ( 23), ( 24), ( 25), ( 26) and ( 27)). Using different diagnostic tests, we show that the migrants from the Commonwealth may be considered as a valid instrument for terrorism3 . We initially conduct the Sargan-Hansen J-statistic test to verify the validity of our instrument.

Conclusions

Since 1970, the United Kingdom has been suffering from terrorism. Terrorism has cost the country dearly in many respects, and has been declared the most important problem posing a significant threat to the state both by politicians, and by the public on several occasions. There have been different causes of terrorism in the UK. Before the 2000s, most terrorist incidents were related to the Northern Ireland conflict. In the late 20th century there were terror attacks by Middle Eastern terrorist groups, most of which were linked to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Since the 2000s, all the terror attacks in Britain were linked to Islamic extremism. In addition to the casualties and physical destruction directly resulting from their attacks, terrorists seek to inflict substantially psychological, social, political, economic damage upon the societies they target. Our study focuses on the political domain. It empirically analyzes the effects of terrorism on the electoral choices of the British voters in the 2017 elections. To our best knowledge, this study is a first in many ways. The study contributes to the existing literature on the determinants of voting behavior in UK. It is the first essay at measuring the political impacts of terrorism in UK. This is a significant contribution considering that terrorism has been declared as one of the most important problems facing the country, both by candidates and voters over 2017 elections. This analysis performs a designed econometric framework allowing analyzing the effect of terrorism on the electorate's preferences across time and location. Another contribution of this study relies on addressing possible endogeneity bias by using the Commonwealth migrant voters as an instrument for terrorism. The idea here is to account for the role that may play the British colonialism heavily characterized by the respect of customs, traditions, culture and laws in the war on terror [START_REF] Higgins | The general international law of terrorism[END_REF][START_REF] Marks | International Human Rights Lexicon[END_REF]. In doing so, we show that terrorism exerts a positive and significant effect on voting behavior. In this setup, a terrorist incident brings information to the electorate; that is, terror attacks tend to persuade the electorate that the moderate faction seems unable to effectively deal with terrorism and security concern and hence cannot be trusted. Indeed, our results reveal that terror fatalities lead to a rise on the support for the right bloc. This finding substantiates the hypothesis that democracies are highly susceptible to be targeted by terror organizations. In this way, the United Kingdom and more generally democratic governments should consider the political implications of terrorism that we uncover throughout this research when they implement counter-terrorism policies. Normally, the conduct of counter-terrorism policies is accompanied by a rise on the salience of terrorism, partially attributed to public declarations made by policy makers. We also show that more is the Muslims proportion in total population, less is the support for the right-wing party.

Last but not least, the results reveal that Brexit decides the elections outcome rather than concerns about terrorism and security. This result seems highly expected. As much as Brexit event revolves around tangible economic consequences, it is also heavily linked to an increased national sentiment among the British people. A year has passed after the announcement of the UK's EU membership referendum and the details of exit and its economic repercussions remain unknown to the British people, thus their increased suspicions and concerns.

  FigureA.3 (Appendix). Thereafter, we have determined for each locality its mean relative support for the right bloc of parties (we focus here on conservatives' party) over the last parliamentary elections at issue. This measure offers information about the localities' electorate preferences. The map in Figure A.4 describes the distribution of the localities'

Figure A. 1 .

 1 Figure A.1. Victims of terror attacks (persons killed) in Western Union 1970-2015 Source: Global Terrorism Database.

Figure A. 2 .

 2 Figure A.2. The UK's changing terror threat level from 2005 to 2017

Figure A. 4 .

 4 Figure A. 4. The geographical distribution of the localities' support for the different political parties in Britain Source: Electoral commission.

Figure A. 5 .

 5 Figure A.5. Manchester elections results Labour: 63.41%; Conservative: 22.73%

  Notes: The data excludes the UK-born children of migrants (the proportion of under-18s in the general population -about 22%), who are not classified as migrants in the official statistics and are thus not taken into account as part of the migrant voter population throughout this analysis.

Table 1 .

 1 The effect of terror fatalities on electoral preferences (Right bloc share) using different time spans to measure locality's terror level

	(1)	(2)	(3)

Notes: Each column reports the estimated coefficients of an Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model in which the dependent variable is the relative support for the right bloc (conservative) of parties. Robust tstatistics (adjusted for clustering at the locality level) are in parentheses.

Table 2 .

 2 The effect of terror fatalities on electoral preferences (Right bloc share) after including further control variables

		(4)	(5)	(6)	(7)	(8)	(9)	(10)	(11)	(12)
	Locality's terror level within
	one month of the elections	0.0411***			0.03215**			0.02861*
		(3.9124)			(2.4567)			(1.9355)
	three months of the elections		0.0192***			0.02456**			0.01308*
			(3.6124)			(2.6029)			(1.8769)
	one year of the elections			0.011672**			0.01368*			0.0046**
				(2.8134)			(1.9654)			(2.3861)
	Total terror fatalities	0.01092**	0.01045*	0.01015**	0.01019**	0.01045*	0.01015**	0.0124*	0.0098*	0.01131*
		(2.3891)	(1.9762)	(2.43561)	(2.5634)	(1.9762)	(2.43561)	(1.7128)	(1.8655)	(1.7692)
	Total population	-0.00871	-0.0096**	-0.0084*	-0.01034*	-0.01106*	-0.0101**	-0.01034*	-0.01106*	-0.01015**
		(-1.1158)	(-2.4983)	(-1.9436)	(-1.8324)	(-1.7693)	(-2.5326)	(-1.8324)	(-1.7693)	(-2.4056)
	GDP per capita	-0.0071**	-0.00855*	-0.00866**
		(-2.6193)	(-1.9643)	(-2.5928)
	Wage
					-0.01668*	-0.01654*	-0.01573*
	Education				(-1.8732)	(-1.95432)	(-1.77321)	0.05214	0.03456	0.026571
								(1.2368)	(1.3782)	(1.4765)
	Distance to home base	-0.00100*	-0.00087*	-0.00063*	-0.00042*	-0.00049*	-0.0003**	-0.0032**	-0.0028*	-0.0021*
		(-1.6999)	(-1.7541)	(-1.8054)	(-1.7652)	(-1.8041)	(-2.3145)	(-2.5075)	(-1.9235)	(-1.769)
	International border	-0.0233**	-0.0231**	-0.02456**	-0.04693*	-0.04128*	-0.03628*	-0.07113*	-0.06821*	-0.07214*
		(-2.3456)	(-2.5539)	(-2.4097)	(-1.9542)	(-1.9163)	(-1.8745)	(-1.7715)	(-1.8954)	(-1.7658)
	Attention to Brexit	-0.091***	-0.1153*	-0.11678**	-0.1195**	-0.1153*	-0.1167**	-0.12142*	-0.11462*	-0.11345**
		(-3.1789)	(-1.9246)	(-2.8134)	(-2.7183)	(-1.9246)	(-2.8134)	(-1.9013)	(-1.7385)	(-2.5110)
	Net migration as a percentage	0.01256	0.00853	0.00817	0.00131*	0.00221*	0.00186**	0.01345	0.0361	0.00121*
	of voters	(1.0875)	(1.2210)	(1.0095)	(1.9564)	(1.8356)	(2.4394)	(1.4246)	(1.4368)	(1.7732)
	R 2	0.81	0.80	0.80	0.86	0.82	0.80	0.89	0.87	0.88

Notes: Each column reports the estimated coefficients of an Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model in which the dependent variable is the relative support for the right bloc (conservative) of parties. Robust t -statistics (adjusted for clustering at the locality level) are in parentheses.

Table 3 .

 3 The effect of terror fatalities on electoral preferences (Right bloc share) after including other Brexit proxies Each column reports the estimated coefficients of an Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model in which the dependent variable is the relative support for the right bloc (conservative) of parties. Robust t -statistics (adjusted for clustering at the locality level) are in parentheses.

		(13)	(14)	(15)	(16)	(17)	(18)
	Locality's terror level within
	one month of the elections	0.03456*			0.041562*
		(1.87652)			(1.8754)
	three months of the elections		0.01532**			0.01269**
			(2.4578)			(1.9143)
	one year of the elections			0.011232**			0.02131**
				(2.3418)			(2.4193)
	Total terror fatalities	0.01125**	0.01452**	0.01239*	0.00982*	0.00913*	0.00981**
		(2.8314)	(2.8132)	(1.8854)	(1.7145)	(1.7735)	(2.2456)
	Total population	-0.00923*	-0.01045*	-0.01092**	-0.01034*	-0.01106*	-0.01157*
		(-1.7653)	(-1.9123)	(-2.5098)	(-1.8324)	(-1.7693)	(-1.9432)
	Regional capital	-0.0415**	-0.03246*	-0.01135***	-0.01157*	-0.0196**	-0.19884*
		(-2.5421)	(-1.9432)	(-3.4672)	(-1.8832)	(-2.3892)	(-1.9145)
	Distance to home base	-0.0009*	-0.0018**	-0.001246*	-0.001***	-0.0013**	-0.00116**
		(-1.8934)	(-2.9235)	(-1.8124)	(-3.8762)	(-2.6144)	(-2.6134)
	International border	-0.0651**	-0.0432**	-0.04157*	-0.04167*	-0.0513**	-0.04981*
		(-2.4789)	(-2.3144)	(-1.9123)	(-1.8011)	(-2.4419)	(-1.9473)
	Attention to Brexit (Twitter)	-0.09978*	-0.0812**	-0.06235**
		(-1.7695)	(-2.6511)	(-2.4122)
	Attention to Brexit (BVIX)				-0.1098**	-0.1013**	-0.10621**
					(-2.7410)	(-2.3946)	(-2.7189)
	Net migration as a percentage of	0.15689	0.10152	0.09324	-0.05124	0.0361	0.02456
	voters	(1.1768)	(1.2861)	(1.6513)	(-1.3986)	(1.4368)	(1.6189)
	R 2	0.85	0.81	0.83	0.79	0.77	0.81

Table 4 (

 4 The major parties often attempt to appeal to a Muslim electorate via their policies and candidates. Nonetheless, the Muslim vote is inaccurate with respect a homogenous voting bloc. British Muslim voters are always split depending to various cleavages whether regarding family ties, theological affiliations or other kinds of socioeconomic cleavages that separate Muslim voters (Timothy 2012). The results displayed in Equations (

Table 4 .

 4 The effect of terror fatalities on electoral preferences (Right bloc share) after excluding Muslims from the total population Notes: the dependent variable is the relative support for the right bloc (conservative) of parties. Robust t -statistics (adjusted for clustering at the locality level) are in parentheses. Robust t -statistics (adjusted for clustering at the locality level) are in parentheses.

	(19)	(20)	(21)

  .2 (Appendix) presents the major migrant communities in UK based on the size of the eligible electorate from each country. It indicates that although migrant voters in the UK originate from a large range of countries across the world, those born in the Commonwealth are the most dominant. Indeed, five of the top six countries from which migrant voters in UK general elections originate are all Commonwealth members: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, andSouth Africa (in this order). We should mention that the number of migrants voters from these Commonwealth countries increased sharply in the year 2016/2017 (see TableA.3, Appendix).

  For empirical purpose, we have used a dummy variable each locality in the study to code whether (scored 1) or not (scored 0) the migrants are from the Commonwealth. With this coding, a positively Information on the immigrant population by country of origin is obtained from the Population Censuses and from various issues of the Control of Immigration Statistics published by the U.K government. To be more effective in our analysis, we have replaced the dummy variable that account for the whole Commonwealth by a dummy variable that considers the old Commonwealth which was formed in 1931 when the Statute of Westminster gave legal recognition to the sovereignty of dominions. This dummy variable takes the value 1 if the electorate is a migrant from the original Commonwealth members Canada and New Zealand have many common interests and a longest shared history. Compared to the rest of Commonwealth states, the alliances between the UK and the old Commonwealth members in several areas had been and

	including	the United	Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New	Zealand, South	Africa
	and Newfoundland. Britain, Australia,

  Bycarrying out this test, the joint null hypothesis is not rejected for almost all cases. Then, we have performed a test suggested byStock and Yogo (2005) to identify if there exist a problem of weak instruments 4 . According to Chit et al. (2010), if the instruments appear weak, the IV estimators would be biased. To verify this evidence, we have applied Cragg-Donald Fstatistic test5. For all the considered cases, we show that migrants from Commonwealth (both cases; whole Commonwealth and old commonwealth) is an effective instrument for terrorism.

Table 5 .

 5 The effect of terror fatalities on electoral preferences (Right bloc share) after controlling for endogeneity bias Each column reports the estimated coefficients of 2SLS regression model in which the dependent variable is the relative support for the right bloc (conservative) of parties. Robust t-statistics (adjusted for clustering at the locality level) are in parentheses; Statistics are robust to heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation. Cragg-Donald F-statistic tests for weak identification. Critical values are for CraggDonald F statistic and i.i.d. errors. Ten per cent and 15 per cent critical value of Stock-Yogo weak idetification test are 17.02 and 13.85, respectively; [.]: p-value.

		Instrument 1: migrants from the whole	Instrument 2: migrants from the old
			Commonwealth			Commonwealth
		(22)	(23)	(24)	(25)	(26)	(27)
	Locality's terror level within
	one month of the elections	0.04110**			0.0367***
		(2.8193)			(3.459)
	three months of the elections		0.02867*			0.0191**
			(1.9873)			(2.910)
	one year of the elections			0.01245*			0.0008***
				(1.9435)			(3.156)
	Total population	-0.00452*	-0.005**	-0.0049**	-0.0213**	-0.0208**	-0.0185***
		(-1.8765)	(-2.7206)	(-2.5018)	(-2.5062)	(-2.8146)	(-3.4691)
	Total terror fatalities	0.0018**	0.0021**	0.0019**	0.0093*	0.0141**	0.0108*
		(2.7651)	(2.668)	(2.7145)	(1.881)	(2.553)	(1.945)
	Regional capital	0.00813**	0.00815*	0.00832*	0.0065**	0.0089**	0.0101**
		(2.6914)	(1.8965)	(1.8845)	(2.337)	(3.106)	(2.465)
	Distance to home base	-0.00315*	-0.00306*	-0.00289**	-0.0019*	-0.0024*	-0.0021*
		(-1.9324)	(-1.9144)	(-2.3465)	(-1.745)	(-1.819)	(-1.769)
	International border	-0.0415*	-0.0493**	-0.0532*	-0.0613**	-0.059***	-0.0491***
		(-1.8345)	(-2.1259)	(-1.9876)	(-2.587)	(-3.346)	(-3.124)
	Attention to Brexit	-0.10113*	-0.10192*	-0.0965**	-0.0942*	-0.1061*	-0.1028*
		(-1.8145)	(-1.9876)	(-2.2976)	(-1.739)	(-1.954)	(-2.143)
	Net migration as a percentage of	-0.01177	0.01345	0.01568	0.00161*	0.0442	0.0497
	voters	(-0.8769)	(1.0922)	(1.0000)	(1.815)	(1.349)	(1.300)
	Cragg Donald test	27.56	24.55	23.61	23.45	21.96	21.89
	J-statistic test	0.0445	0.0391	0.0683	0.0932	0.0.0523	0.0879
		[.1394]	[.1541]	[.2134]	[.1645]	[.1358]	[.1986]
	Notes:

Table A

 A

.1. Data sources

Table A

 A : Source: the Office of National Statistics; the data excludes the UK-born children of migrants (the proportion of under-18s in the general population -about 22%), who are not classified as migrants in the official statistics and are thus not taken into account as part of the migrant voter population throughout this analysis.

	Nigeria	Africa	191000	5,89%
	Pakistan	Asia	482000	14,87%
	Papua New Guinea	Australia	27053	0,83%
	Rwanda	Africa	3895	0,12%
	Saint Kitts and Nevis Caribbean	2734	0,084%
	Saint Lucia	Caribbean	4163	0,13%
	Saint Vincent and	Caribbean	3037	0,093%
	the Grenadines
	Samoa	Oceania	8691	0,26%
	Seychelles	Africa	288	0%
	Sierra Leone	Africa	9475	0,29%
	Singapore	Asia	101522	3,13%
	Solomon Islands	Oceania	14553	0,45%
	South Africa	Africa	191000	5,89%
	Sri Lanka	Asia	118000	2,45%
	Swaziland	Africa	288	0%
	Tanzania	Africa	3216	0,099%
	Tongo	Oceania	3037	0,094%
	Trinidad and Tobago Caribbean	12152	0,37%
	Tuvalu	Oceania	1086	0,033%
	Uganda	Africa	15107	0,46%
	Vanuatu	Oceania	768	0,024%
	Zambia	Africa	7995	0,25%

.3. The distribution of Commonwealth migrants to UK by country of birth 2016/2017 Notes

For more details, FigureA.2 (Appendix) shows the history of the U.K.'s threat level since the warning system was first introduced in

to the last Bridge attack in June 3, 2017.2 The Commonwealth of nations is an intergovernmental organization of 52 member states that are mostly former territories of the British Empire, including (1) 16 members of the Commonwealth with Queen Elisabeth II as the Head of State, known as "Commonwealth realms", and (2) 31 republics with distinct heads of state and (3) five monarchies with a dissimilar monarch.

The joint null hypothesis of the test is that the concerned instrument is valid when it is uncorrelated with the error term and when the instrument is correctly excluded from the regressions.

If this F-statistic value is greater than the critical value provided byStock and Yogo (2005), the null hypothesis of weak instruments can be rejected.

Variables Sources

The A dummy variable that takes the value 1 for localities that have an international border.

Socio-economic indicators

The attention to Brexit Google Trends (http://trends.google.com)


Claire Sorin

Anatomy of the Female Angel or Science at the Service of Woman in

Woman and Her Era by Eliza Farnham

Claire Sorin, LERMA

In January 1864, at Staten Island, a forty-eight year old woman suffering from consumption was writing the preface of what she considered her great work. Eliza Farnham was about to publish a 784 page-long book entitled Woman and her Era and wholly devoted to the one "Truth" which had dawned on her two decades earlier: this one truth was "THE SUPERIORITY OF WOMAN", a phrase she liked to write in capital letters.

Eliza W. Farnham has almost fallen into oblivion but she was fairly well-known in her own time. She was one of those active, passionate nineteenth-century reformers who sincerely believed they could make the world a better place. In the early 1840's, she embraced provoking prison reforms while she served as matron at the women's division of Sing Sing prison. Then, during the Gold Rush, she tried to organize the migration of unmarried women to San Francisco in order to introduce order and stability in the brutal, masculine world of mining towns. Her plan failed but she moved to California, built a farm in Santa Cruz, and subsequently crossed the continent several times. She became a regular contributor to the California Farmer and delivered a series of public lectures on a great variety of subjects including philosophy, history, spiritualism and phrenology. Although she had received very little formal education, Eliza was an avid, self-taught intellectual who published two successful books on her pioneer years in Illinois and California, as well as a popular autobiographical novel. 1 Lecturing and writing provided Eliza's only livelihood for she could not count on a husband's support. Indeed, by 1856, she had lost her first spouse, divorced a second one prone to whisky and violence and three of her four children had died. As a staunch abolitionist, she volunteered to nurse the wounded soldiers at Gettysburg in July 1863 but she contracted a disease on the field and died in December 1864. However, during the last year of her life, she found the energy to publish Woman and her Era and write a novel illustrating her vision of manhood and womanhood. interest lay in Woman's nature and mission which Woman and her Era exposed in great detail. Although fed by personal experience, her work was clearly conceived as a scientific demonstration of woman's superiority. That superiority, Farnham claimed, was primarily inscribed in the female body. In the first part of her book, which is about 120 pages long, she uses all the scientific knowledge available in her age and boldly proposes to prove that woman's position in the scale of life is the highest one, second to God's. Thus, her work can be read as an attempt to use science at the service of Woman. This is a somewhat extraordinary enterprise since most scientific discourses in the nineteenth century tended to belittle the female body and demonstrate its innate inferiority. Although Farnham's scientific arguments and logical reasoning are not always convincing, she clearly perceived the paradox which struck Victorian women and she turned it to her own advantage. The nineteenth century, indeed, promoted the cult of True Womanhood, idealized the Home, glorified the "Angel in the House" and readily accepted woman's moral superiority. However, it also treated women as intellectual inferiors seriously handicapped by complex reproductive organs. In a way, Eliza Farnham proposed to eliminate that paradoxical response to woman by exposing the glorious anatomy of the female angel.

All this was not done out of love for science, however, but for Humanity for Farnham's bold and simple goal was to "speed the day of Woman's Illumination" (viii) and herald "Woman's Era". Only Woman, she believed, could save the human race and improve it. This vision, which has been called "apocalyptic feminism", was both, as we shall see, profoundly revolutionary and conservative. 3 The purpose of this paper is to examine the part that science plays in Eliza Farnham's project, first as an epistemological object giving legitimacy to her demonstration, and second as a subject providing convincing evidence. This will lead us to raise a certain number of questions: how does Farnham consider science and scientists? How does she position her own voice? How does she reject, adopt or adapt the contemporary scientific discourses on the female body? And finally, how does her vision of female physiology shape her view of male bodies and of men's roles? 3 The phrase "apocalyptic feminism" is used by Elizabeth K. Helsinger to refer to a belief in "a female saviour leading the way to a fuller humanity and ushering in a new era of community and love. This vision of woman's unique role (…) attracted both eccentrics like Eliza Farnham and, to a certain extent, even staunch conservatives like Sara Josepha Hale (...) For some, like Farnham, it amounted to an absolute claim for female superiority; for others, like Margaret Fuller, a temporary claim for woman's special role within an overall vision of human equality". Helsinger notes that although this view was held by a minority, it helped promote the reforms related to temperance, sexual purity, prisons and corruption which marked the late nineteenth century. The Woman Question, XV.

The ambiguous place of science in Woman and her Era

The two volumes of Woman and her Era examine a wide variety of arguments in order to prove the superiority of Woman. Thus, volume 1 has chapters dealing with religion, art, history, popular sentiment and common observation. Similarly, volume 2 includes a comparative study of the "affectional qualities" of the sexes, a part on "Woman in the Kingdom of Uses" and a final chapter entitled "Era of the Feminine". As its title indicates, the book reads as a prophecy in which Farnham heralds a forthcoming age ruled by purity, democracy, love and persuasion.

Farnham's prophecy, however, is deeply anchored in its own time and in the spirit of reforms that pervaded the nineteenth century:

This is an age of Revolutions. It has been well said, that History is re-written in the light of Modern science. It is equally true that human nature, with its relations, the fountain and source of History, is to be reread in the light of the wondrous revelations which this Nineteenth Century is making in its hitherto hidden parts. ( 149)

Woman and her Era proposes a radical re-writing of human nature, which accounts for the fact that the "Organic Argument" is the first one to be examined. By grounding woman's specificity in her very physiology, Farnham said she intended to reveal Nature's plan and natural laws are repeatedly invoked as the irrefutable proof of woman's superiority.

Although it was published five years after Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, Farnham's conception of nature is heavily shaped by natural theology and romanticism. Like many middle-class popularizers of Victorian science, she praised "the divine qualities of the natural world" and believed in a teleological frame (Lightman,188). Even though her demonstration of woman's superiority is also shaped and inspired by evolutionary thought, nature is clearly conceived as a product of God's will. Writing in a post Darwinian context of increased tensions between religion and science, Farnham seeks to reconcile both fields:

(…) organization, the primitive language of Deity in the world of life, and the sole proof touching it which science can recognize, will be no more studied as an end, but as a means, employed by the Creator for the development of higher purposes than can be expressed in gross matter; and when this takes place, the methods of the scientists and spiritualists will be at one. (22)(23) Although she clearly differentiates herself from a professional scientist, Farnham stages herself as a widely-read woman, able to summarize, explain and simplify complex theories to a lay audience. Thus, the text has a polyvocal quality, blending technical passages with biblical metaphors and sentimental poems with scientific descriptions. 4 In order to enhance her credibility, Farnham includes lengthy quotes from the respected scientists of her day, such as the English naturalist William B. Carpenter or the German physiologist Ernst Karl Van Baer, or the American scientist John William Draper. She shows special respect for those men for they are specialists in physiology which she considers as a young and promising discipline, able to shed light on the mysterious connections between the body and the soul (14-15).

On the whole, Woman and her Era reflects the "heady optimism about the powers and achievements of scientific inquiry" that characterized the mid nineteenth century (Winter,25).

However, it is striking to notice that Farnham's relation to science and to scientists is fundamentally ambiguous: indeed, on the one hand, she uses biology as a clincher but on the other hand, she dismisses contemporary science as a limited and materialistic discipline. Sex differences, rather than religious piety, explain this ambivalence. Indeed, science is clearly presented as a masculine discipline, exercised and expanded by male observers. Borrowing the familiar dichotomy of separate spheres, Farnham acknowledges that man is endowed with reason and woman with intuition, but ultimately, it is feminine intuition that she values and she introduces the notion of an intuitive science with which woman is gifted. In the third chapter of the second volume, she explains than men and women have different methods towards Truth. Man, for whom Truth is external, uses the inductive approach, relying on his intellect and observation in slow, laborious demonstrations; he is on the human side and limited by the boundaries of the experimental. By contrast, woman, who has internalized Truth and is already "in the sacred presence", adopts the deductive method, not for proof but for pleasure of acquaintance with details; she is close to the divine and the Ideal is her kingdom (vol.2, 185-187). Farnham's enterprise mixes both approaches, which accounts for the tautological flavour of her arguments. Indeed, in her attempt to provide the scientific demonstration of an age-old "intuitive Truth" (woman's superiority), she considers superiority both as a postulate and a theorem.

It is interesting to note that among all the scientific disciplines that Farnham mentions, it is phrenology that she considers the most reliable. Phrenology, at the time she was writing, was losing credibility, but it had enjoyed a wide popularity in the first half of the nineteenth century. Well-read in phrenology herself 5 , she claimed that it offered a complete science of humanity "organic, spiritual and social" and that it reconciled the body and the mind (15). Phrenology in itself did not claim that women were superior, it even confirmed that they had a weaker intellect; however, it was an embodied philosophy favourable to women since it stated that the individual's constitution was determined yet improvable (Russett,(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22). Thus, phrenology offered Farnham the most congenial approach to her enterprise. Although her book is not fraught with phrenological theories, her avowed adhesion to this increasingly criticized discipline probably enabled her to indirectly challenge and transcend the malemanaged realm of orthodox science.

Although paying respect to established science, Eliza Farnham's voice is deeply subversive and doubtful. Her deification of woman, which indirectly leads to a feminisation of the divine, confines man and science to a materialistic universe. The ambiguous role attributed to science and scientists in Woman and her Era ultimately confirms that "science continued to be contested territory in the latter half of the nineteenth century" (Lightman,205).

Revisiting biology or a bio-mystical reading of the female body.

In her attempt to ground woman's superiority in the female body, Eliza Farnham had to twist and adapt the contemporary medical and scientific discourses on that subject. Medical literature on the female sex was abundant in the nineteenth century and debates about women's physiological, intellectual and developmental capacities characterized the period.

In the feverish atmosphere of the health movement and the rising medical specialties, phrenologists, physiologists, gynaecologists and craniologists had all something to say about the inside and the outside of women's bodies.

Most of the time, the conclusions underlined woman's physical fragility and intellectual inferiority. The brain and the womb were widely considered as the two major weak points which prohibited total equality with men. With a generous amount of sophisticated measures, craniologists had concluded that the female brain was smaller, lighter and less effective than the male's (Russett,(34)(35)(36). As for the womb and ovaries, they were featured as pathological organs which often handicapped their possessors. Women were warned against the dangers of menstruation and menopause which could easily impair not only their bodies but also their minds. Indeed, most nineteenth-century doctors firmly believed that the reproductive organs were connected to the nervous system and that menstruating, pregnant and post-menopausal women were naturally more prone to a wide variety of nervous troubles ranging from simple fancies to downright insanity or hysteria (12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27).

In a century fascinated by the origin and the development of human races, the place of women on the life scale was also given much notice. Most anthropologists defined women as inferior on the evolutionary ladder and compared them to children or to Blacks (Russett,11).

Much of the scientific discourse had social implications since the biological and intellectual inferiority of the female sex was invoked to exclude middle and upper-class women from the public sphere: woman's place, Nature dictated, was in the Home which represented a necessary balance to man's active and competitive sphere. The apologists of the separate sphere theory heavily insisted on the sexes' different but complementary qualities and the global distribution of sex roles ultimately reflected an egalitarian ideal, a sort of separate but equal rhetoric which supposedly led to social harmony.

In this gender configuration of social roles, woman was given a positive, regenerative function which took a particular dimension in the millenarian atmosphere characterizing the nineteenth century, and which different reformers defended. For example, Sarah Hale, editor of Godey's Lady's Magazine, predicted that: "the moral power in which [women] excel, is yet to rule the world. The empire of physical strength, in which lay man's superiority is (...) wearing out (…) the reign of brute force is now over, and that of intellect and feeling is at hand." 6Where did Eliza Farnham stand in that picture? It is clear that she promoted separate spheres but she did not believe in the relative equality of each sphere. In fact, she pushed the theory of separate spheres to its utmost logic and her radical belief in woman's superiority cast man in a lesser, menial role: that of sheer material provider. Farnham acknowledged woman's dependence but as a master would acknowledge his need for a servant. Like Sarah Hale, she strongly promoted woman's identification with the Home but, more actively than anyone, she pushed its limits to embrace the Heavens and the whole human race. As for the medical and scientific discourses on the female body, she accepted most of their technical content but rejected their conclusions. Indeed, Farnham's examination of the inside and the outside of the female body accepts the assumption that woman is physically weaker than man and that she is a "nervous", suffering creature endowed with complex organs. However, she twists those arguments in favor of woman. Thus, in her vision, physical weakness becomes a sign of spiritual strength, biological complexity reflects divine sophistication, suffering is part of the female redemptive mission and nerves represent fine connections between the body and the spirit.

Farnham unfolds her demonstration along three lines: first, she deals with woman's physiology, then with her nervous (cranial and extra-cranial) structure and finally she examines her place on the evolutionary scale.

Her examination of female physiology begins with this syllogism:

Life is exalted in proportion to its Organic and Functional Complexity; Woman's organism is more Complex and her totality of Function larger than those of any other being inhabiting our earth, Therefore her position in the scale of Life is the most exalted-the Sovereign one. ( 26) Her central argument is that the male body, compared to the female's, is devoid of organs, therefore of functions and powers. Thus, the womb and the breasts are considered as the sacred attributes of maternity which Farnham considers woman's "divine service" (93).

Farnham embraces the idea that the cyclical action of the womb was accompanied by a host of mental and emotional states but she places them above the masculine realm of sinful pleasure and dry intellect: "This unique function separates the Ante-maternal from the Ante-Paternal period by a world of fine susceptibilities, emotions, affections, yearnings, which transcend, as intellectual power does mere knowledge, or as moral purpose mere intellect, the limits of self-enjoyment which bound the horizon of the masculine"(42). By contrast, menstruation is "the open window of the feminine soul, affording its longest and divinest outlook beyond self and the present" (42).

The passage on menstruation, which is cloaked in Victorian euphemisms and lyrical metaphors, describes the young woman as a priestess entering a new spiritual world:

Here sweeter ardors take possession of the soul; Faith lights the inner fires that have lain unkindled through all the gay years of infancy (…) the Ideal opens its jasper doors to the yearning eye-all the mountain peaks, that were before shrouded, shine out in the newdescending light, and life is aglow with bright-it may be shifting-realities and intense hopes. (43) Farnham also considered the "periodic action" as sacred because she shared the widespread belief that women were fertile during their menses and because the suffering it could bring enhanced "courage and lofty faith" (43). Thus, we see that, contrary to many women's rights' activists, she did not reject the fatality of pain. But instead of insisting, like doctors did, on the debilitating effect of pain, she invoked the elevating power of martyrdom.

On the whole, however, menstruation is seen as a period of strength, a cyclical renewal of woman's "most occult forces" which restores nervous equilibrium and contrasts with the male logic of waste (44)(45). This conception clearly transcends the pathological approach.

It is striking to notice that her criticism of the medical discourse becomes more radical as she proceeds to expose her revolutionary vision of conception and menopause. Because she meant to persuade her readers that the female principle had the upper hand in the reproductive process, and because this view was clearly marginal at the time, she starts by doubting the reliability of current knowledge on the subject: a myriad of contradictory and confusing theories, she says, has led to a "pitiful result-O representing to-day pretty fairly, the sum of our actual knowledge of law herein" (46). Farnham was actually lucid since the exact mechanism of conception was known decades later; nonetheless, she attempted to put forth her own theory: if research has failed, she claims, it is because male scientists erroneously conceived woman as a simple medium, and not as the main creator. Farnham rejected the findings of comparative embryology by claiming that the laws governing the animal kingdom could not be applied to the higher human kingdom. Instead, she proposed to rely on the power of deduction-since woman is a superior creature, she cannot be second in the generative process-and she quotes at length a Dr Redfield whose theory is reminiscent of that of the eighteenth-century ovists. Redfield, an American phrenologist, states that the father has a minor role in the generative process since sperm is but the food of the ovum; for him (and for Farnham who speaks through him) man is disconnected from the offspring and any physical resemblance is simply due to the psychological impression that the father makes on the mother. This conception of the male semen as mere food for the embryo's development perfectly reflects Farnham's more global vision of gender roles in which man is merely a material provider.

The idealization of motherhood and the general depreciation of elderly women lead Farnham to propose a bold revision of menopause. For Farnham, menopause must not be seen as a loss but as a gain of power and of womanhood; it must be considered as a physical, psychical and ultimately mystical metamorphosis which transforms woman into the spiritual mother of humanity. Thanks to menopause, Farnham explains that woman's body can reach the ultimate "regenerative" stage (58). That menopause is a hectic and perturbed transitional phase, she does not deny, but she attributes the perturbations to the centrifugal transfer of powers from the womb to the soul. This metamorphosis, which leads to what she calls the "superior maternal system" (65), is described as a painful sequence of deaths and revivals which turns the aging woman into a Christlike figure .  and repeatedly denounces man's scornful attitude towards post-menopausal women. In fact, Farnham clearly puts forth that man's social contempt and scientific ignorance, rather than physiological processes per se, constitute the major threats for the aging woman. Claiming that "a pathological can only come through a physiological possibility" (78), she boldly assimilates men and male scientists to inferior creatures: When, therefore, men congratulate themselves as being superior to Woman because of their exemption from the suffering and disabilities peculiar to her, it is the Orang congratulating himself that he can never lose the cunning right hand which may make a watch or a telescope, and so bring the rolling heavens into the observatory (…) Superior for his position and work on the earth man undoubtedly is, in his exclusion from woman's pathological world, as, for the same reason, the fish is superior to him for swimming in the sea, the bird for the upper air (…); but superior in his position and work, no, except less be reckoned better than more, lower than higher. ( 78)

In dealing with the nervous structure of the female body, Farnham gladly adopts the widespread belief that the female reproductive organs are connected to the nervous system. Indeed, making nerves "feminine" amounts to making woman divine since nerves constitute a link with the spiritual, immaterial world.

Besides, she admits that men's skulls and brains are larger than women's but she reverses the argument by saying that more matter amounts to less spirit. In other words, man has the sad privilege of quantity while woman possesses quality: "Her brain is finer, as her other tissues are; it is more complex, as her general structure is. Through the fineness comes a higher character, in powers of the same order; (…) more penetrative reach of faculty (…) a state more receptive of illumination (…) every added convolution spreads a surface for this vestment, whose presence invites the gods (…)" (74-75). As a result, man is left with a bigger but less sophisticated brain. 7 Likewise, his body is physically stronger, "of a greater relative proportion of the osseous and fibrous tissues", whereas woman's is all nerves (81).

Man's superior muscular power is yet another sign, for Farnham, that men's stage of development is still entangled in brutish strength. On several occasions, the muscular, selfish, active man and the sexist, short-sighted male scientist are compared to animals or inferior human beings. Thus, besides the analogy with the orang we just mentioned, man is said to be "of the Bos or Equine fiber" (87) and, when she denounces the intellectual flaw of the 7 Interestingly enough, Farnham rejects the marginal theory developed by the German physiologist Friedrich Tiedemann (1781-1861) who claimed that female brains were larger. According to her, female brains are necessarily smaller because "an equal quantity of brain of the finer quality would cause the destruction instead of the development (…) of the lesser and more delicate body." Besides, she points out that the female brain is bound to develop and expand once women emancipate and occupy the place they deserve since "use is the condition of full normal volume in any organ." (75-76).

scientist who judges the female body while assuming man as the standard, she compares him to a Chinese savant or an African King unable to "see better methods than those he employs" (77). In fact, this depreciative view of the male sex reflects the main point she initially proposes to demonstrate, that "these two sexes are also two grades of development and that the female sex is the higher" (38).

Her last argument, steeped in Darwinian language, drives the point home. It deals with rudimentary organs and explains that the contrast between the undeveloped, useless male mammae and the wonderfully developed woman's breasts proves that woman has reached the highest stage of physiological development: at that point, Farnham believes that evolutionary processes no longer concern woman since woman is perfect, and why would nature want to alter perfection? For the readers who would still doubt her, she invokes the beauty of the female body as a proof of perfection: beauty, she says, is the "external sign of a spiritual nature" which needs no mask: after all, aren't these beards and hairy chests designed to conceal the imperfect body of the male whose "whole life is a game of concealments and surprises" (106-107)? However, although Farnham admires the divine perfection of the female body, she acknowledges that much progress remains to be achieved in the intellectual realm. Women, she claims, have had no opportunity to develop their intellects because they are still in a state of physical and mental oppression, subject to man's rule. For Farnham, however, women's rights activism is not the answer because the egalitarian ideal is the wrong one. The female angel, she argues, is unfit for work outside her sphere, and she takes the example of the women slaves in the South and the female workers in the North whom physical work has turned into physical and spiritual "monsters"; halfway between manhood and womanhood, those women's progeny is bound to be inferior (88). Besides, if we follow Farnham's reasoning, why would women ask for equality? It was almost as ludicrous, after all, as for man to ask for equality with the ape. Farnham's book, like Farnham herself, finally emerges as a paradox: it is at once an anti feminist and an "arch feminist" manifesto; it is also at once revolutionary and conservative. Indeed, it is probably the first ambitious assertion of woman's dominance made by an American and it heralds the gynaecocracy theory that Lester Ward developed two decades later. But at the same time, its language and assumptions take for granted the ideal of domesticity as well as a hierarchical vision of race and class, which casts a doubt as to the universality of womanhood. Indeed, although Farnham speaks to all women and announces Woman's era, it seems that the ideal, angelic creature she dreams of is essentially the white, middle-class educated woman.

Woman and her Era did not meet the success Eliza Farnham expected as the book only went through one edition and received mitigated reviews. Critic Helen Woodward points out that the temperate tone of those reviews is surprising, given the provocative assertion of female superiority (The Bold Women,341). It is possible that the conventional style and exceeding length of the book somewhat muffled the boldest appeals to women. It is also likely that the segregated pattern of gender roles promoted by Farnham ultimately comforted man's position. However, one should not underestimate the profound originality and radicalism of a work which "called upon women to exult in their ovaries, or rule the world on the basis of their breasts" (Woodward,344) and which was meant to be read as Woman's Manifest Destiny.

  2 1 Eliza W. Farnham published a fictionalized account of her youth in 1859 under the title My Early Days (republished in 1864 as Eliza Woodson;Or, the Early Days of One of the World's Workers, A Story of American Life). Her years in Illinois and California are related in Life in Prairie Land (1846) and California, In-doors and Out; Or, How we Farm, Mine and Live generally in the Golden State (1856).

2

The Ideal Attained (1865). For a biographical sketch of Eliza Farnham, see W. David Lewis's article in Notable American Women (598-600). For a more detailed biographical account, see Jo Ann Levy, Unsettling the West.

Her description of the brain, for example, includes technical terms, such as "cineritious", "medullary", "cerebrum", "cerebellum", "ganglia" (73-75). By contrast, the passages dealing with the sexual organs are cloaked in Victorian euphemisms and the chapter on the organic argument closes on Patmore's poem, "Angel in the House".

Besides giving lectures on phrenology, Farnham had applied its principles when she implemented new methods at Sing Sing prison. In 1846, she published an American edition of a treatise written by the English phrenologist Marmaduke Blake Sampson, entitled Rationale of Crime, and its Appropriate Treatment.

Quoted in Helsinger, vol.2, 200.