On the day of Bin Laden’s death, May 2, 2011, two of the options provided to survey respondents of the question “What will be the chief consequence of Osama Bin Laden’s death?” related to al Qaeda’s financing. Essentially, would the terror group’s funding rise or decline with the loss of its key leader and chief financier. Here were the results of the two options in the days immediately following Bin Laden’s death:

“al Qaeda fundraising increases substantially” - only 1 ‘Government’ voter from a total of 152 responses selected this as the chief consequence.
“al Qaeda fundraising diminishes substantially” – only 6 of 152 voters selected this option with the largest professional groups being 2 each of ‘Private Sector’ and ‘Government’ voters.

For the full results of this question from 2011, see this post.

A year after Bin Laden’s death, (May 2, 2012) 209 respondents answered this question:

“Since Usama Bin Laden’s death, has al Qaeda fundraising increased of decreased?”

Overall, almost 80% of respondents said al Qaeda’s financing had decreased in the year since Bin Laden’s death while the remaining 20% believed al Qaeda’s financing had increased in the year since Bin Laden’s death. In comparison, voters, on average, were more likely to believe al Qaeda’s funding had decreased (80%) than al Qaeda’s attacks had decreased (70%). But according to the crowd, both have declined.

The following chart shows the breakdown of votes by percentage of each professional group. Again, a note of caution, some professional groups had only a small number of respondents so the percentages may appear artificially large. Below the chart is a table which breaks out the raw vote totals by demographic group. Here’s what I found interesting about the professional groups: (See this link for full charts: http://selectedwisdom.com/?p=772)

‘Government Contractors’ were more likely than ‘Military’ voters to select “fundraising increased”.

Those that did not declare their professional background and ‘Academia’ were most likely to say that al Qaeda’s funding had decreased since Bin Laden’s death.

After examining the professional groups, I broke down the responses of each group by education level, preferred information source and residency. In the last set of results (#2), the preferred information source of respondents appeared to correlate with respondents’ interpretation of an increase or decrease in al Qaeda attacks. In these results (#3), I found the following vote breakdown to be of the most interest.

For education level, those with Doctoral degrees were more inclined than other education levels to believe that al Qaeda funding had increased since Bin Laden’s death.

The comparison of residency provided the most interesting results for comparison. Those ‘born outside the U.S.’ or currently ‘residing outside the U.S.’ were the most likely to believe al Qaeda’s funding has decreased since Bin Laden’s death. Meanwhile, those individuals that have lived cumulatively outside the U.S. and E.U. for two years or more were slightly more likely than average and twice as likely as those currently residing outside the U.S. to believe al Qaeda’s fundraising has increased in the year since Bin Laden’s death. A strange paradox that I need to spend a little more time researching, but interesting nonetheless.

Here’s the full breakdown in a table. In yellow are lines that I marked as interesting for being higher than average and in green are lines I marked as interesting for being lower than average. See this link for the charts: http://selectedwisdom.com/?p=772

For the full write up and charts, see this link: http://selectedwisdom.com/?p=772

Next results will cover which AQ affiliate receives the most funding after Bin Laden's death.