Monkey Cage reader “Peter Rosendorff”:https://files.nyu.edu/bpr1/public/ of NYU writes in with the following response to “yesterday’s post”:http://tmc.org/blog/2011/09/29/terrorism-in-democracies/ by Erica Chenoweth:
Erica Chenoweth reports on her recent research on the sources and the targets of transnational terrorism in a recent post on the Monkey Cage. She shows that terrorism occurs more frequently in democratic countries than in non-democratic countries. On this I have no objection. She claims however that:
“Additional research confirms that despite all of the concern about terrorism in weak states, democracies also remain the most frequent sources of terrorist activity.”
Brock Blomberg and I beg to differ. In a book edited by Gregory Hess, Blomberg and I have a chapter that shows that the impact of being a democracy or participating in the WTO/IMF for a source country decreases the number of terrorist strikes by about 2 to 3 per year, which is more than two standard deviations greater than the average number of strikes between any two countries in a given year.
From the abstract,
We employ a gravity model to investigate the relative importance of globalization and democratization on transnational terrorism and external conflict. We construct an original database of over 200,000 observations from 1968-2003 for 189 countries, to examine the extent to which economic, political and historical factors influence the likelihood of citizens from one country to engage in terrorist activities against another. We find that the advent of democratic institutions, high income and more openness in a source country significantly reduces conflict.
Table 1 of the chapter offers the details. The host state is the country that experiences the terrorist attack whether by location or nationality of the victims; source is the country from which the terrorists originate. Each column provides the mean number of incidents for sub-sampled decades during 1968-2003. By and across decades, democracies are indeed more likely to experience transnational terrorist attacks; but it is also the case that non-democracies are more likely to be the source countries for those attacks.
The research also investigates the effects of a country’s degree of economic or commercial integration in the world economy. OPEN is dummy variable that captures whether a country’s total trade to GDP ratio exceeds 30%. The data tell us that more open economies are less likely to export terrorism.
These results follow from the use of a gravity model (which establishes that these observed differences are statistically significant) – where the attributes of the source country, the host country, and characteristics of the dyad are all relevant for understanding the incidence of transnational terrorism events; and that analyses that exclude some or all of these variables are likely to generate results that are mis-specified.