Democracy, civil liberties, and hostage-taking terrorism

Abstract

While hostage-taking has been a common form of terrorism for decades, which types of governments are more prone to it remains unclear. Does democracy motivate terrorists to engage in hostage-taking acts because of how easy negotiating with a democratic government is? Or does democracy impose 'audience costs' on the government leaders, driving them never to negotiate with hostage-taking terrorists following the long-held principle of no negotiation? This article argues that hostage-taking terrorists are more inclined to target democratic governments because of the greater value given to human life and personal freedom in democracies. Additionally the helplessness of held hostages is more freely exposed by the media in democracies, which leads to the audience focusing on the hostages themselves rather than on the interests of the nation. This in turns compels decisionmakers to concede, especially near election time. It is only when institutional constraints on the executives are high that democratic leaders refuse to make concessions. Using data on hostage events from 1978 to 2005, this article finds strong evidence that supports this theory, showing that democracy has competing effects on hostage-taking terrorism -civil liberties and press freedom are positively associated with hostage-taking incidents, whereas executive constraints have a negative association.

Globalization and terror in Africa

“…Previous terrorism literature has employed: logistic regressions (Kavanagh, 2011;Bhavani, 2011); Ordinary Least Squares (Tavares, 2004;Bravo & Dias, 2006); the multilevel Poisson model (Lee, 2013); Zero-inflated Negative and Negative Binomial regressions (Drakos & Gofas, 2006;Savun & Phillips, 2009) and Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) (Bandyopadhyay et al, 2014). The inquiry adopts the GMM strategy for four main reasons.…”

Fighting terrorism in Africa: Benchmarking policy harmonization

“…The advantage in financial development established by Beck et al (2013) has been confirmed within the frameworks educational performance and economic growth by Agbor (2015). In essence, the logic underpinning this classification is that, the institutional web of formal rules, informal norms and enforcement characteristics within a legal system influence how terrorism is fought by means of institutional regimes and government quality (Li, 2005;Choi, 2010;Lee et al, 2013). Classification of countries within this category is based on information from La Porta et al (2008, p. 289).…”

Fighting terrorism in Africa: evidence from bundling and unbundling institutions

“…From an empirical perspective, many studies have documented (Lee 2013) and established the positive nexus between democracy and transnational terrorism Weinberg 1994, 2001;Piazza 2007Piazza , 2008bWeinberg and Eubank 1998). Chenoweth (2010) has argued that good governance with democratic competition can stimulate terrorist organisations to resort to violence.…”

“…Second, whether good governance reduces or promotes terrorism is the subject of debate in the literature (Lee 2013). There is a strand which posits that fundamental features of good governance like, civil society, democratic political systems, political participation and knowledge economy, can reduce resentment toward the State and hence, mitigate the likelihood of terrorist organizations recruiting extremists (Li 2005;Windsor 2003).…”

“…African-specific literature has focused on understanding: geopolitical fluctuations (Straus 2012); poverty and lack of politico-economic freedom (Barros et al 2008); competition in military companies in the swift termination of conflicts (Akcinaroglu and Radziszewski 2013); the role of global warming (Price and Elu 2016) and exploratory studies on the African Union's role in fighting terrorism (Ewi and Aning 2006). Moreover, the literature on the role of governance on terrorism has either been skewed on the effect of democracy for the most part (see Lee 2013;Savun and Phillips 2009) or oriented toward a few specific dimensions like the rule of law (Choi 2010) and transparency (Bell et al 2014). Unfortunately, democracy (rule of law) is only an aspect of political (institutional) governance.…”