Lock, stock, and barrel: a comprehensive assessment of the determinants of terror

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. We assess the robustness of previous findings on the determinants of terrorism. Using extreme bound analysis, the three most comprehensive terrorism datasets, and focusing on the three most commonly analyzed aspects of terrorist activity, i.e., location, victim, and perpetrator, we re-assess the effect of 65 proposed correlates. Evaluating around 13.4 million regressions, we find 18 variables to be robustly associated with the number of incidents occurring in a given country-year, 15 variables with attacks against citizens from a particular country in a given year, and six variables with attacks perpetrated by citizens of a particular country in a given year. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor mayJEL-Code: D740, F510, F520, H560, K420.

Regime Types and Terrorism

“…Strategic concerns, liberal democratic protections, and political access 5. See, for example, Gassebner and Luechinger 2011. 6.…”

“…14. See Gassebner andLuechinger 2011;and Savun and Phillips 2009. 15 Most articles with democracy as a determinant of the count of terrorist attacks did not use country fixed effects to control for individual countries' idiosyncrasies in their panel estimations.…”

Suicide attacks and religious cleavages

“…Freytag et al (2011), on the other hand, maintain that socio-economic variables do matter for terrorism, implying that terrorism might be reduced by economic development and growth, and Caruso and Schneider (2011) confirm that in Western Europe the classical economic concept of opportunity cost is indeed predicative of an individual's willingness to be involved in a terrorist activity. In any event, the scholarly consensus appears to converge to the stylized 10 See the surveys by Krieger and Meierrieks (2011) and Gassebner and Luechinger (2011). fact that the relationship between poverty and terrorism is highly non-linear (hump-shaped) and varies according to the specific circumstances; the low income explanation of terrorism applies better to the perpetrators' home country than to the venue country (Enders et al 2014). …”

Does Income Inequality Lead to Terrorism? Evidence from the Post-9/11 Era

“…This in turn may incite violence on behalf of the "have-nots" to violently overthrow the existing institutional status quo penalizing them. Indeed, there is evidence that terrorism becomes more likely when the means of economic participation are constrained, e.g., when property rights are not secure (e.g., Basuchoudhary and Shughart, 2010;Gassebner and Luechinger, 2011).…”

“…Second, terrorism may reduce a country's tax base (e.g., by reducing economic activity through increased insecurity) and decrease the efficiency of its 2 What is more, many empirical analyses on the determinants of terrorism do not study the role of inequality at all. For instance, in their review of 43 empirical studies Gassebner and Luechinger (2011) find that only eight of them control for the effect of inequality on terrorism, where no study provides robust evidence that inequality indeed incites terrorism. 6 tax administration (Gupta et al, 2004 …”