The relationship between Autocracy, Democracy, and Terrorism

The manifestation of terrorism in a given country is typically a function of the country’s institutional mechanisms and internal stability. These, in turn, are directly influenced by the political institutions that govern the country. In a recent paper, economist Khusrav Gaibulloev and political scientists Todd Sandler and James Piazza consider the influence of the governance structure within countries on the incidences and strains of terrorism affecting those countries.

The paper states that the current academic literature on terrorism fails to analyze the root causes of differences in the frequency and type of terrorist violence under different governance structures. It eschews the conventional empirical analysis of terrorism, which finds a positive correlation between democracy and terrorism, in favor of a model based on game theory that considers various influences that may correlate regime type with terrorism. The model finds a correlation between governance and terrorism: full democracies and strict autocracies experience the least amount of terrorism, and nations with neither the institutional power to project full democracy nor strict autocracy (anocracies) experience the highest levels of terrorism. Per the authors, anocracies experience higher levels of terrorism because on one hand, they do not limit freedoms and strategic opportunities to commit terrorism as much as strict autocracies do. On the other hand, legitimate media to express political grievances and the inclination to increase security in the aftermath of terrorist attacks are absent in anocracies but are features in full democracies.

The authors use a two-player theoretic game model to calculate the maximum payoffs from a terrorist attack given a government’s counterterrorism efforts. Using data from the Global Terrorism Database and the International Terrorism: Attributes of Terrorist Events database, governments were scored as democracies, anocracies, or autocracies based on their Polity 2 scores. The results could be graphed onto an inverted u-shaped curve, with middling scores—corresponding to anocracies—correlating with the highest incidence of terrorism. The model concludes that terrorists will act differently under different objectives; the frequency of attacks will be relatively low for increased political access and relatively high for increased strategic influence. Under a democratic equilibrium, the frequency of attacks is relatively low and objectives are typically limited to political access. Under an autocratic equilibrium, the frequency of attacks is still relatively low, and objectives are typically limited to increased strategic influence. Finally, under an anocratic equilibrium, the frequency of attacks is high, with terrorists pursuing both political access and strategic influence.

The researchers found that civil war, discriminated population share, population size, alliances with the United States, and participation in international crises had a positive effect on the incidence of terrorist attacks. It was also found that location in Africa or Asia reduced the number of transnational attacks as compared to location in Europe.

The paper concludes that the inverted u-shaped relationship between regime type and incidence of terrorism contradicts prior literature on terrorism that did not find a strict link between the incidence of attacks and regime type. More importantly, it concludes that anocracies can reduce the incidence of terrorism in their countries, thereby increasing internal stability, by either empowering democratic institutions or taking measures to increase autocracy. The window of anocracy presents previously unavailable opportunities to terrorists, indicating that attempts to transition autocracies to full democracies must be tempered by an increase in vigilance and counterterrorism efforts.

Article source: Gaibulloev, K., J. Piazza, & T. Sandler, “Regime Types and Terrorism,” International Organization 71, Issue 3 (2017): 491-522.

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