Terrorist Strategy, Democracy and Electoral Systems

In general, scholarly work has revealed a complex relationship between regime openness and the likelihood of terrorist violence: put simply, there are about as many reasons to believe that democracy increases the capacity (and, to a lesser extent, the willingness) of disaffected political actors to engage in terrorism as there are reasons to believe that democracy reduces the incentives for political actors to engage in terrorism. In the aggregate, the former view posits that democratic governance is more ‘permissive’ of terrorist campaigns. The decentralized government decision-making structure of democratic polities limits their capacity to develop and support robust and unified counterterrorist strategies.Footnote ¹⁰ Moreover, the general guarantee of civil rights and liberties in democracies allows terrorists greater recruiting, propaganda and operational freedom.Footnote ¹¹ Furthermore, in so far as their counterterrorist responses involve the use of force and/or the limitation of civil liberties, democratic governments run the risk of delegitimizing themselves. In extreme circumstances, harsh responses can have the counterproductive effect of swelling the ranks of the insurgency,Footnote ¹² and the unpopularity of such responses amongst the voting public can conceivably threaten the tenure of the government.Footnote ¹³ Alternatively, it is possible that democratic institutions reduce the likelihood of terrorist violence.Footnote ¹⁴ Democracy increases the number of non-violent avenues for political actors to redress their grievances;Footnote ¹⁵ moreover, democratic participation and elections increase the general satisfaction and political efficacy of citizens, subsequently reducing grievances, thwarting terrorist recruitment and raising the public's tolerance for counterterrorist policies.Footnote ¹⁶

Of particular interest in recent research is the degree to which democratic institutions increase political efficacy. Democratic institutions vary widely in the extent to which political interests are translated into legislative representation, and greater representation is likely to decrease functional disenfranchisement and increase political efficacy. Thus, citizens in democratic states with more inclusive political institutions may have fewer incentives to engage in violent coercive behaviour than citizens in democratic states with less inclusive institutions. Though not derived in specific relation to terrorism, Reynal-Querol's game-theoretic treatment of the influence of democratic system type on civil war deduces that proportional systems hold a distinct advantage in regards to systemic stability. In proportional systems, where the legislative representation of more politically extreme groups is necessarily greater than it is in majoritarian systems, the policies ultimately implemented are more likely to approximate the mean of all political groups’ preferred policies. As such, it is more likely that all groups in a proportional system will prefer to support the implemented policies as opposed to rebellion. Put differently, proportionalism systematically increases the opportunity costs of rebellion for any given political group by decreasing the likelihood that the ‘distance’ between any group's preferred policy and the policy ultimately implemented is ‘greater’ than the material costs and risks of rebellion. Reynal-Querol's empirical analyses indicate that proportionalism does decrease the likelihood of civil war relative to presidential, majoritarian and authoritarian systems.Footnote ¹⁷

This logic has been adapted directly to the study of terrorism. Quan Li, generally uncovering evidence of both dampening and enhancing effects of democracy on terrorism, finds that democratic systems that minimize avenues for direct political representation are the target of larger numbers of transnational terrorist attacks. Specifically, his analyses show that ‘the proportional system experiences fewer terrorist incidents than either the majoritarian or mixed system’, indicating that greater proportionality translates into greater inclusiveness and less transnational terrorism.Footnote ¹⁸ A similar conclusion is reached by Deniz Aksoy and David Carter in respect to levels of domestic terrorism and the emergence of new domestic terrorist groups. Effective disenfranchisement should have a more regular effect on domestic terrorism than transnational terrorism, since the process by which institutional inclusiveness increases efficacy is most germane to domestic interests and actors. Their study provides some evidence that fewer domestic-originating attacks occur and fewer new domestic groups emerge in democratic states in Western Europe characterized by higher levels of structural inclusiveness.Footnote ¹⁹

A Reformulation of the Inclusiveness–Terrorism Linkage

While compelling, we believe the ‘representative permissiveness’ account to be problematic in two important ways. Our first criticism involves the use of institutional measures as proxies for the actual inclusion of varied political interests into the legislature. While such measures reflect an institutional capacity to translate multiple political interests into multiple legislative parties, they give no indication of the ex ante pressure to translate more interests into more parties. This is because such measures do not account for the presence or absence of multiple existing political interests in a given society. Crucially, social cleavages interact with electoral systems to determine the establishment of political parties:

As such, the exclusive use of institutional measures, by lending identical explanatory weight to those states which have a pressing ‘need’ (in terms of ensuring broader inclusion) to form new parties and to those which do not, potentially muddles empirical analysis. For example, countries with few existing socio-political cleavages are relatively unlikely to experience domestic political violence regardless of whether or not their institutions are relatively more inclusive, simply because limited inclusion may not disenfranchise any groups. By the same token, countries with numerous socio-political cleavages and moderate institutional inclusiveness should still be expected to face greater risks of violence than states in the former example. In this scenario, the necessary empirical assumption embodied by the exclusive use of institutional measures – that the latter type of state should experience less terrorism than the former simply because its institutions are more inclusive – is clearly antithetical to the logic of the permissiveness account. In all, we believe that tests of this and associated arguments would be much improved by gauging the commensurability of institutional inclusiveness and societal pressures for inclusion.

Moreover, work in comparative politics would suggest that the legislative result of the coincidence of permissive institutions and multiple socio-political cleavages may actually increase political violence. Indeed, our primary substantive critique of the permissiveness argument is that greater political representation simply may not increase political efficacy to a degree sufficient to dissuade the use of violence by some actors – and, in particular, the use of terrorism by small political groups. It must be reiterated that the theoretical underpinnings of the permissiveness argument are clearly most applicable to relatively large political groups within democracies.Footnote ²¹ Given increased institutional inclusiveness (such as proportional representation), larger groups will send larger contingents to the legislature, thus giving them a greater independent capacity to influence policy making (or, using Reynal-Querol's terminology, a greater independent capacity to pull the mean of all groups’ preferred policy closer to their ideal points).

But when institutional structures include relatively smaller groups in the political process, the distance between their preferred policy points and the mean of all groups’ preferred policy points is not necessarily decreased. Most obviously, the legislative ‘clout’ of any given smaller group is minimal, meaning that such parties lack the independent influence over the legislative mean policy point that inclusion affords their numerically larger counterparts. Thus, by extension, the likelihood that inclusion places the mean policy point within a given small group's range of acceptable outcomes is largely dependent upon the preferred policy points of other included parties. As such, the aggregate effect of greater institutional inclusiveness on the relationship between the mean legislative policy point and the preferred policy points of small political groups would seem to be indeterminate, all else being equal.

Majoritarian rules for the passage of legislation in proportional systems can cause some voters who prefer more extreme small parties to support more moderate coalition parties in an attempt to ‘edge policy closer to their most preferred outcome’. Adherents to extreme parties thus often view votes for their own parties as wasteful, given the lack of influence such parties will wield over policy outcomes. Votes for extreme small parties do occur, but they are normally made (a) on relatively rare occasions by putative moderates who support parties more extreme than their ideal point to pull national policy closer to that ideal; and (b) with greater regularity by ‘true believers’, or those whose commitment to a party's platform trumps their interest in strategic voting.Footnote ²²

Based on these considerations, we posit that the inclusion of multiple small groups into the political space increases the likelihood of terrorist violence by raising the likelihood that extreme groups are rendered impotent in the national political process. The notion of ‘extreme pluralism’ is useful in illustrating the nuances of the process by which the marginalization of small political groups can take place – even when those groups accept inclusion in principle at the outset. The presence of several small parties in the legislature can induce volatility in coalition formation, thus leading (especially in cases of pronounced societal polarization) to legislative gridlock and increased fractionalization in proportional systems. Indeed, the coincidence of many parties and significant ideological distances between those parties is potentially threatening to regime stability in several direct and indirect ways. First, fractionalized multipartism increases the likelihood that votes flow away from the centre and towards the extremes. However, given ideological diversity, it is unlikely that these extreme parties can mount a unified challenge to any centrist government. Complicating matters, since fractionalized multipartism compels parties to distinguish themselves from one another, politics becomes more ideological, resulting in doctrinaire platforms and memberships and further decreasing the likelihood of coalition-building and compromise. Finally, since such parties are unlikely to become the linchpin of any government, they have incentives to make grandiose promises and severe demands on the government (which are likely to resonate with those extreme parties’ ‘true believer’ constituencies). As these promises and demands escalate, challenges to governmental efficacy can arise. In all, these centrifugal forces can render impossible the integration of diverse parties into the system, thus inviting constitutional irresponsibility on the part of the government and the employment of extra-constitutional means of protest (such as political violence) by those parties.Footnote ²³

By this accounting, even when it leads to the formation of nominally centrist coalitions, proportionalism in fractionalized societies can simultaneously include ‘extreme’ groups in the political process and fail to bring the mean legislative policy point within their ranges of policy acceptability. In such circumstances, inclusion through proportionalism frustrates extreme groups by institutionalizing their political ineffectiveness. This then has the effect of increasing the likelihood that they remain or become comparatively small and weak anti-system or protest movements, which one would speculate are particularly given to the use of terrorism as a tactic.

A potential illustration of this phenomenon involves the now-banned Basque separatist party Batasuna in Spain. Batasuna represented the Basque region of northern Spain from the post-Franco period until it was banned in 2003. Throughout this period it is recognized as having operated as the legal political wing of ETA. Its members participated in multiple national and local elections and reached a peak by winning five seats in the Spanish national parliament in 1986, but their representatives rarely attended sessions. Indeed, their frustration at the impotence of their role in parliament culminated with their boycott of the 2000 election.Footnote ²⁴ Despite being able to win seats to the national parliament (in a polity with a lower legislative tier governed by proportional representation rules), Batasuna never saw its policy preferences accommodated by the range of legislation produced therein, and apparently opted instead to sanction the pursuit of Basque independence through terrorist violence.

By the same token, any significant within-group variability regarding the range of an ‘extreme’ group's policy acceptability may increase the likelihood of political violence. Assume, for example, any scenario in which there exists a division between elements of an extreme group on the basis of the willingness to accept limited policy change (with moderates willing and radicals unwilling to accept limited changes). In so far as inclusion results in any increase in the probability that group policy demands will be satisfied to any degree via the national political process, moderates are likely to accept inclusion. The likelihood that radicals will accept inclusion, by contrast, varies in proportion with the likelihood that inclusion will satisfy their demands for more comprehensive policy change. If inclusion fundamentally shifts the legislative balance of power in such a way as to empower the group with at least something of a direct say over the course of national policy, the likelihood that radical demands for comprehensive change will be satisfied increases. If, however, inclusion does not meaningfully affect the legislative balance of power – as is normally the case with relatively small groups – then inclusion is, in the eyes of radicals, tantamount to the political institutionalization of the movement's marginal national status, and moderates’ acceptance of inclusion may result in the defection of the radicals. Since ‘legitimate’ (i.e., within-system) political avenues for acceptable policy change have been exhausted, radicals are more likely to adopt violent stances than to accept even more pronounced minority status as an even smaller included party.

A useful illustration of this ‘splitting’ behaviour over the willingness to accept national legislative inclusion involves the defection of the Naxalites from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (or CPI-M) in 1968. In the run-up to the 1967 Lok Sabha elections, the Central Committee of the CPI-M (which had itself split from the Communist Party of India in 1964 over ideological issues) decided to pursue alliances with ideologically dissimilar parties in West Bengal to increase efficacy in national policy making.Footnote ²⁵ This decision was roundly criticized by both communist governments around the world and CPI-M hardliners as an abandonment of ideological principals. The hardline uprising caused the CPI-M leadership to commit to courting alliances with only leftist parties. However, after the CPI-M won 4 per cent of the seats in the 1967 election and the violent repression of a labour uprising in Naxalbari, West Bengal (where the provincial government were dominated by CPI-M deputies), the hardliners rejected political avenues and defected, establishing a violent revolutionary movement known as the Naxalites.Footnote ²⁶ Naxalite terrorism persists to this day in West Bengal and other areas of India.

Thus, in sum, we arrive at two hypotheses regarding the relationships between electoral rules, small-party representation in the legislature, and domestic terrorism. First, from an institutional perspective, we posit that societal fractionalization is a crucial intervening variable in the relationship between institutional inclusiveness and domestic terrorism. In particular, and contrary to the expectations of the permissiveness argument, the proportional electoral rules in a fractionalized society may institutionalize the political weakness of and exacerbate policy preference divisions within extreme groups. Conversely, the proportional inclusion of fewer, larger groups in non-fractionalized societies is generally likely to diminish terrorism, since the relative strength of these groups offers them a meaningful say in the direction of national policy and encourages radical elements to choose intraparty strategies to achieve political influence over defection. Secondly, from a legislative perspective, the foregoing logic would suggest that the mere presence of numerous smaller parties in the legislature would be associated with increased domestic terrorism.

Research Design

Our empirical tests of these hypotheses examine domestic terrorism in all democraciesFootnote ²⁷ from 1975 to 2007, and we use the state-year as the unit of analysis (e.g., Botswana, 1985; Colombia, 1990). To construct the dependent variable, we operationalize the annual count of domestic terrorist events.Footnote ²⁸ The general source is the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), which defines a terrorist attack as an ‘intentional act of violence or threat of violence by a non-state actor’ – to include assassinations, hostage-taking, armed and unarmed assaults, bombings, hijackings and facility or infrastructure attacks – and which further meets two of the following three qualifying criteria: (a) is ‘aimed at attaining a political, economic, religious, or social goal’; (b) included evidence of an intention to ‘coerce, intimidate, or convey some other message to a larger audience (or audiences) other than the immediate victims’; and (c) is ‘outside the context of legitimate wartime activities’.Footnote ²⁹ Recent research has disaggregated the GTD data into domestic and transnational terrorism, with attacks in the former category being those in which the ‘venue, target, and perpetrators are all from the same country’ (for example, by the ETA against Spanish citizens in Spain; by Action Directe against French governmental offices in Paris).Footnote ³⁰ As noted previously, such attacks are significantly better suited than transnational events to test hypotheses about the influence of domestic institutional inclusiveness on the decision of domestic actors to resort to political violence. Moreover, the broad spatial coverage of the GTD data allows for a global assessment of democratic institutional and socio-political variation, thus representing an improvement upon analyses employing regional compilations of domestic terrorism.Footnote ³¹ The GTD data includes 26,877 domestic events for the period 1975–2007. Importantly, the data also code failed and foiled attempted terrorist attacks, the inclusion of which allows us to avoid systematically omitting behaviour on the basis of its success.Footnote ³²

Given that the dependent variable takes the form of a zero or a positive integer, event count modelling is more appropriate than ordinary least squares regression. Since ‘over-dispersion’ appears in the data series (as evidenced by standard deviations that are larger than means), we employ negative binomial models.Footnote ³³ To address temporal dependence in the dependent variable – which, as indicated by diagnostic tests, follows a first-order trend – we estimate AR(1) generalized estimating equation negative binomial models, which control for first-order autoregression in the idiosyncratic error term of panel data when numerous panels are analysed and when some panels are invariant (i.e., when terrorism equals zero in all years for some countries).Footnote ³⁴

To examine the effects of political inclusion on terrorism comprehensively, we first run statistical models utilizing measures of both the institutional facilitation of political inclusiveness and the actual degree to which societal groups are included into the legislative political process. Two institutional variables, both culled from the 2010 edition of the Database of Political Institutions,Footnote ³⁵ are employed: (a) a dichotomous measure indicating whether or not a democracy employs first-past-the-post (i.e., plurality) in any of its national voting rules; and (b) the average national mean number of representatives elected per district in all directly elected houses of parliament (or overall district magnitude). While the use of a simple ‘majoritarianism’ measure allows for comparability to previous research on the institutional correlates of terrorism, the inclusion of overall district magnitude allows for more nuanced tests of the gradient effects of inclusiveness. Indeed, much comparative politics scholarship identifies district magnitude as being central to the representative inclusiveness of a given system (with greater district magnitude predicting greater inclusiveness), irrespective of the number of political parties produced by the system.Footnote ³⁶ It has been suggested that ‘as district magnitude increases, each party's share of seats tend to correspond more closely to its vote share.’Footnote ³⁷ In the main, the ‘representative permissiveness’ logic would expect each of these measures to be negatively and significantly associated with domestic terrorism; conversely, the argument developed here does not expect either of these static measures of institutional permissiveness to be significantly related to domestic terrorism.

In addition to these institutional measures, and in line with our critiques of the permissiveness argument, we include one measure of the commensurability of socio-political cleavage and institutional permissiveness, and one measure of the degree to which small parties are present in the legislature. First, in order to use ethnic diversity as a proxy for gauging the multiplicity of social forces, we multiplicatively interact the variable Ethnolingusitic Fractionalization (or ELF) with our two measures of institutional inclusiveness. ELF, a percentage measure indicating the likelihood that any two randomly selected citizens of a given country are from different ethno-lingusitic groups, is a widely utilized measure of the diversity of societal groups.Footnote ³⁸ In general, a positive association of ELF x Majoritarian and a negative association of ELF × Overall District Magnitude with terrorism would provide support for the permissiveness argument. Conversely, a negative association of ELF × Majoritarian and a positive association of ELF × Overall District Magnitude with terrorism would provide support for Hypothesis 1. Secondly, we include in separate models a measure of the Legislative Fractionalization of the legislature, or the likelihood that any two legislators drawn at random are members of different political parties. As this variable is widely used as a measure of the number of small parties in a given system,Footnote ³⁹ a positive and significant association of this variable with domestic terrorism would provide support for Hypothesis 2.

We also include several control variables in our analyses. First, we control for country-specific heterogeneity by including a measure of the demographic size of the country (Natural Log of Population). Much of the variation in the timing of terrorist attacks can be accounted for through variation in country size.Footnote ⁴⁰ Secondly, we include a measure of a state's military capabilities to control for the state's capacity to combat terrorism. Military Capability, operationalized as the annual composite percentage index of a state's share of the world's total material capabilities, is taken from the Correlates of War (COW) Project's Composite Index of National Capabilities,Footnote ⁴¹ and is expected to be negatively related to the dependent variable. Thirdly, to account for the influence of material wealth on terrorist proclivities, we include for each country-year the Natural Log of Per Capita Gross Domestic Product, taken from the Penn World Tables.Footnote ⁴² We conceive of this variable as capturing general satisfaction with the economic status quo, which might both dampen the importance of representative inclusiveness to citizens and decrease their grievances against the government.

Fourthly, to control for regime stability, we specify Continuous Democracy Years, culled from the POLITY 4e dataset. Previous literature has argued and found that unstable or nascent regimes experience greater levels of terrorism than stable regimes.Footnote ⁴³ As such, we expect a negative relationship between this variable and terrorism. Fifthly, to account for the potential capacity of an independent executive to encroach on civil liberties (thus perhaps increasing the prospect of government deadlock, terrorist incentives to elicit a harsh overreaction by the government, and ultimately weakening the capacity of the state to fight terrorism),Footnote ⁴⁴ we include a dichotomous measure of presidentialism, with the expectation of a positive influence on the dependent variable.Footnote ⁴⁵ Sixthly, it is possible that the restructuring of the international system after the US–Soviet Cold War rivalry diminished the strategic costs to states of granting nationalist groups autonomy or independence, thus diminishing the need for those groups to engage in violence.Footnote ⁴⁶ We therefore include the dichotomous variable Post Cold War, coded 1 for country-years after 1991 and 0 otherwise. Finally, as involvement in international conflicts could sap states’ capacities to conduct effective domestic counterterrorism, we include a dichotomous measure of International War Involvement, as coded by the COW dataset.Footnote ⁴⁷

Discussion and Conclusion

Scholars have naturally focused on the role that political institutions play in the generation of violent political events. Domestic political institutions act as an important moderator of both demands and how they are expressed. Previous literature has argued that in terms of terrorism, a permissive environment creates alternative pathways for the expression of grievances, which implies that violence would be minimized in societies with more representative institutions. This logic is based on two flawed assumptions. First, it assumes that extreme groups view the political systemas legitimate and want to be co-opted by it. Secondly, there is the implicit assumption that a small, marginalized extreme group would be able actually to move policy outcomes in a meaningful way. We believe that these assumptions rarely reflect political reality.

In general, groups inclined towards domestic terrorism are likely to feel, at the very least, that the political system is illegitimate. In the most extreme cases, these groups want to tear down the current political system and replace it with something closer to their ideal point. As such, inclusion in the system seems unlikely to assuage their grievances and attempts to do so may further serve to exacerbate the split. In addition, even if these groups attempt to act within the political system, it may only serve to institutionalize their impotence, as they are unlikely to be able to alter policy outcomes in a meaningful manner. The net effect, then, is that openness in and of itself will not decrease domestic terrorism; indeed, when combined with a highly fractionalized society, openness should actually lead to more terrorism.

Our statistical analysis of democratic states and domestic terrorism from 1975 to 2007 confirms our expectations in two critical ways. First, we find little evidence that institutional inclusiveness in and of itself is correlated with domestic terrorism. While this differs from previous research, we believe our models are both more complete and properly focus on domestic terrorism. Secondly, the models demonstrate that high levels of representation, given high degrees of fractionalization, actually increase the amount of domestic terrorism. These situations, where the weakness and inability of these extreme groups becomes both acute and most noticeable, are likely to drive them further into alternative methods of contention, such as terrorism. We discussed this as the process potentially motivating Batasuna's boycott of the national elections in Spain in 2000.

In general, our analysis demonstrates that permissive political systems are not a panacea for limited domestic terrorism. In fact, under some circumstances the openness of the system forces the extremists further from the centre and increases the amount of domestic terrorism. Future research needs to delve more deeply into the process by which permissiveness creates divisiveness. In particular, does this process affect all groups equally? In other words, can some groups be co-opted through a permissive environment even though we have seen that the average effect is to drive them towards violence? Regardless, it is clear that our analysis has revealed that the effect of democratic institutions is neither obvious nor simple, and that a more nuanced approach is needed to determine the relevant relationships.