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Ethnic inclusion, democracy, and terrorism

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Abstract

Previous research has shown that ethnic exclusion and restricted political access can motivate ethnic groups to resort to violence. Although these links are better established for civil wars or conventional conflict, we believe that the same logic should be applicable to ethnic terrorism as well. If so, can reforms towards greater ethnic inclusion also reduce terrorist risks? We argue that reform and changes towards greater ethnic inclusion and democratization should induce substitution and reduce the volume of terrorist violence, even if attacks by splinter groups may persist. We develop propositions on terrorist attack frequency, given group characteristics and accommodation. We take advantage of the large changes towards democratization, decreased discrimination, and increased ethnic accommodation since the third wave of democratization and the end of the Cold War, as well as new data linking domestic terrorist organization in the Global Terrorism Data to specific ethnic groups in the Ethnic Power Relations data. Our group-level analyses suggest considerable support for a decline in terrorism following accommodation.

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Notes

  1. http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/2014/06/25/97,001-20140625FILWWW00292-corse-le-flnc-annonce-lacher-les-armes.php.

  2. Basuchoudhary and Shughart (2010) examine how a perception based measure of ethnic tensions influence transnational terrorism. Although this will reflect variation in ethnic relations and terrorism, it does not allow assessing to what extent political status may drive ethnic tensions.

  3. We exclude transnational attacks since we focus on how ethnic exclusion and accommodation influence domestic terrorist events. The total number of ethnic groups varies across years, and can change if new independent states emerge (e.g., through decolonization or secession), or the EPR data classify a change in ethnic distinctions within a country.

  4. We have also considered possible non-linear effects of regime type, but found no evidence that this specification changed the main results or notably improved the fit of the model. We provide these results in the Supplementary Appendix.

  5. According to the EPR codebook, “an ethnic group is politically relevant if either at least one significant political actor claims to represent the interests of that group in the national political arena or if group members are systematically and intentionally discriminated against in the domain of public politics”; see http://www.icr.ethz.ch/data/epr/EPR-2014_Codebook.pdf.

  6. Alternatively, democracy as competitive political institutions may be less relevant to terrorism than other forms of liberal constitutions such as the rule of law and economic freedom (see Basuchoudhary and Shughart 2010 for evidence on transnational terrorism).

  7. We show in the appendix that there is some evidence for an interaction between democracy and group size, such that larger groups are less likely to use terrorism in democracies (the effect turns negative when relative group size is above the mean, i.e., 0.19). This is consistent with a logic wherein the impact of democracy varies depending on the potential power that a group can wield. However, a fuller analysis would need to consider other factors, such as electoral systems/representation and opportunities for conventional violence.

  8. Our argument here is not that changes in accommodation are exogenous or unrelated to past terrorist activity by the group, but we simply try to evaluate the consequences of political status on motivation and attacks. It is entirely possible that terrorism by a group may push a government to provide accommodation, but it seems implausible that anticipated lower terrorism should promote concessions. Accommodation could conceivably increase terrorist activity if terrorist organizations were largely insensitive to any gains in status or perceived that more terrorism could bring yet larger future concessions. Our results, however, do not support this.

  9. In the Supplementary Appendix we provide additional results where we let transitions interact with group size and again find some evidence of interaction. The tipping point is much lower for the sample excluding Asia, and the marginal effect turns negative for groups with a relative size above 0.05.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful for comments and suggestions from Daniel G. Arce M., Alex Braithwaite, Lars-Erik Cederman, Stefano Costalli, Michael Findley, Suthan Krishnarajan, Jørgen Møller, Lasse Lykke Rørbæk, Todd Sandler, William F. Shugart II, Dag Tanneberg, Jacob Tolstrup, and Andrea Ruggeri as well as the anonymous reviewers. Previous versions of this manuscript have been presented at the workshops on “Political Violence and Policy Conference” at the University of Texas Dallas, 19–20 May 2016, “Foundations of Regime Stability and Conflict” at Aarhus University, 2–3 June, 2016 “Conflicts and Institutions” at the University of Genoa, 16–17 June 2016. Gleditsch is grateful for support from the Research Council of Norway (213535/F10) and the European Research Council (313373), and Polo is grateful for support from the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/J500045/1).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Essex, Colchester, UK

    Kristian Skrede Gleditsch

  2. Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Oslo, Norway

    Kristian Skrede Gleditsch

  3. Rice University, Houston, USA

    Sara M. T. Polo

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  1. Kristian Skrede Gleditsch
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Correspondence to Kristian Skrede Gleditsch.

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Gleditsch, K.S., Polo, S.M.T. Ethnic inclusion, democracy, and terrorism. Public Choice 169, 207–229 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-016-0360-5

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