Terror and the loss of citizenship

Terror in the name of God and the specter of returning fighters for the so-called ‘Islamic State’ have recently moved some Western states, including Britain, Canada, and France, toward revoking the citizenship of terrorists. To critics, this constitutes a ‘return to banishment,’ a ‘fate universally decried by civilized people,’ as an American Supreme Court Chief Justice put it in the late 1950s. In a double reflection on the changing nature of terror and of citizenship, this paper argues that denationalization is, in principle, the adequate response to terror. This is because terror, particularly of the Islamist kind, is no ordinary crime but attack on the fundaments of citizenship. But what is right in principle may not be the right thing to do, because denationalization raises serious practicality problems.     

Blood and ink! The common-interest-game between terrorists and the media

It has often been pointed out in the literature that a symbiotic relationship exists between terrorist groups and the media. As yet, however, no formal model has been built based on this issue and only very little empirical research has been done in this field. The present contribution builds a simple game theoretic model, focussing on the strategic interactions between terrorists and the media. The model has features of a common-interest-game and results in multiple equilibria. After a discussion of the policy implications of the model, an empirical analysis is performed. Using newspaper coverage, terror incidents and terror fatalities data, it is shown that media attention and terrorism do mutually Granger cause each other, as predicted by the model. Moreover, it is explained why terror attacks tend to be “bloodier” in developing countries than in Europe and the United States.     

Terrorism,Dynamic Commitment Problems,and Military Conflict

Since 9/11, several states have initiated military conflicts in the name of fighting terrorism. However, studies indicate that the costs of terrorism are insignificant compared to the damage created by war. This raises the question: Why do states initiate costly wars when the risk posed by terrorism appears marginal? This study presents two explanations. First, we argue that while terrorists frequently fail to achieve their strategic objectives, terrorists can accomplish tactical objectives and may transition to insurgencies by seizing control of pockets of territory. States may respond by initiating preventive wars to stop terrorists from consolidating control over their strategically valuable territories (e.g., resource‐rich areas). Second, rival states may opportunistically exploit terrorist violence by declaring that the government is a “weak state.” This allows rivals to seize portions of the government's territory under the cover of fighting terror. We test these hypotheses using post–Cold War African dyads from 1990 to 2006.     

Electoral Incentives and Individual Parliament Members’ Rights

Cameral procedures define the modus operandi of a parliament. This article examines how the electoral environment affects parliaments’ rules of procedures and legislators’ rights. It argues that when the electoral environment motivates legislators to act individualistically governments are incentivised to restrict cameral procedures to curtail legislators’ behaviour. Materialising such incentives depends on the government’s ability to pass restrictive procedural changes. To test the assertion, four decades (1967–2007) of amendments to the Israeli Knesset’s rules of procedure were examined and support provided for co-variation of the electoral environment and restrictive Knesset’s procedures. The analysis then details the factors that enabled Israeli governments to pass such restrictive measures. Indeed, governments seem to use the rules of procedure strategically in their attempt to improve their control and curtail legislators’ behaviour.     

Threat-Inducing Violent Events Exacerbate Social Desirability Bias in Survey Responses

A key challenge in survey research is social desirability bias: respondents feel pressured to report acceptable attitudes and behaviors. Building on established findings, we argue that threat-inducing violent events are a heretofore unaccounted for driver of social desirability bias. We probe this argument by investigating whether fatal terror attacks lead respondents to overreport past electoral participation, a well-known and measurable result of social desirability bias. Using a cross-national analysis and natural and survey experiments, we show that fatal terror attacks generate turnout overreporting. This highlights that threat-inducing violent events induce social desirability, that researchers need to account for the timing of survey fieldwork vis-à-vis such events, and that some of the previously reported post-violent conflict increases in political participation may be more apparent than real.     

Re-examining the evidence on the electoral impact of terrorist attacks: The Spanish election of 2004

This paper re-examines the electoral effect of the 11-M terrorist attacks in Madrid. Previous research has focused on post-electoral surveys to construct counterfactuals for the evaluation of the electoral impact of the attack. Bali (Electoral Studies, 2007) claims that the terrorists attacks had an important electoral impact while Lago and Montero (2005) claim the opposite. In this paper I propose to re-examine the evidence using a methodological approach based on actual votes instead of opinions revealed by surveys, and the difference-in-differences estimator. The calculations under the counterfactual of “no terrorist attack” support the forecasts of the polls taken prior to the terrorist attack and the results of Bali (2007). The incumbent (conservative) party would have won the election with between 42% and the 45% of the votes, while the socialist party would have obtained 37% of the votes.     

Diffusion through Democracy

Many argue that international norms influence government behavior, and that policies diffuse from country to country, because of idea exchanges within elite networks. However, politicians are not free to follow their foreign counterparts, because domestic constituencies constrain them. This article examines how electoral concerns shape diffusion patterns and argues that foreign templates and international organization recommendations can shift voters’ policy positions and produce electoral incentives for politicians to mimic certain foreign models. Experimental individual‐level data from the field of family policy illustrates that even U.S. voters shift positions substantially when informed about UN recommendations and foreign countries’ choices. However, voters receive limited information about international developments, biased towards the policy choices of large and proximate countries. Aggregate data on the family policy choices of OECD countries show how voters’ limited information about international models shapes government decisions: governments are disproportionately likely to mimic countries whose news citizens follow, and international organizations are most influential in countries with internationally oriented citizens.     

Fiscal consolidation under electoral risk

The European debt crisis has uncovered serious tension between democratic politics and market pressure in contemporary democracies. This tension arises when governments implement unpopular fiscal consolidation packages in order to raise their macroeconomic credibility among financial investors. Nonetheless, the dominant view in current research is that governments should not find it difficult to balance demands from voters and investors because the economic and political costs of fiscal consolidations are low. This would leave governments with sufficient room to promote fiscal consolidation according to their ideological agenda. This article re‐examines this proposition by studying how the risk of governments to be replaced in office affects the probability and timing of fiscal consolidation policies. The results show that governments associate significant electoral risk with consolidations because electorally vulnerable governments strategically avoid consolidations towards the end of the legislative term in order to minimise electoral punishment. Specifically, the predicted probability of consolidation decreases from 40 per cent after an election to 13 per cent towards the end of the term when the government's margin of victory is small. When the electoral margin is large, the probability of consolidation is roughly stable at around 35 per cent. Electoral concerns are the most important political determinant of consolidations, leaving only a minor role for ideological concerns. Governments, hence, find it more difficult to reconcile political and economic pressures on fiscal policy than previous, influential research implies. The results suggest that existing studies under‐estimate the electoral risk associated with consolidations because they ignore the strategic behaviour that is established in this analysis.     

It can happen here: the impact of the Mumbai terror attacks on public opinion in Western Europe

Do terror attacks have an impact on public opinion, even if the terror attacks happen far away? We exploit the fact that the fourth round of the European Social Survey was conducted in several West European countries at the time of the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai, India, in order to identify the causal effect of the Mumbai attacks on public opinion. We identify a clear jump in fear of terrorism at home as a consequence of the terror attacks, but despite the increase in fear of terrorism, we find no significant effect of the attack on support for illiberal interrogation techniques or for liberal immigration policies. We do find indications of a shift in conservative direction on the left–right scale, but this shift is not significant in all time windows. Our findings suggest that a terror attack needs to have a very large impact on the fear of terrorism before people change their policy preferences.     

Orchestrating silence,winning the votes: Explaining variation in media freedom during elections

Restrictions on media freedom play a prominent role in the survival of incumbents in hybrid regimes. But while scholars agree that governments limit media freedom to punish opponents and mobilize supporters, less is known about the electoral incentives that explain the timing and location of restrictions. Using original microdata on government attempts to prevent the dissemination of information from Venezuela (2002–2015), I show that electoral competition at the local and national levels shape patterns of government-led restrictions on media freedom. At the local level, I find that differences in the opposition's strength incentivize governments to use restrictions to demobilize opponents where they are strongest, target marginal districts during local elections, and maintain dominance in their strongholds. At the national level, I show that as threats to the government party's primacy increase, so does the effect of local electoral competition on the hazard of restrictions.     

Democracy and Education Spending in Africa

While it is widely believed that electoral competition influences public spending decisions, there has been relatively little effort to examine how recent democratization in the developing world has resulted in changes in basic service provision. There have been even fewer attempts to investigate whether democracy matters for public spending in the poorest developing countries, where "weak institutions" may mean that the formal adoption of electoral competition has little effect on policy. In this article I confront these questions directly, asking whether the shift to multiparty competition in African countries has resulted in increased spending on primary education. I develop an argument, illustrated with a game-theoretic model, which suggests that the need to obtain an electoral majority may have prompted African governments to spend more on education and to prioritize primary schools over universities within the education budget. I test three propositions from the model using panel data on electoral competition and education spending in African countries. I find clear evidence that democratically elected African governments have spent more on primary education, while spending on universities appears unaffected by democratization .     

The effects of the electoral calendar on terrorist attacks

The goal of this paper is to study the linkages between the timing of terrorist events and elections. As strategic actors terrorists may respond to electoral environments by altering the frequency of their attacks around election times. Focusing on democracies, we examine variations in transnational and domestic terrorist incidents before elections over a 40 year span. We find distinct pre-electoral changes in the incidence of terrorist events. In the ITERATE data set, where only transnational terrorist events are included, terrorist activities decline in election months, while in the partitioned GTD data set, where only domestic terrorist events are kept, terrorist activities rise in election months. The findings suggest electoral calendars can dissuade and attract terrorist threats, depending on the origin of the threat, but these effects occur only very close to election time.     

Recalibrating social protection: Electoral competition and the new partisan politics of the welfare state

This article investigates the new party politics of welfare states with a particular focus on electoral competition. The argument is that welfare state politics are no longer just about more or less, but involve trade-offs among ‘new’ versus ‘old’ social rights, and hence social investment versus social consumption. However, party priorities on these issues are highly dependent upon their electoral situation. As electoral competition becomes more intense, parties focus more on vote maximisation than on their traditional policy goals. For left parties, this means focusing more on social investment, which appeals to their growing constituency of progressive sociocultural professionals, and less on defending the traditional income maintenance programmes favoured by their core blue-collar voters. Centre-right parties, on the other hand, should hesitate to retrench old social rights when electoral competition intensifies because they need to prioritise their appeal to culturally conservative working-class voters over their traditional fiscally conservative policy profiles. Using a new dataset and a recently published measure of electoral competitiveness, the article shows that as electoral competition intensifies, left governments are willing to prioritise social investment by reducing pension rights generosity in order to expand programmes for new social risks, while centre-right governments by contrast avoid retrenchment of pension rights and pension expenditures. The findings demonstrate that this relationship is moderated by the presence of a credible radical right challenger, which increases the electoral risk of welfare state recalibration.     

Sharing the Rewards,Dividing the Costs? The Electoral Consequences of Social Pacts and Legislative Reform in Western Europe

Do electoral pressures provide an explanation for why governments offer pacts to unions and employers rather than acting through legislation when faced with the need to pass potentially unpopular reforms to welfare policies, wages, and labour markets? This article addresses that question by analysing whether governments’ pursuit of pacts affects their vote share and increases the probability that they gain re-election for 16 West European countries between 1980 and 2012. It is found that the presence of social pacts has a significant and positive effect on incumbents’ vote shares at the next election and also results in a higher probability of re-election. These results are conditioned by government type: While all types of governments benefit electorally from pacts, the electoral penalties from the pursuit of unilateral legislation on policy reforms harm single-party majorities the most, minority governments moderately, and coalition majorities the least.     

Party and Gender Stereotypes in Campaign Attacks

Research on negative campaigning has largely overlooked the role of stereotypes. In this study, we argue that the gender and partisan stereotypes associated with traits and policy issues interact with a candidate’s gender and partisanship to shape the effectiveness of campaign attacks. We draw on expectancy-violation theory to argue that candidates may be evaluated more harshly when attacks suggest the candidate has violated stereotypic assumptions about their group. Thus, attacks on a candidate’s “home turf,” or those traits or issues traditionally associated with their party or gender, may be more effective in reducing support for the attacked candidate. We use two survey experiments to examine the effects of stereotype-based attacks—a Trait Attack Study and an Issue Attack Study. The results suggest that female candidates are particularly vulnerable to trait based attacks that challenge stereotypically feminine strengths. Both male and female candidates proved vulnerable to attacks on policy issues stereotypically associated with their party and gender, but the negative effects of all forms of stereotype-based attacks were especially large for democratic women. Our results offer new insights into the use of stereotypes in negative campaigning and their consequences for the electoral fortunes of political candidates.     

American intelligence and the Soviet ICBM build‐up: Another look

Abstract

Since the events of 9/11 the terms ‘threat’ and ‘risk’ have entered the daily lexicon to a greater extent than ever before. News media report on changes to national threat assessments, commenting when the threat level rises from ‘Moderate’ to ‘Substantial’, in the case of the United Kingdom. The British government recently released a document that provided details of the issues that pose the highest risk to the national infrastructure. All of these are based, so we are told, on the work of the national intelligence agencies. But what are these indicators actually telling us and what is the relationship between threat assessments and risk assessments? These are both important questions because important decisions are made as a result of changes in these assessments. National defence and security planning is based upon perceived threats and risks. An entire risk management industry has grown up in the business world that covers everything from health and safety to financial risk. It is not only governments and businesses that base decisions on these indicators, but individuals as well. Tourists planning holidays in Europe were alarmed when the British, French and German governments increased their threat levels in response to intelligence that suggested that an attack against tourist sites in their respective capitals was imminent. Some will have changed their plans and travelled elsewhere, to the detriment of the tourist industry, while others will have chosen to defy the terrorists and travel anyway – potentially placing themselves in harm's way. With so much at stake, both nationally and individually, it is therefore important that we understand the difference between a ‘threat’ and a ‘risk’ and, as scholars of intelligence, the role that intelligence plays in assessing them.     

Preference modification vs. incentive manipulation as tools of terrorist recruitment: The role of culture

Terrorism is a tactic much more likely to be used when combatants have asymmetric numerical strength and weaponry. Only if one side is comparatively very weak will it use terror tactics. This weakness requires a means of controlling strong incentives for free-riding or defection from the weaker side. There are two (nonexclusive) answers: (1) Atttract or inculcate recruits with an innate preference for cooperation, even if it results in the recruit's own death (2) Create a set of incentives that reward loyalty, by giving access to excludable near-public (“club”) goods. Culture is the key to achieving either of these solutions. Culture is defined here as the set of “inherited” beliefs, attitudes, and moral strictures that a people use to distinguish outsiders, to understand themselves and to communicate with each other. The primary question is whether culture creates a preference for cooperation as a primitive, or accommodates incentives such as excludable club goods that can only be obtained by cooperation. The difference between the two accounts matters greatly for determining the correct strategy to fight terrorism. If terrorists are selected for having unusual (cooperative, from the perspective of the terror group) preferences, then recruitment must be disrupted somehow. If, on the other hand, terrorists allow themselves to be recruited to gain access to club goods, then the intervention strategy must be the disruption of social networks that credibly guarantee access to those club goods.     

Ideological congruence over government mandates under majoritarian and proportional representation electoral systems

The existing literature on ideological congruence has typically looked at congruence immediately after elections when governments are formed. This article goes beyond that comparative static approach by examining changes in citizen-government ideological congruence between two fixed points in time, namely at the beginning and end of government mandates. Building on a veto player approach and dynamics of party competition under majoritarian and proportional representation (PR) electoral systems, the results indicate, first, that government positions are more stable in between elections, as the number of parties and their ideological distance increase in cabinet. Second, it appears that single-party and homogeneous coalition governments decrease ideological congruence between elections under low levels of polarisation, while they increase congruence under very high levels of polarisation. Third, it was found that governments under majoritarian systems slightly decrease congruence between elections while congruence stays stable on average under PR systems. The different levels of party system polarisation across majoritarian and PR electoral systems mostly explain this difference.     

Explaining the impact of new parties in the Western European party systems

ABSTRACT

In recent years, and particularly following the impact of the “great recession”, Western European party systems have undergone profound change. New parties have emerged and been successful, thus radically changing the structure of inter-party competition. So far, research on new parties has been mainly conducted from party-level and election-centred perspectives. Here, instead, we focus on party system innovation (PSInn), meaning the impact of new parties on Western European party systems, and on the factors that explain such impact, by adopting a systemic perspective and taking into account all the arenas where inter-party competition takes place (i.e. elections, parliaments and governments). For this purpose, this article relies on an original dataset on the performances of new parties in terms of votes, seats, and ministerial posts, covering about 350 elections and 670 governments in 20 countries, over the period 1945–2017. The results of the analysis show a notable increase in PSInn over the last decade, in particular with regard to the electoral and parliamentary arenas. Moreover, data show that PSInn in the electoral and the parliamentary arenas is mainly predicted by turnout change, while in the governmental arena is instead driven by the country’s economic performance.     

Intelligence to counter terror: The importance of all-source fusion

The modern digital environment has made terrorism and other transnational crimes vastly easier to coordinate on a worldwide scale than was possible before World War II. It has also exacerbated a most serious challenge: governments attempting to stop terrorists – particularly democracies – are expected to do so without undermining the laws, representative principles and informal confidences upon which a culture of democracy depends. The purpose of this article is to examine the modern intelligence requirements for countering terror in order to appreciate this challenge in greater depth and to develop a reasoned basis for balancing counterintelligence capabilities with civil liberties. It begins by considering the nature of the terrorists we face and the requirements for good intelligence operations against them. Historical examples illustrate those lessons that can be learned from the defeat of similar threats in the past, including the recurring ways in which challenges to civil liberties arise as democracies optimize intelligence in the name of security. In discussing the special opportunities and challenges modern technology poses in this contest, the analysis suggests an essential next step for democracies threatened by terrorists in their midst.