Evolution,uncertainty, and the asymptotic efficiency of policy

Public Choice - Politics, like any social system, involves selection mechanisms. This paper presents a model of politics as an evolutionary process. Our model yields three main results. First, the...     

Only the Bad Die Young: The Correlates of Organizational Death for Far-Right Extremist Groups

The domestic far-right movement has existed in the United States for many years. During that time, groups have appeared, disappeared, and reappeared. Unfortunately, very little is known about what causes these groups to disband. Prior research has focused on long-lived groups, but the majority of extremist or terrorist groups fail to survive for an extended period of time. This study examined a variety of external and internal correlates of organizational death identified from both terrorism and organizational literature, to empirically test which correlates lead to a group dying young.     

Repression,opportunity, and innovation: The evolution of terrorism in Xinjiang,China

How does state repression affect the incidence and impact of terrorism? This study conducts a process tracing analysis of the ongoing contention between the Uyghur separatist movement and the Chinese state to provide a plausible explanation for the present lack of consensus on this question. Relying on insights from collective action theory, it argues that although repression was initially successful in curtailing the opportunistic use of terrorism, novel political opportunity allowed some separatists to adopt innovations, such as suicide bombing, to circumvent repression. Repression has since proved ineffective in quelling terrorism, and will likely remain incapable of forestalling future terrorist innovations.     

Surveying American State Police Agencies About Lone Wolves,Far-Right Criminality,and Far-Right and Islamic Jihadist Criminal Collaboration

This study presents state police agencies’ perceptions about three significant terrorism issues on which there is little empirical research. All three issues have significant implications for understanding the role of state police agencies in responding to terrorism threats. First, the authors investigated whether the respondents believed that supporters of specified extremist movements tended to commit crimes as lone wolves, with others, or both alone and with others. Second, they were asked to provide data to gauge how often far-right extremists committed 13 crime types that varied in magnitude and motivation. Third, they were asked if they had knowledge about whether far-right extremists and Islamic jihadists had cooperated to commit crimes. These data were collected by surveying the 50 state police agencies in the United States. The results indicate that state police officials are concerned with both group and lone-wolf activities. Importantly, there was variation in the potential for lone-wolf crimes when comparing different types of extremist movements. The results indicate that far-right extremists are involved in a range of terrorist, preparatory, and routine criminal activities, but this involvement varies by region. Two state police agencies also indicated that they knew of Islamic and far-right collaboration. The study identified two other instances of direct collaboration and a number of other interesting cases through open source searches. The article concludes with a discussion of the policy implications of the findings and outlines directions for future research.