David B. Carter

A Blessing or a Curse? State Support for Terrorist Groups

Little existing work has systematically examined the factors that help terrorist groups survive or contribute to their failure. State support for terrorist groups is commonly thought to be a factor that helps groups to survive. I demonstrate with newly collected data that state sponsorship is not always helpful to terrorist groups. The resources provided by sponsors increase a groups ability to maintain itself internally. However, when a group has a sponsor that provides it with safe haven, the risk of the group being forcefully eliminated by the target increases. I argue that sponsors that provide safe haven can have incentives to provide information to the target about the groups to avoid potential costs from target military operations within their territory. The key empirical findings suggest that state sponsorship is a less serious problem for target states than many previously thought.

Democracy and Multilateralism: The Case of Vote Buying in the UN General Assembly

Democracies are more supportive of US positions on important votes in the UN General Assembly than of nondemocracies. Is this because democracies share common perspectives, or does this pattern reflect coercion? Since 1985, US law has stipulated that the US State Department identify important votes and that aid disbursements reflect voting decisions. To unravel these alternative explanations, we introduce a strategic statistical model that allows us to estimate voting preferences, vulnerability to influence, and credibility of linkage, which are theoretical quantities of interest that are not directly observable. The results reject the hypothesis of shared democratic values: poor democracies have voting preferences that are more oppositional to US positions than autocracies, and they are more willing than autocracies to take symbolic stands that may cost them foreign aid. Democracies support US positions, however, because US aid linkages are more credible when directed toward democratic countries. Splitting the sample into Cold War and post�Cold War segments, we find that the end of the Cold War changed the way US linkage strategies treated allies and left- and right-leaning governments, but the effects of democracy remained constant.

Terrorism In Dictatorships

A key finding in the terrorism literature is that dictatorships experience less terrorism than democracies. However, we have few explanations for why some dictatorships experience substantial threats from terrorism while others do not. A growing body of work on authoritarian politics focuses on political institutions in these regimes to explain a broad range of political outcomes. Building on this literature, we argue that opposition political party activity increases the collective action capacity of regime opponents and that elected legislatures can channel this mobilized capacity into support for the government. However, when active opposition parties operate in the absence of legislatures, political opponents increasingly turn to terrorism. We find evidence that terrorist groups are most likely to emerge in dictatorships with opposition political parties but no elected legislature. These regimes also experience the highest volume of subsequent attacks.

Electoral Institutions and the Emergence of Terrorist Groups

A wide range of studies find that democracies experience more terrorism than non-democracies. However, surprisingly little terrorism research takes into account the variation among democracies in terms of their electoral institutions. Furthermore, despite much discussion of the differences in terrorist groups’ goals in the literature, little quantitative work distinguishes among groups with different goals, and none explores whether and how the influence of electoral institutions varies among groups with different goals. The argument in this article posits that electoral institutions influence the emergence of within-system groups, which seek policy changes, but do not influence the emergence of anti-system groups, which seek a complete overthrow of the existing regime and government. The study finds that within-system groups are significantly less likely to emerge in democracies that have a proportional representation system and higher levels of district magnitude, while neither of these factors affects the emergence of anti-system groups.

Provocation and the Strategy of Terrorist and Guerrilla Attacks

Violent nonstate groups are usually weaker than the states they target. Theory suggests that groups carefully condition their choice of tactics on anticipated state response. Yet scholars know very little about whether and how groups strategically plan attacks in anticipation of state response. Scholars do not know if and under what conditions groups employ violent tactics to provoke or avoid a forceful state response, although extant theory is consistent with both possibilities. Relatedly, there is little systematic evidence about why groups choose terrorist or guerrilla tactics and how this choice relates to anticipated state response. I develop a theoretical and empirical model of the interaction between groups and states that generates unique evidence on all three fronts. Using data on attacks in Western Europe from 1950 to 2004, I show that guerrilla attacks are sometimes associated with provoking forceful state response, whereas terrorist attacks are generally associated with avoiding forceful response. Groups effectively choose their tactics to avoid forceful state responses that are too damaging for themselves but provoke forceful responses that disproportionately harm civilians. These findings survive several robustness and model specification tests.

Terrorism and the Fate of Dictators

The authors study the influence of domestic political dissent and violence on incumbent dictators and their regimes. They argue that elite with an interest in preserving the regime hold dictators accountable when there is a significant increase in terrorism. To pinpoint the accountability of dictators to elite who are strongly invested in the current regime, the authors make a novel theoretical distinction between reshuffling coups that change the leader but leave the regime intact and regime-change coups that completely change the set of elites atop the regime. Using a new data set that distinguishes between these two coup types, the authors provide robust evidence that terrorism is a consistent predictor of reshuffling coups, whereas forms of dissent that require broader public participation and support, such as protests and insurgencies, are associated with regime-change coup attempts. This article is the first to show that incumbent dictators are held accountable for terrorist campaigns that occur on their watch.

Why Do States Build Walls? Political Economy, Security, and Border Stability

Borders constitute the international system of states. Accordingly, states will, from time to time, take assertive measures to secure the border, with among the most aggressive strategies being the construction of physical barriers, which we refer to as “border walls.” Using original data on man-made border wall construction from 1800 to 2014, we theorize and find that in many cases, wall construction is about economic security. Significant economic disparities between the states will create incentives to illegally transport people or move goods readily available in the poorer country but highly regulated in the richer country. We find that economic disparities have a substantial and significant impact on the presence of a physical wall that is independent of formal border disputes and concerns over instability from civil wars in neighbors. In other words, “prominent examples such as the Maginot Line”, constructed largely out of fear of attack, is an exception, not the exemplar, of the reasons states construct border walls.

The temporal dynamics of new international borders

Borders are perhaps the most significant institutions in international relations. A massive literature demonstrates that border disputes fundamentally affect the character of relations between disputants, often escalating to violent and persistent conflict. However, the literature has barely begun to explore and identify the exact mechanisms that produce disputes and whereby these disputes escalate. Recent research demonstrates that how borders are drawn affects the probability of subsequent conflict and suggests that borders will be peaceful when they effectively and efficiently coordinate the actors on either side, thereby creating stable and predictable patterns of interactions. This research, however, ignores the obvious temporal component implied by theory. We develop the temporal component of an institutional theory of borders, starting from the argument that whether new international borders become more stable over time depends upon whether actors on both sides learn to coordinate on new jurisdictional international borders. We build on this idea to argue that the effect of time is significantly influenced by the manner in which the new border is drawn. We find that new borders that follow previous administrative frontiers become stable institutions much faster than than those drawn otherwise. In other words, stable and peaceful coordination on new borders occurs much faster when those new borders follow previous administrative frontiers.

International Trade and Coordination: Tracing Border Effects

Abstract:This article examines how the institutional design of borders affects international trade. The explore variation in the effects of borders by comparing new international borders that follow precedent and thus have a prior institutional history with new international borders that lack such an institutional history. The former minimally disrupt—or restore—previous economic networks, while the latter fundamentally disrupt existing economic networks. A variety of empirical tests show that, consistent with this institutional perspective on borders, new international boundaries that follow precedent are associated with significantly faster recovery and greater increase in subsequent trade flows. By contrast, when new international borders are truly new, they disrupt local economic networks, introduce new transaction costs, and impose higher adjustment costs on states, which the authors show to have long-term deleterious effects on trade.

History as a double-edged sword

Recent evidence suggests that historical boundary precedents play a central role in the outbreak, character, and long-term consequences of territorial disputes. The institutional theory of borders holds promise in explaining why leaders find old borders to be attractive as new borders. However, the mechanisms that link historical precedents to territorial claims and their consequences are not fully specified in the extant literature. I argue that there are three key arguments that can explain why boundary precedents are associated with subsequent disputes: ease of justification, perpetual conflict over territories of particular value, and persistent coordination around old borders. I argue that the coordination mechanism is essential to understanding the connections between historical boundary precedents and territorial disputes.