Dennis M. Foster

Ballots, Bargains, and Bombs: Terrorist Targeting of Spoiler Opportunities

Benjamin Netanyahus come-from-behind victory over Shimon Peres in the Israeli national elections of May 1996, following an apparent intensification of Palestinian terrorism over the course of that spring, reminded observers of the political ramifications of terrorism. Since May 1996 was also the month in which Israel reentered Final Status negotiations with a Palestinian delegation in Taba, Egypt, the timing of this surge in violence encourages us to ask if terrorists regularly conceive of elections and rounds of negotiations as “spoiler opportunities,” or opportune times to undermine peaceful political processes. We address this question in the context of Israels long‐running experience with elections, negotiations, and terrorism. We hypothesize that attacks resulting in fatalities are likely to increase in periods immediately surrounding Israeli general elections and key rounds of negotiations affecting the fate of the Palestinian population. Negative binomial event count analyses of the period 1970–2007 suggest that violent opponents indeed viewed the periods preceding negotiations and the ends of electoral cycles as “spoiler opportunities.”

Rallies and the “First Image” Leadership Psychology, Scapegoating Proclivity, and the Diversionary Use of Force

Despite considerable scholarship regarding the degree to which the international use of force generates popular rallies, no work has addressed the possibility that leaders’ managerial philosophies and psychological predispositions systematically influence their assessments of whether or not diversion “works”. In this article, we test hypotheses—conceived through direct reference to work in political psychology—which suggest that the degree to which presidents are innately concerned with the maintenance of the American “in-group” is an important predictor of whether they scapegoat international “out-groups” and, by extension, whether they choose strategies of diversionary foreign conflict or more cordial foreign engagement when facing domestic problems. Several analyses of American foreign policy behavior for the period 1953—2000 produce findings that clearly are at odds with these hypotheses, in that in-group biased presidents are actually less likely to use force and more likely to attend superpower summits when faced with a poor economy. We believe that these unexpected findings have serious implications for both the psychological study of international conflict and the plausibility of the “traditional” diversionary hypothesis.

State Power, Linkage Mechanisms, and Diversion against Nonrivals

Mitchell and Prins (2004) have recently found that diversion from high levels of inflation is observed only among enduring rivals. However, neither this nor any other cross-national test of the relevance of opportunity to diversion has included a potentially important determinant of diversionary capacity: major power status. I contend that since militarily powerful states have both more extensive sets of international commitments and much greater physical capacities to divert against broader sets of opponents, they are less likely to limit their diversionary behavior to enduring rivals. Cross-national time series analyses of the association between inflation and militarized interstate dispute (MID) initiation for the period 1960—1999 reveal several differences between the diversionary activity of major powers and that of all other states. Models that account for the interaction between inflation and rivalry reveal that while nonmajor powers seemingly divert only against enduring rivals, major powers are marginally less likely to do so against rivals than they are against nonrivals. However, more detailed analyses indicate that these latter findings are being driven by the American case: While the United States is more likely to initiate MIDs against nonrivals than rivals at the highest levels of inflation, other major powers are more likely to initiate MIDs against rivals than nonrivals at all points. Moreover, the United States is, on average, more likely than all other states to initiate MIDs at all levels of inflation. At minimum, these findings imply that the United States is unique among major powers both in its capacity to divert from inflation and in its propensity to link diversion from inflation against nonrivals to its most important rivalries.

There Can Be No Compromise: Institutional Inclusiveness, Fractionalization and Domestic Terrorism

Research on terrorism in democracies borrows from the literature on civil war and rebellion to argue that more proportional representation decreases the likelihood of terrorist violence. However, theories of broader social mobilization may be ill-suited to predicting the occurrence of terrorism. This article proposes that proportionalisms institutionalization of small minority groups as legitimate but relatively insignificant political actors leads to militancy. Analyses of the Global Terrorism Database on domestic terrorist attacks across all democracies in 1975–2007 provide broad support for this argument. The presence and greater degrees of proportionalism are significantly associated with greater levels of domestic terrorism when ethnic fractionalization within a given society increases. Moreover, domestic terrorism increases as the number of small parties represented in the legislature increases.

Inter Arma Silent Leges? Democracy, Domestic Terrorism, and Diversion

This article develops expectations about the use of military force by democracies facing domestic terrorism. Due to the necessity of balancing effective counterterrorism with liberal acceptability, domestic terrorism typically represents a significant but nonexistential threat to democracies that is ineradicable via repression; as such, it is likely to generate appreciable diversionary incentives. Moreover, the use of force abroad, coupled with counterterrorist strategies that seek to safeguard democratic legitimacy, allows leaders to provide benefits both to citizens who seek retribution against terrorists and to those who value the preservation of liberty. Tests of the correlates of dispute initiation across all democracies, 1970–2000, provide support for this hypothesis. Further analyses reveal that diversion from domestic terrorism is most likely by democratic governments with relatively greater diversionary capacity and with lesser repressive capacity and incentive.