William Eubank

Does democracy encourage terrorism

The question of the linkage of democratic forms of government with the incidence of terrorist violence is explored. Distinguishing between the presence of terrorist groups in a nation and violent terrorist events, and using multiple indicators of democratic development, evidence is presented clearly linking democracy with the presence of terrorist groups. Terrorist groups are less likely to be found in non‐democratic settings than in democratic ones.

Terrorism and democracy: What recent events disclose

This paper is the second in a series of analyses which explore relationships between terrorism and democracy. In this instance, the authors use the Rand‐St Andrews Chronology of International Terrorism for 1994, as well as the US State Departments Patterns of Global Terrorism collection of events for 1995. The authors use these data sets to determine if there is a linkage between the occurrence of terrorist attacks and the type of incumbent political regime in the countries where they are perpetrated. The two classifications of political regimes were drawn from Robert Wessons 1987 study Democracy: a Worldwide Survey and the Freedom House Publication Freedom in the World for 1984–85 and 1994–95, in order to evaluate the impact of regime change on the incidence of terrorist events. Our principal finding, consistent with earlier work, is that terrorist events are substantially more likely to occur in free and democratic settings than in any of the alternatives. We do discover, though, that change in and of...

Italian women terrorists

This paper seeks to assess the role of women in Italian terrorist groups. It is based on biographical information concerning 451 women who were active in such organizations between 1970 and 1984. T...

Political parties and the formation of terrorist groups

Where do modern terrorist group come from? How do they begin? This article establishes that most often they emerge from political parties. An effort is made to identify the relevant types of parties and the internal party dynamics which may have led to terrorist activity. Also, it is asserted that party‐terrorist group links are most likely to occur in nations whose political systems are going through episodes of regime transformation.

The Cost of Terrorism: The Relationship Between International Terrorism and Democratic Governance

After Al Qaedas destruction of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, many democracies reacted to the event, and to international terrorism in general, by passing laws restricting civil liberties and political rights, raising questions about the balance between security and liberty. Such laws have produced alarms among civil libertarians, worldwide. Are the alarms justified? In this article we analyze the relationship between the yearly number of international terrorist attacks in 24 countries from 1968–2003 and (a) measures of civil liberties and political rights as provided by Freedom House, and (b) levels of democracy as measured in the Polity IV scales. We take the number of international terrorist events, by country, from data provided by the Memorial Institute of the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) http://www.tkb.org/Home.jsp. Our analysis indicates that there is, generally, no relationship between the number of international terrorist events and the levels of civil rights, political rights, or democracy as measured by the Freedom House and Polity IV indicators. When there is a statistically significant relationship, it is negative, opposite to what is predicted by the tradeoff hypothesis.

Neo-Fascist and Far Left Terrorists in Italy: Some Biographical Observations

In recent years a good deal of concern has been expressed about the phenomenon of political terrorism in Italy. The mass media have directed our attention to spectacular acts of international terrorism committed on Italian soil by groups, largely from the Middle East, which have used the country as a teatro in which to stage their operations against targets of opportunity. Scholars and journalists have also drawn our attention to the problem of domestic terrorism. The kidnapping and assassination of the former Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978 may serve as the most dramatic example. It seems fair to say that much of this publicity has been focused on the Left. The attempts by various leftist groups, the Red Brigades (BR), Front Line (PL), Worker Autonomy (AO) and others, to use terrorist violence as a means of bringing about a Communist revolution was a source of apprehension in the Western world from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. Allegations that the revolutionary groups were aided by the Soviets or other Warsaw Pact nations, as part of an effort to destabilize the Western democracies, did much to heighten the concern.

An End to the Fourth Wave of Terrorism

It is widely believed that the current wave of religiously inspired terrorism will persist for the foreseeable future. Is this necessarily the case? This article asserts that this present wave may be cresting, much like previous waves in the modern history of terrorist violence. Further, the article goes on to forecast not an end to terrorism in general, but the likely emergence of still new manifestations of terrorist violence.

Terrorism and changes in political party systems

The subject to which this essay is devoted concerns the relationship between conventional party politics and the formation of terrorist groups. Using several collections of aggregate data, this study examines the effect of changes in party politics from the 1960s to the 1970s on the appearances of terrorist groups in many nations. Changes in the number of parties in the system, fluctuations in their electoral performances and in their parliamentary representation from one decade to the other are linked to the number of terrorist groups active in different nations. A principal finding is that nations with many leftist parties have also tended to have many terrorist groups, irrespective of the latters ideology or political outlook. The study maintains that understanding the dynamics of political party change in different nations provides insight into the origins of terrorist activity.

Voter rationality: A retest of the Downsian model

Abstract This article tests the model of voter rationality developed by Anthony Downs. Using data originally presented by Sanders (1980) and using log-linear techniques, a model is constructed that confirms Downs formulation. The analysis indicates that all of the terms proposed by Downs are required to build the model, plus several interactions among those terms. Thus the article notes that while Downs is correct, the voting decision is more complex than originally developed.

The Italian regions and the prospects for democracy

Using Putmans Making Democracy Work as the basis for our analysis, we investigate the performances of Italys regional governments and conclude that successful democratic institutions depend upon the existence of a lively ‘civic community’ where citizens participate actively in public life in a variety of ways. ‘Civic communities’ do not appear overnight; they are the product of a long process of historical evolution. The implication of Making Democracy Work is that democracy is likely to fail in countries lacking such communities, where violence and authoritarian rule prevailed until recently. The findings reported in this article challenge this pessimistic view. They do so by calling attention to the fact that the areas of Italy with the most successful regional government and lively civic communities were also the areas where Fascism and Fascist violence were most prevalent in the years following World War I. In the Italian case at least, popular support for extreme anti‐democratic forces and political violence did not pose an insuperable barrier to the formation of civic communities in later decades.