State capacity matters in ‘the middle:’ A new perspective on domestic terrorism

Abstract

When it comes to domestic terrorism (DT), state capacity matters in ‘the middle.’ Our article aims to bring together two apparently separate strands of terrorism research: one concerning the effects of regime type; and another concerning the effects of state capacity. We argue that state capacity can reduce DT in anocracies, but not so much in full dictatorships and democracies. Terrorists seek to maximize the reach of their attacks by exposing themselves to a larger audience. As a result, regimes with higher audience costs tend to be more vulnerable to domestic terror attacks. In anocracies, there is room for state capacity to influence the audience costs of a domestic terrorist attack. In full democracies and dictatorships, on the other hand, state capacity has little influence on the audience costs of DT. Consequently, if previous studies have purported linear, U-shaped, and inverted- U-shaped links between democracy and terrorism, we argue that the shape of the relationship is contingent on the level of state capacity. Theoretically, we substantiate our argument with a two-player simultaneous game between a terrorist group and a government. On the empirical side, we conduct a series of negative binomial panel regressions upon a time-series cross-sectional dataset of no less than 108 countries from 1970 to 2007.