Solving the Problem of Unattributed Political Violence

Vincent Bauer, Keven Ruby and Robert Pape

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2017, vol. 61, issue 7, 1537-1564

Abstract: High rates of missing perpetrator information in political violence data pose a serious challenge for studies into militant group behavior and the microdynamics of conflict more generally. In this article we introduce multiple imputation (MI) as the best available method for minimizing the impact of missing perpetrator information on quantitative analyses of political violence, a method that can easily be incorporated into most quantitative research designs. MI will produce unbiased attributions when the reasons for missingness are known and can be controlled for using observed variables, rendering responsibility for unclaimed attacks, “missing at random†(MAR) – which we show is a reasonable assumption in the case of political violence based on current theory of militant group claiming. We lay out the logics and steps of MI, identify variables and data sources, and demonstrate that MI produced better results in the case of the Pakistani Taliban’s response to drone strikes.

Keywords: civil wars; terrorism; conflict; multiple imputation; events data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022002715612575 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jocore:v:61:y:2017:i:7:p:1537-1564

DOI: 10.1177/0022002715612575

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Conflict Resolution from Peace Science Society (International)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().