The empirical relationship between commitment enhancement devices and terrorism

Kendrick Morales, Prosper Raynold and Jing Li

Applied Economics, 2018, vol. 50, issue 50, 5366-5380

Abstract: An extant theoretical literature attributes the high lethality of violent extremist religious sects (VERSs) to their comparative advantage in assembling coalitions of highly committed operatives and identifies sacrifice and stigma (S&S) and social service provision (SSP) as the primary commitment enhancement devices VERSs employ. However, lack of direct measures of the VERSs’ deployment of these devices has impeded efforts to test the hypothesized effects of S&S and SSP on terrorism. This article exploits the relationship between exogenous variation in the marginal productivities of S&S and SSP as inputs in the production of commitment and variation in VERSs’ employment of these inputs to identify proxies for S&S and SSP. Using data from 158 countries, our cross-sectional estimates of the effects of S&S and SSP on the impact of terrorism are significant and larger than the effects of geographic and political variables that are consistently reported to be both significant and substantial.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00036846.2018.1486991 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:applec:v:50:y:2018:i:50:p:5366-5380

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEC20

DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2018.1486991

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().