Does Terrorism Pay? An Empirical Analysis

Max Abrahms and Matthew S. Gottfried

Terrorism and Political Violence, 2016, vol. 28, issue 1, 72-89

Abstract: Does terrorism help perpetrators to achieve their demands? Few research questions about terrorism generate as much controversy. This study contributes to the debate in two main ways. First, we identify major limitations within the burgeoning literature on the effectiveness of terrorism. Specifically, we highlight the main methodological problems vexing empirical assessments of whether terrorism promotes government concessions. Second, we present a research design that circumvents those recurrent methodological shortcomings. In short, we find no empirical evidence to suggest that terrorism pays. In fact, multiple variants of the tactic in hostage standoffs impede the perpetrators from coercing government compliance. The negative effect of terrorism on the odds of compliance is significant and substantial across logistic and multilevel logistic model specifications, particularly when civilians are killed or wounded in the coercive incident. These findings have important implications for both scholars and practitioners of counterterrorism.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09546553.2013.879057 (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:ftpvxx:v:28:y:2016:i:1:p:72-89

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ftpv20

DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2013.879057

Access Statistics for this article

Terrorism and Political Violence is currently edited by James Forest

More articles in Terrorism and Political Violence from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().