State capacity matters in ‘the middle:’ A new perspective on domestic terrorism
| Published date | 01 May 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00223433221147320 |
| Author | Seung Hoon Chae,Wukki Kim |
| Date | 01 May 2024 |
Journal of Peace Research
2024, Vol. 61(3) 366 –382
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/00223433221147320
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1225162JPR0010.1177/00223433221147320Journal of Peace ResearchChae & Kim
research-article2023
Regular Article
State capacity matters in ‘the middle:’
A new perspective on domestic terrorism
Seung Hoon Chae
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford
Wukki Kim
Department of Economics and Law, Korea Military Academy
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: on e 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.
Keywords
anocracy, audience cost, domestic terrorism, regime types, state capacity
Introduction
When it comes to domestic terrorism, state capacity
matters in ‘the middle.’
Terrorism is ‘the premeditated use or threat to use
violence by individuals or subnational groups against
noncombatants to obtain a political objective through
the intimidation of a large audience beyond that of the
immediate victims’ (Enders & Sandler, 2006: 3). Since
the primary goal of terrorism is to intimidate an audience
beyond the physical vicinity of an attack, terrorists seek
to maximize the reach of their attacks by exposing them-
selves to a larger audience (Hoffman & McCormick,
2004). What follows as a result is that regimes with larger
audience costs (Weeks, 2008) tend to suffer more from
domestic terrorist attacks (Conrad, Conrad & Young,
2014; Wilson & Piazza, 2013; Piazza, 2017). In contrast
to full democracies, however, intermediary regimes can
utilize state resources to suspend – or at least temporarily
restrict – democratic practices. As a result, for those
regimes, state capacity could substantially affect the audi-
ence costs of a terror attack. We dub this the ‘audience
restriction’ (AR) effect, because state capacity is
employed for restricting the audience of a domestic ter-
ror attack.
We focus on domestic as opposed to tran snational
terror since the key mechanism involved in our theore-
tical argument assumes that the terrorist is interested in
affecting the host country’s political outcomes such that
given alternative avenues to do so a potential terrorist
Corresponding author:
wukki.kim@kma.ac.kr
Chae & Kim 367
may instead resort to methods other than terror. The
scope of this article is also limited to domestic terrorist
attacks with casualties, which tend to target soft as
opposed to hard targets, because such attacks can gen-
erate substantially higher audience costs for the incum-
bent political leadership than attacks on hard targets.
Finally, the article primarily concentrates on the mili-
tary capacity of a state, operationalized with the Com-
posite Index of National Capacity (CINC) (version 4.0)
score (Singer, 1987; Singer, Bremer & Stuckey, 1972).
Since terrorism is a national security threat, the security
apparatus is crucial for successfully preventing and
responding to the attacks (Bove, Rivera & Ruffa,
2020). Policies designed to counter terrorist attacks are
ceteris paribus more likely to be successful when the
state has stronger war-making capabilities.
We contend that the AR depends critically on both state
capacity and the type of regime. In full dictatorships and
full democracies, state capacity makes little difference to the
AR. In full democracies, terrorists already have maximum
access to democratic institutions and practices. For
instance, the Black September Munich Olympics terrorist
attack in 1972, after receiving widespread media coverage,
ended up encouraging thousands of Palestinians to join the
terroristorganization (Hoffman,1998). Even if Germany’s
military capability were higher, Black September would
have received no less attention from the public. In full
dictatorships too, state capacity has few implications for
the AR. In 2017, as an example, Turkmenistan (a low
capability authoritarian state) was reportedly at risk of
being attacked by an extremist Islamist terror group
(Pannier, 2017). To this day, it is impossible to know
whether actual attacks took place, highlighting how ter-
rorists could hope to inflict little audience cost to a full
dictatorship, no matter how incapable it is.
By contrast, state capacity could tremendously affect
the amount of AR exercised after a terrorist attack if the
attack takes place in ‘the middle.’ In anocracies, where
democratic and autocratic features coexist, the capacity
of a state’s security apparatus critically affects the audi-
ence of a terror attack. First, sensitive information that
concerns the nation’s security will not easily leak to the
public when security forces are well-trained and highly
disciplined, meaning that news about a terrorist incident
will affect a smaller audience. Moreover, strong coercive
institutions can effectively detect and deter democratic
institutions (such as opposition parties, journalists and
civil society) that seek to generate political momentum
through a terrorist attack. Singapore, for example, intro-
duced the ‘Public Order and Safety (Special Powers) Act’
in 2018, allowing the Ministry of Home Affairs to
completely ban media coverage of terrorist events. Such
a total ban on media coverage would not be possible
without a strong and capable state apparatus.
Building upon this intuition, we present a formal argu-
ment as well as a thorough empirical evaluation of whether
state capacity and regime type (RT) could jointly affect DT.
This article’s contribution to the literature is twofold. First,
it brings together the two apparently separate strands of
terrorism research: one concerning the effects of regime
type; and another concerning the effects of state capacity.
On the one hand, a large body of research has focused on
investigating democracy’s effect on terrorism. On the other
hand, a relatively smaller group of researchers sought to
examine whether terrorism is affected by varying levels of
state capacity. Importantly, there is no evident bridge con-
necting the scholarship’s relatively recent interest in the
state capacity variable with its more traditional focus on
regime types and political institutions. Our analysis pro-
poses to address this critical gap in the field. While studies
of RT’s relation to terrorism often include state capacity as
a control variable (and vice versa), to our knowledge ours is
the first attempt to explore how the two variables may
interact with each other in their effect on terrorism. Sec-
ond, our article sheds a new perspective on the debate
about democracy’s relationship with terrorism. If previous
studies have purported linear, U-shaped, and inverted-U-
shaped links between the two variables, our study finds that
the shape of the relationship may be contingent on the level
of state capacity.
Literature review
Regime type has been a central variable to many scholars of
terrorism. From the early 1980s (Hamilton & Hamilton,
1983), scholars have sought to understand whether democ-
racy renders terrorism more likely or less. On the one hand,
proponents of ‘strategic influence’ posit that terrorism
would thrive in the midst of the relative freedoms and
many political constraints that characterize democracies.
Civil liberties could lower the marginal costs of terrorism
(Schmid, 1992; Eyerman, 1998), while a free press adds
publicity to terrorist attacks (Wilkinson, 1986; Eubank &
Weinberg, 1994). Indeed, the vast majority of empirical
studies have found democracy to positively affect the fre-
quency of terrorist events (Eubank & Weinberg, 1994,
2001; Weinberg & Eubank, 1994; Pape, 2003; Li &
Schaub, 2004; Braithwaite & Li, 2007; Lai, 2007; Piazza,
2007, 2008; Chenoweth, 2010, 2013; Dreher & Fischer,
2010; San-Akca, 2014).
A different school of thought argues that democracy
could deter terrorism by providing dissidents with
2journal of PEACE RESEARCH XX(X)
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