Democracy, Regime Durability and Terrorism in Africa

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the causal linkages among democracy, regime durability and terrorism for a panel of 53 African countries over the period 1980-2012. Due to the count nature of terrorism data, the study employs a negative binomial regression estimator. The empirical analysis is based on four terrorism types namely: domestic, transnational, uncertain and total terrorism respectively. The following are the key findings: First, with the exception of the specification relating to uncertain terrorism, the unconditional effect of democracy was found to be negative on the other three dimensions of terrorism. Second, the unconditional impact of regime durability was also positive on terrorism with the exception of uncertain terrorism but in a rather inconsistent manner. Third, the interactions between democracy and regime durability are found to have positive marginal effects on all the terrorism types except uncertain terrorism. Fourth, the net effects of interaction between democracy and regime durability are positive across various models of these terrorism measures. Lastly, the theoretical priors of other covariates are equally validated across different measures of terrorism. On the policy arena, mitigating terrorism would require embracing democratic regime and mainstreaming the concomitant doctrines into the politico-institutional architecture but not without moderation in regime elongation..

KEYWORDS:

• Democracy
• regime durability
• terrorism
• generalized method of moments
• Africa

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D74
• H10
• O40

List of Countries

Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cabo Verde, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo Dem. Rep., Congo Rep., Cote D’Ivoire, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, the Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Swaziland, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. There have been many recorded cases of terror attacks before 11 September 2001 but terrorism was specially accorded global attention after the 9/11 incident.

2. It is not our intention here to present exhaustive details of the literature since an extensive body of literature already exists on the causal relationship between democracy and terrorism.

3. The primary source of Alesina et al’s (2003) dataset as well are from the Encyclopedia Britannica (2000), CIA (2000), Levinson (1998), Minority Rights Group International (1997) and National Censuses (various issues).

4. See the Appendix 1.

5. Domestic terrorism can be said to include all incidences of terrorist activities that involves the nationals of the venue country; Transnational Terrorism is terrorist activities which include two or more countries; Unclear is a terrorist act that stands in between domestic and transnational on whose decision of where it eventually falls is hard to take; and finally, Total is the summation of the above-mentioned terrorism categories.

6. It is important, however, to state that, having too many controls may complicate the estimation results (see, Achen, 2002). As a consequence, we only attempted to alternate some of the controls across the models with the exception of model 10 of our results in Table 3–6 respectively.

7. For further reading, see Posner (2004).

8. We do not attempt to elaborate on the controls since they do not constitute our primary reason for conducting the study in the first place.