The Ambivalent Effect of Autocratization on Domestic Terrorism

Abstract

This study asks if a decline of democratic regime attributes affects the volume of domestic terrorism. We argue that different forms of autocratization may stimulate or suppress terrorist activities. Democratic backsliding may dampen domestic terrorism, while autocratic consolidation may make autocracies more vulnerable to terrorism. This study empirically tests these assumptions on time-series cross-sectional data on domestic terrorism in 182 countries between 1970 and 2020 with a difference-in-differences design. We find that democratic backsliding reduces the amount of terrorism in the short to medium term. Autocratic consolidation increases the number of terrorist attacks in the short to medium term.

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2020 Workshop on Contentious Politics in Asia, V-Dem’s East Asia Regional Center; at 2022 Autocratization Webinars Series, Université Libre de Bruxelles and Centre d’Etude de la Vie Politique; and at the Heidelberg University. We thank all participants for their helpful comments. We also thank the reviewers and editor for their invaluable feedback. All errors remain our own. We are grateful to Fabian Fassmann and Carmen Wintergerst for editorial assistance.

Disclosure Statement

The authors declare no ethical issues or conflicts of interest in this research.

Data Availability Statement

The data and materials required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures, and analyses in this article are available at the Harvard Dataverse Network, at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JWCLSB.

Notes

1 Cf. Nancy Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding,” Journal of Democracy 27, no. 1 (2016); Andrea Cassani and Luca Tomini, “Post-Cold War Autocratization: Trends and Patterns of Regime Change Opposite to Democratization,” Italian Political Science Review 49, no. 2 (2019); Stephan Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman, Dictators and Democrats: Masses, Elites, and Regime Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Haemin Jee, Hans Lueders, and Rachel Myrick, “Towards a Unified Approach to Research on Democratic Backsliding,” Democratization 29, no. 4 (2022); Carl H. Knutsen and Svend-Erik Skaaning, “The Ups and Downs of Democracy, 1789–2018,” in Why Democracies Develop and Decline, ed. Michael Coppedge et al., 29–54 (Cambridge University Press, 2022); Anna Lührmann and Staffan I. Lindberg, “A Third Wave of Autocratization Is Here: What Is New about It?,” Democratization 26, no. 7 (2019); Lars Pelke and Aurel Croissant, “Conceptualizing and Measuring Autocratization Episodes,” Swiss Political Science Review 27, no. 2 (2021); Svend-Erik Skaaning, “Waves of Autocratization and Democratization: A Critical Note on Conceptualization and Measurement,” Democratization 27, no. 8 (2020); Luca Tomini, “Don’t Think of a Wave! A Research Note about the Current Autocratization Debate,” Democratization 28, no. 6 (2021).

2 INEF, Peace Report 2022 (Bielefeld, Germany: transcript Verlag, 2022).

3 Seraphine F. Maerz et al., “State of the World 2019: Autocratization Surges – Resistance Grows,” Democratization 27, no. 6 (2020): 919.

4 Asif Efrat et al., Report on the Relationship Between Terrorist Threats and Governance Conditions in the European Union (2021), https://reconnect-europe.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/d11.3.pdf; Amichai Magen, “Fighting Terrorism: The Democracy Advantage,” Journal of Democracy 29, no. 1 (2018); Joshua Tschantret, “Democratic Breakdown and Terrorism,” Conflict Management and Peace Science (2020); see also Figure 1.

5 Matthijs Bogaards, “Kinder, Gentler, Safer? A Re-Examination of the Relationship between Consensus Democracy and Domestic Terrorism,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 43, no. 10 (2020); Erica Chenoweth, “Democratic Competition and Terrorist Activity,” The Journal of Politics 72, no. 1 (2010); Erica Chenoweth, “Terrorism and Democracy,” Annual Review of Political Science 16, no. 1 (2013); Dag A. Christensen and Jacob Aars, “Counterterrorism Policies and Attitudes Towards Out-Groups: Evidence from a Survey Experiment on Citizens’ Attitudes Towards Wiretapping,” Political Behavior 43, no. 3 (2021); Dennis M. Foster, Alex Braithwaite, and David Sobek, “There Can Be No Compromise: Institutional Inclusiveness, Fractionalization and Domestic Terrorism,” British Journal of Political Science 43, no. 3 (2013); Ted R. Gurr, Peoples versus States: Minorities at Risk in the New Century, 2nd printing (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2002); Ashlyn W. Hand and Nilay Saiya, “Democracy’s Ambivalent Effect on Terrorism,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 67, no. 7-8 (2023); Quan Li, “Does Democracy Promote or Reduce Transnational Terrorist Incidents?,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 49, no. 2 (2005); James A. Piazza, “Sore Losers: Does Terrorism and Approval of Terrorism Increase in Democracies When Election Losers Refuse to Accept Election Results?,” Political Research Quarterly 75, no. 4 (2022); Matt Qvortrup and Arend Lijphart, “Domestic Terrorism and Democratic Regime Types,” Civil Wars 15, no. 4 (2013); Yufan Yang, Joshua Tschantret, and Cody Schmidt, “Is terrorism Deadlier in Democracies?,” International Interactions 48, no. 6 (2022).

6 Aziz Huq, “Terrorism and Democratic Recession,” University of Chicago Law Review 85, no. 2 (2018); Aurel Croissant, “Radicalization, Terrorism and Democratization in Southeast Asia,” in United by Violence, Divided by Cause?, ed. La Toya Waha (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2020), 71–101; Magen, “Fighting Terrorism: The Democracy Advantage.”

7 Tschantret, “Democratic Breakdown and Terrorism.”

8 B. J. Bushman and L. R. Huesmann, “Effects of Violent Media on Aggression,” in Handbook of Children and the Media, ed. D. G. Singer and J. L. Singer, 231–48 (Los Angeles: Sage, 2012); Lars-Erik Cederman, Simon Hug, and Lutz F. Krebs, “Democratization and Civil War: Empirical Evidence,” Journal of Peace Research 47, no. 4 (2010); Martha Crenshaw, “The Causes of Terrorism,” Comparative Politics 13, no. 4 (1981): 383; Ted R. Gurr, Why Men Rebel, Fortieth anniversary paperback ed. (London: Routledge, 2011); Henry Thomson, “Rural Grievances, Landholding Inequality, and Civil Conflict,” International Studies Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2016).

9 Mia M. Bloom, “Palestinian Suicide Bombing: Public Support, Market Share, and Outbidding,” Political Science Quarterly 119, no. 1 (2004); Chenoweth, “Democratic Competition and Terrorist Activity”; William L. Eubank and Leonard Weinberg, “Does Democracy Encourage Terrorism?,” Terrorism and Political Violence 6, no. 4 (1994); Joe Eyerman, “Terrorism and Democratic States: Soft Targets or Accessible Systems,” International Interactions 24, no. 2 (1998); Shana K. Gadarian, “The Politics of Threat: How Terrorism News Shapes Foreign Policy Attitudes,” The Journal of Politics 72, no. 2 (2010); Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, Expanded, Revised Auflage (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Ruud Koopmanns, “Explaining the Rise of Racist and Extreme Right Violence in Western Europe: Grievances or Opportunities?,” European Journal of Political Research 30, no. 2 (1996); Belgin San-Akca, “Democracy and Vulnerability,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 58, no. 7 (2014); Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca and Paloma Aguilar, “Terrorist Violence and Popular Mobilization: The Case of the Spanish Transition to Democracy,” Politics & Society 37, no. 3 (2009); Alex P. Schmid, “Terrorism and Democracy,” Terrorism and Political Violence 4, no. 4 (1992).

10 Tschantret, “Democratic Breakdown and Terrorism,” 371.

11 Efrat et al., Report on the Relationship Between Terrorist Threats and Governance Conditions in the European Union; Sambuddha Ghatak, Aaron Gold, and Brandon C. Prins, “Domestic Terrorism in Democratic States: Understanding and Addressing Minority Grievances,” Journal of Conflict Resolution (2017).

12 Cf. Bogaards, “Kinder, Gentler, Safer? A Re-Examination of the Relationship between Consensus Democracy and Domestic Terrorism”; Chenoweth, “Terrorism and Democracy”; Hand and Saiya, “Democracy’s Ambivalent Effect on Terrorism.”

13 Crenshaw, “The Causes of Terrorism,” 383; Eyerman, “Terrorism and Democratic States: Soft Targets or Accessible Systems”; Li, “Does Democracy Promote or Reduce Transnational Terrorist Incidents?”; San-Akca, “Democracy and Vulnerability”; Schmid, “Terrorism and Democracy.”

14 Ryan Bakker, Daniel W Hill, and Will H. Moore, “How Much Terror? Dissidents, Governments, Institutions, and the Cross-National Study of Terror Attacks,” Journal of Peace Research (2016); Chenoweth, “Democratic Competition and Terrorist Activity”; W. Eubank and L. Weinberg, “Terrorism and Democracy: Perpetrators and Victims,” Terrorism and Political Violence 13, no. 1 (2001); Li, “Does Democracy Promote or Reduce Transnational Terrorist Incidents?”; Michael A. Rubin and Richard K. Morgan, “Terrorism and the Varieties of Civil Liberties,” ID 3361330 (Social Science Research Network, 2020); Joseph K. Young and Laura Dugan, “Veto Players and Terror,” Journal of Peace Research (2010); Joseph K. Young and Michael G. Findley, “Promise and Pitfalls of Terrorism Research,” International Studies Review 13, no. 3 (2011).

15 Bloom, “Palestinian Suicide Bombing: Public Support, Market Share, and Outbidding”; Eubank and Weinberg, “Does Democracy Encourage Terrorism?”; Eubank and Weinberg, “Terrorism and Democracy: Perpetrators and Victims”; Gadarian, “The Politics of Threat: How Terrorism News Shapes Foreign Policy Attitudes”; San-Akca, “Democracy and Vulnerability”; Sánchez-Cuenca and Aguilar, “Terrorist Violence and Popular Mobilization: The Case of the Spanish Transition to Democracy.”

16 R. J. Rummel, Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence (Abingdon: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 1997), 6.

17 Max Abrahms, “Why Democracies Make Superior Counterterrorists,” Security Studies 16, no. 2 (2007); Seung-Whan Choi, “Fighting Terrorism through the Rule of Law?,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 54, no. 6 (2010); Eyerman, “Terrorism and Democratic States: Soft Targets or Accessible Systems”; Qvortrup and Lijphart, “Domestic Terrorism and Democratic Regime Types.”

18 Alberto Abadie, “Poverty, Political Freedom, and the Roots of Terrorism,” American Economic Review 96, no. 2 (2006); Bakker, Daniel W Hill, and Moore, “How Much Terror? Dissidents, Governments, Institutions, and the Cross-National Study of Terror Attacks”; Eyerman, “Terrorism and Democratic States: Soft Targets or Accessible Systems”; Gadarian, “The Politics of Threat: How Terrorism News Shapes Foreign Policy Attitudes”; Andrew H. Kydd and Barbara F. Walter, “The Strategies of Terrorism,” International Security 31, no. 1 (2006); David A. Lake, “Rational Extremism: Understanding Terrorism in the Twenty-first Century,” Dialogue IO 1, no. 1 (2002); Li, “Does Democracy Promote or Reduce Transnational Terrorist Incidents?”; Matthew J. Nanes, “Political Violence Cycles: Electoral Incentives and the Provision of Counterterrorism,” Comparative Political Studies 50, no. 2 (2017); Robert A. Pape, “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 3 (2003).

19 Abadie, “Poverty, Political Freedom, and the Roots of Terrorism”; Joseph M. Brown, “Force of Words: The Role of Threats in Terrorism,” Terrorism and Political Violence 32, no. 7 (2020); Eyerman, “Terrorism and Democratic States: Soft Targets or Accessible Systems”; Li, “Does Democracy Promote or Reduce Transnational Terrorist Incidents?”; Sara J. Wade and Dan Reiter, “Does Democracy Matter? Regime Type and Suicide Terrorism,” Journal of Conflict Resolution no. 51 (2007); Jennifer L. Windsor, “Promoting Democratization Can Combat Terrorism,” The Washington Quarterly 26, no. 3 (2003).

20 Michael G. Findley and Joseph K. Young, “Terrorism, Democracy, and Credible Commitments,” International Studies Quarterly 55, no. 2 (2011): 370.

21 Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Malečková, “Education, Poverty and Terrorism: Is There a Causal Connection?,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 17, no. 4 (2003): 141.

22 Alan B. Krueger and David D. Laitin, “Kto Kogo? A Cross-Country Study of the Origins and Targets of Terrorism,” in Terrorism, Economic Development, and Political Openness, ed. Norman Loayza and Philip Keefer, 148–73 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

23 James I. Walsh and James A. Piazza, “Why Respecting Physical Integrity Rights Reduces Terrorism,” Comparative Political Studies 43, no. 5 (2010): 551.

24 Abadie, “Poverty, Political Freedom, and the Roots of Terrorism”; Chenoweth, “Terrorism and Democracy”; Khusrav Gaibulloev, James A. Piazza, and Todd Sandler, “Regime Types and Terrorism,” International Organization 71, no. 3 (2017); Sambuddha Ghatak, “Challenging the State: Effect of Minority Discrimination, Economic Globalization, and Political Openness on Domestic Terrorism,” International Interactions 42, no. 1 (2016); Ghatak, Gold, and Prins, “Domestic Terrorism in Democratic States: Understanding and Addressing Minority Grievances”; James A. Piazza, “Types of Minority Discrimination and Terrorism,” Conflict Management and Peace Science (2012).

25 Tschantret, “Democratic Breakdown and Terrorism,” 385.

26 Chenoweth, “Terrorism and Democracy”; Gaibulloev, Piazza, and Sandler, “Regime Types and Terrorism”; Zachary M. Jones and Yonatan Lupu, “Is There More Violence in the Middle?,” American Journal of Political Science 62, no. 3 (2018); Magen, “Fighting Terrorism: The Democracy Advantage”; Wade and Reiter, “Does Democracy Matter? Regime Type and Suicide Terrorism.”

27 Helen Fein, “More Murder in the Middle: Life-Integrity Violations and Democracy in the World, 1987,” Human Rights Quarterly 17, no. 1 (1995): 174.

28 Anna Lührmann, Marcus Tannenberg, and Staffan I. Lindberg, “Regimes of the World (RoW): Opening New Avenues for the Comparative Study of Political Regimes,” Politics and Governance 6, no. 1 (2018): 63

29 Aniruddha Bagchi and Jomon A. Paul, “Youth Unemployment and Terrorism in the MENAP (Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan) Region,” Socio-Economic Planning Sciences 64 (2018); Gaibulloev, Piazza, and Sandler, “Regime Types and Terrorism”; Ghatak, Gold, and Prins, “Domestic Terrorism in Democratic States: Understanding and Addressing Minority Grievances”; Magen, “Fighting Terrorism: The Democracy Advantage.”

30 Håvard Hegre, “Toward a Democratic Civil Peace? Democracy, Political Change, and Civil War, 1816–1992,” American Political Science Review 95, no. 1 (2001); Jones and Lupu, “Is There More Violence in the Middle?.”

31 James R. Vreeland, “The Effect of Political Regime on Civil War: Unpacking Anocracy,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 52, no. 3 (2008): 419.

32 Cf. Chenoweth, “Terrorism and Democracy”; Amélie Godefroidt, “How Terrorism Does (and Does Not) Affect Citizens’ Political Attitudes: A Meta-Analysis,” American Journal of Political Science 67, no. 1 (2023); Hand and Saiya, “Democracy’s Ambivalent Effect on Terrorism”; Badi Hasisi, Simon Perry, and Michael Wolfowicz, “Counter-Terrorism Effectiveness and Human Rights in Israel,” in International Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism, ed. Eran Shor and Stephen Hoadley, 1–21 (Singapore: Springer Singapore, 2019); Gary LaFree and Anina Schwarzenbach, “Micro and Macro-Level Risk Factors for Extremism and Terrorism: Toward a Criminology of Extremist Violence,” Monatsschrift für Kriminologie und Strafrechtsreform 104, no. 3 (2021); Li, “Does Democracy Promote or Reduce Transnational Terrorist Incidents?.”

33 Huq, “Terrorism and Democratic Recession,” 458.

34 Tschantret, “Democratic Breakdown and Terrorism,” 370.

35 ³⁵ Huq, “Terrorism and Democratic Recession,” 469–81.

36 Tschantret, “Democratic Breakdown and Terrorism,” 378–80.

37 Carl H. Knutsen and Svend-Erik Skaaning, “The Ups and Downs of Democracy, 1789–2018,” in Why Democracies Develop and Decline; Andrew T. Little and Anne Meng, Measuring Democratic Backsliding (2023).

38 Vanessa A. Boese et al., “State of the World 2021: Autocratization Changing Its Nature?,” Democratization 29, no. 6 (2022); Larry Diamond, “Democratic Regression in Comparative Perspective: Scope, Methods, and Causes,” Democratization 28, no. 1 (2021); Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman, Backsliding (Cambridge University Press, 2021); Carl H. Knutsen and Svend-Erik Skaaning, “The Ups and Downs of Democracy, 1789–2018,” in Why Democracies Develop and Decline; Lührmann and Lindberg, “A Third Wave of Autocratization Is Here: What Is New about It?.”

39 Robert C. Lieberman, Suzanne Mettler, and Kenneth M. Roberts, Democratic Resilience (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

40 Boese et al., “State of the World 2021: Autocratization Changing Its Nature?”; Cassani and Tomini, “Post-Cold War Autocratization: Trends and Patterns of Regime Change Opposite to Democratization”; Aziz Z. Huq and Tom Ginsburg, “How to Lose a Constitutional Democracy,” SSRN Electronic Journal (2017); Lührmann and Lindberg, “A Third Wave of Autocratization Is Here: What Is New about It?”; David Waldner and Ellen Lust, “Unwelcome Change: Coming to Terms with Democratic Backsliding,” Annual Review of Political Science 21, no. 1 (2018).

41 Efrat et al., Report on the Relationship Between Terrorist Threats and Governance Conditions in the European Union; Magen, “Fighting Terrorism: The Democracy Advantage.”

42 Deniz Aksoy, David B. Carter, and Joseph Wright, “Terrorism in Dictatorships,” The Journal of Politics 74, no. 3 (2012); Ursula E. Daxecker and Michael L. Hess, “Repression Hurts: Coercive Government Responses and the Demise of Terrorist Campaigns,” British Journal of Political Science 43, no. 3 (2013); Huq, “Terrorism and Democratic Recession.”

43 Lührmann and Lindberg, “A Third Wave of Autocratization Is Here: What Is New about It?,” 1096.

44 Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding,” 5.

45 There is a plethora of concepts intended to capture democratic decline such as “autocratization”, “democratic backsliding”, “democratic breakdown”, “deconsolidation”, “democratic regression”, “democratic transgression”, or “democratic decay” (see Johannes Gerschewski, “Erosion or Decay? Conceptualizing Causes and Mechanisms of Democratic Regression,” Democratization 28, no. 1 (2021): 43–62; Pelke and Croissant, “Conceptualizing and Measuring Autocratization Episodes”; Jee, Lueders, and Myrick, “Towards a Unified Approach to Research on Democratic Backsliding”). Lührmann and Lindberg, on whose definition of autocratization this article builds, distinguish between democratic recession and democratic breakdown, which both take place in democracies, and autocratic consolidation. Democratic recession and breakdown both have the same starting point in a (minimally) democratic regime, and empirically many democratic recessions in the early twenty-first century are right-censored, meaning that autocratization had not yet terminated before the country experienced either a gap in coding or the end of its coding period. Therefore, we use summarized cases of democratic erosion without (“recession”) and with regime collapse (“breakdown”) under the notion of democratic backsliding.

46 Cederman, Hug, and Krebs, “Democratization and Civil War: Empirical Evidence”; Gurr, Why Men Rebel.

47 Christopher M. Fleming et al., “Ethnic Economic Inequality and Fatalities from Terrorism,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 37, no. 11–12 (2022); Jeffrey Treistman, “Social Exclusion and Political Violence: Multilevel Analysis of the Justification of Terrorism,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism (2021).

48 Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die?, 1st ed. (New York: Crown, 2018).

49 Yunus Emre Orhan, “The Road to Democratic Backsliding”; Milan W. Svolik, “Polarization versus Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 30, no. 3 (2019).

50 David D. E. Andersen and Suthan Krishnarajan, “Economic Crisis, Bureaucratic Quality and Democratic Breakdown,” Government and Opposition 54, no. 4 (2019); Carles Boix, “Democracy, Development, and the International System,” American Political Science Review 105, no. 4 (2011); Adam Przeworski et al., Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990, 8. print, Cambridge Studies in the Theory of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

51 Haggard and Kaufman, Dictators and democrats; Kenny Miao and Jason Brownlee, “Debate: Why Democracies Survive,” Journal of Democracy 33, no. 4 (2022).

52 Ursula Daxecker, “Dirty Hands: Government Torture and Terrorism,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 61, no. 6 (2017): 1261.

53 Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding,” 6.

54 Li, “Does Democracy Promote or Reduce Transnational Terrorist Incidents?,” 287–93.

55 Cederman, Hug, and Krebs, “Democratization and Civil War: Empirical Evidence,” 384–7.

56 Courtenay R. Conrad and Will H. Moore, “What Stops the Torture?,” American Journal of Political Science 54, no. 2 (2010); Tiberiu Dragu, “The Moral Hazard of Terrorism Prevention,” The Journal of Politics 79, no. 1 (2017); Tiberiu Dragu and Mattias Polborn, “The Rule of Law in the Fight against Terrorism,” American Journal of Political Science 58, no. 2 (2014); Daxecker, “Dirty Hands: Government Torture and Terrorism”; Peter Haschke, “Ausnahmezustand: Citizenship and the Protection of Physical Integrity Rights,” in Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, 2012; Henda Y. Hsu and David McDowall, “Examining the State Repression-Terrorism Nexus: Dynamic Relationships among Repressive Counterterrorism Actions, Terrorist Targets, and Deadly Terrorist Violence in Israel,” Criminology & Public Policy 19, no. 2 (2020); James A. Piazza, “Repression and Terrorism: A Cross-National Empirical Analysis of Types of Repression and Domestic Terrorism,” Terrorism and Political Violence 29, no. 1 (2017).

57 Kosuke Imai, In Song Kim, and Erik H. Wang, “Matching Methods for Causal Inference with Time-Series Cross-Sectional Data,” American Journal of Political Science 67, no. 3 (2023), 587–605.

58 Schmid, “Terrorism and Democracy”; Bart Schuurman, “Research on Terrorism, 2007–2016: A Review of Data, Methods, and Authorship,” Terrorism and Political Violence 32, no. 5 (2020); Leonard Weinberg, A. M. Pedahzur, and Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler, “The Challenges of Conceptualizing Terrorism,” Terrorism and Political Violence 16, no. 4 (2004).

59 Schmid, “Terrorism and Democracy”; Schuurman, “Research on Terrorism, 2007–2016: A Review of Data, Methods, and Authorship”; Weinberg, Pedahzur, and Hirsch-Hoefler, “The Challenges of Conceptualizing Terrorism.”

60 We use the most recent available version of GTD, dating from May 2022.

61 National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Respones to Terrorism (START), “Global Terrorism Database (GTD),” (2019), 10, https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/.

62 Called INT_ANY variable.

63 If the location of the attacks differs from the nationality of the target or victim.

64 National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Respones to Terrorism (START), “Global Terrorism Database (GTD).”

65 Choi, “Fighting Terrorism through the Rule of Law?”; Idean Salehyan, “Best Practices in the Collection of Conflict Data,” Journal of Peace Research 52, no. 1 (2015); Todd Sandler, “On the Relationship between Democracy and Terrorism,” Terrorism and Political Violence 7, no. 4 (1995).

66 Sophia Dawkins, “The Problem of the Missing Dead,” Journal of Peace Research (2020): 1100.

67 Seraphine F. Maerz et al., “Episodes of Regime Transformation,” Journal of Peace Research (2023).

68 Lührmann and Lindberg, “A Third Wave of Autocratization Is Here: What Is New about It?,” 1098–1100.

69 Amanda B. Edgell et al., Episodes of Regime Transformation Dataset (v1.0) Codebook (2020), https://github.com/vdeminstitute/ERT.

70 Michael Coppedge et al., eds., V-Dem Codebook v10 (2020); Edgell et al., Episodes of Regime Transformation Dataset (v1.0) Codebook, 5.

71 Michael Coppedge et al., “Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy: A New Approach,” Perspectives on Politics 9, no. 2 (2011); Jan Teorell et al., “Measuring Polyarchy Across the Globe, 1900–2017,” Studies in Comparative International Development 54, no. 1 (2019).

72 Cf. Pelke and Croissant, “Conceptualizing and Measuring Autocratization Episodes.”

73 In the robustness tests we operationalize our treatment variable, autocratization, in a more conservative way by tracking the annual change between t and t + 1 on the EDI (see Supplementary Appendix).

74 Anna Lührmann, Marcus Tannenberg, and Staffan I. Lindberg, “Regimes of the World (RoW): Opening New Avenues for the Comparative Study of Political Regimes.” Politics and Governance 6, no. 1: 60–77. https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v6i1.1214

75 Cf. Christopher H. Achen, “Let’s Put Garbage-Can Regressions and Garbage-Can Probits Where They Belong,” Conflict Management and Peace Science (2016).

76 Christopher J. Fariss et al., “New Estimates of over 500 Years of Historic GDP and Population Data,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 66, no. 3 (2022).

77 S. B. Blomberg, Gregory D. Hess, and Hunter Jackson, “Terrorism and the Returns to Oil,” SSRN Electronic Journal (2008); Piazza, “Types of Minority Discrimination and Terrorism”; Matthew C. Wilson and James A. Piazza, “Autocracies and Terrorism: Conditioning Effects of Authoritarian Regime Type on Terrorist Attacks,” American Journal of Political Science 57, no. 4 (2013).

78 Brian Blankenship, “When Do States Take the Bait? State Capacity and the Provocation Logic of Terrorism,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 62, no. 2 (2018); Sambuddha Ghatak and Brandon C. Prins, “The Homegrown Threat: State Strength, Grievance, and Domestic Terrorism,” International Interactions 43, no. 2 (2017).

79 Cullen S. Hendrix, “Measuring State Capacity: Theoretical and Empirical Implications for the Study of Civil Conflict,” Journal of Peace Research (2010); Cullen S. Hendrix and Joseph K. Young, “State Capacity and Terrorism: A Two-Dimensional Approach,” Security Studies 23, no. 2 (2014).

80 Correlates of War, “National Material Capabilities,” https://correlatesofwar.org/data-sets/national-material-capabilities.

81 Seung W. Choi and James A. Piazza, “Ethnic Groups, Political Exclusion and Domestic Terrorism,” Defence and Peace Economics 27, no. 1 (2016): 41–3.

82 Kristian S. Gleditsch and Sara M. T. Polo, “Ethnic Inclusion, Democracy, and Terrorism,” Public Choice 169, no. 3–4 (2016): 210–25.

83 Ghatak and Prins, “The Homegrown Threat: State Strength, Grievance, and Domestic Terrorism.”

84 Andreas Wimmer, Lars-Erik Cederman, and Brian Min, “Ethnic Politics and Armed Conflict: A Configurational Analysis of a New Global Data Set,” American Sociological Review (2009).

85 Christopher Gelpi and Nazli Avdan, “Democracies at Risk? A Forecasting Analysis of Regime Type and the Risk of Terrorist Attack,” Conflict Management and Peace Science (2015); Li, “Does Democracy Promote or Reduce Transnational Terrorist Incidents?.”

86 Halvard Buhaug, Lars-Erik Cederman, and Jan K. Rød, “Disaggregating Ethno-Nationalist Civil Wars: A Dyadic Test of Exclusion Theory,” International Organization 62, no. 3 (2008); Kristian S. Gleditsch, “Transnational Dimensions of Civil War,” Journal of Peace Research 44, no. 3 (2007); Andreas Wimmer and Brian Min, “From Empire to Nation-State: Explaining Wars in the Modern World, 1816–2001,” American Sociological Review 71, no. 6 (2006).

87 Clayton L. Thyne, “Cheap Signals with Costly Consequences,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 50, no. 6 (2006).

88 Michael Coppedge et al., eds., V-Dem Codebook v12 (2022).

89 Gelpi and Avdan, “Democracies at Risk? A Forecasting Analysis of Regime Type and the Risk of Terrorist Attack”; Li, “Does Democracy Promote or Reduce Transnational Terrorist Incidents?.”

90 Guy Schvitz et al., “Mapping the International System, 1886-2019: The CShapes 2.0 Dataset,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 66, no. 1 (2022).

91 John Gerring et al., “Democracy and Economic Growth: A Historical Perspective,” World Politics 57, no. 3 (2005).

92 Imai, Kim, and Wang, “Matching Methods for Causal Inference with Time-Series Cross-Sectional Data.”

93 Kosuke Imai and In S. Kim, “On the Use of Two-way Fixed Effects Regression Models for Causal Inference with Panel Data,” Political Analysis (2019).

94 Ibid., 467.

95 Kosuke Imai and In S. Kim, “When Should We Use Unit Fixed Effects Regression Models for Causal Inference with Longitudinal Data?,” American Journal of Political Science 63, no. 2 (2019).

96 Stefano M. Iacus, Gary King, and Giuseppe Porro, “A Theory of Statistical Inference for Matching Methods in Causal Research,” Political Analysis 27, no. 1 (2019); Imai and Kim, “When Should We Use Unit Fixed Effects Regression Models for Causal Inference with Longitudinal Data?”; Imai, Kim, and Wang, “Matching Methods for Causal Inference with Time-Series Cross-Sectional Data”; Gary King, Christopher Lucas, and Richard Nielsen, “The Balance-Sample Size Frontier in Matching Methods for Causal Inference,” American Journal of Political Science 61, no. 2 (2017).

97 For details on the construction of the matched set by the matching method with the TSCS dataset, see Supplementary Appendix A. For a detailed discussion, see Imai, Kim, and Wang, “Matching Methods for Causal Inference with Time-Series Cross-Sectional Data.”

98 Whenever an autocratization episode ends, the following country-year is seen as a control case. All country-years that are not coded as the treatment (= autocratization) are controls, also when the country has received the treatment in previous years.

99 Daniel E. Ho et al., “Matching as Nonparametric Preprocessing for Reducing Model Dependence in Parametric Causal Inference,” Political Analysis 15, no. 3 (2007): 199–236.

100 Pelke and Croissant, “Conceptualizing and Measuring Autocratization Episodes,” 436–9.

101 Ibid.

102 Lührmann and Lindberg, “A Third Wave of Autocratization Is Here: What Is New about It?.”

103 G. Panzano, “The Impact of Autocratization on Ethnic Relations,” in Routledge Research Handbook of Autocratization, ed. A. Croissant and L. Tomini. Chapter 3.3 (London: Routledge, forthcoming).

104 Tschantret, “Democratic Breakdown and Terrorism.”