“The Political Effectiveness of Terrorism Revisited”, 2012-02-16 (; backlinks; similar):
Terrorists attack civilians to coerce their governments into making political concessions. Does this strategy work?
To empirically assess the effectiveness of terrorism, the author exploits variation in the target selection of 125 violent sub-state campaigns. The results show that terrorist campaigns against civilian targets are statistically-significantly less effective than guerrilla campaigns against military targets at inducing government concessions. The negative political effect of terrorism is evident across logit model specifications after carefully controlling for tactical confounds.
Drawing on political psychology, the author concludes with a theory to account for why governments resist compliance when their civilians are targeted.
[Keywords: terrorism, coercion, civilian targeting, political psychology]