Security Studies, 18:756–788, 2009Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0963-6412 print / 1556-1852 onlineDOI: 10.1080/09636410903369027

Researching Democracy and Terrorism:

How Political Access Affects Militant Activity

RISA BROOKS

Strikingly, little systematic study of the relationship between democ-racy and terrorism has been undertaken. This article addresses thislacuna by laying some groundwork for further analytical studyof the issues. It does so, first, by suggesting a family of indepen-dent variables related to the concept of political access that mightbe employed in this research; and second, by introducing a moreexpansive set of dependent variables, which will help capture the di-verse effects of political access on militant group activity. The bulkof the paper examines the variety of causal logics that could po-tentially connect democracy and terrorist group activity, drawingfrom five analytical approaches to understanding terrorist motiva-tion evident in the literature. Two major conclusions follow fromthe analysis. First, the democracy and terrorism debate constitutesnot one research question, but many. Second, the prediction thatfollows from many approaches to terrorist motivation is not thatdemocracy should promote an easy, inevitable lessening of terror-ism. Rather, a more refined understanding of when democracy, orother forms of political access, may reduce violence or yield otherdesirable (and undesirable) outcomes is essential.

Promoting democracy has long played a role in United States foreign policy,but in recent years it has emerged as one of the country’s primary instrumentsof statecraft. Among the central arguments in favor of democracy promotionhas been its putative benefits for reducing the incidence of global terrorism.

Risa Brooks is assistant professor of Political Science at Northwestern UniversityFor comments, the author wishes to thank especially Robert Pape, Robert Art, Ron

Krebs, and participants in the Chicago Project on Suicide (CPOST) workshop at the Universityof Chicago, September 2007.

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As, for example, the George W. Bush administration articulated in its 2006National Security Strategy, with the advancement of democracy, the condi-tions allowing terrorist groups to operate will worsen and therefore theirincentives to continue operations will diminish: democracy is less likely togenerate terrorists and terrorist violence.1

Although the Bush administration was an especially forceful advocate ofthis view, it resonates across the political spectrum. Take, for example, theclaim by Jennifer Windsor, executive director of Freedom House, who whenspeaking about the Middle East in summer 2003 argued that “promotingdemocratization in the closed societies of the Middle East can provide a setof values and ideas that offer a powerful alternative to the appeal of thekind of extremism that today has found expression in terrorist activity.”2

Her comments echo claims by Martin Indyk in 2002, a senior official in theClinton administration, and by Strobe Talbott who five years prior, as deputysecretary of state under President Clinton, argued that democracies werebetter prepared to confront the challenges of terrorism.3 In short, as oneanalyst (like Windsor, in addressing the Middle East), nicely captures theattraction of these ideas, “Most experts on both the left and the right agreethat promoting democracy will help address the root causes of terrorism inthe region, though they differ on what degree. The reasoning is simple: ifArabs and Muslims lack legitimate, peaceful outlets with which to expresstheir grievances, they are more likely to resort to violence.”4

1 See especially “Strengthen Alliances to Defeat Global Terrorism and Work to Pre-vent Attacks Against Us and Our Friends,” in The National Security Strategy (March 2006),http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2006/. See also George W. Bush, speech to the National En-dowment for Democracy, United States Chamber of Commerce, Washington, DC, 6 November 2003,http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031106-2.html; Dick Cheney, keynote address tothe Weinberg Founders Conference 2007, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Washington, DC,21 October 2007, www.washingtoninstitute.org; Paula Dobriansky, Under Secretary of State for GlobalAffairs, “Promoting Democracy in the 21st Century: An essential tool against terrorism” (speech, BaltimoreCouncil on Foreign Affairs, Baltimore, MD, 9 February 2004). See also “Democracy and Security: The BushDoctrine is Alive and Well,” editorial endorsement, Wall Street Journal, 26 March 2006.

2 Jennifer Windsor, “Promoting Democratization Can Combat Terrorism,” Washington Quarterly 26,no. 3 (Summer 2003): 43–58.

3 Strobe Talbott, “Democracy and the International Interest” (speech, Denver Summit of the EightInitiative on Democracy and Human Rights, Denver, CO, October 1997); Martin Indyk, “Back to theBazaar,” Foreign Affairs 81, no. 1 (January/February 2002): 75–88.

4 Shadi Hamid, “Engaging Political Islam to Promote Democracy,” Policy Report (Washington, DC:Progressive Policy Institute, 27 June 2007). Note that there are also critiques of the democracy-terrorthesis from across the political spectrum. See for example, Thomas Carothers, “Promoting Democracyand Fighting Terror,” Foreign Affairs (January/February 2003); Dennis Roddy, “Democracy, Terror andFantasy,” Pittsburgh Post Gazette, 27 February 2005; F. Gregory Gause III, “Can Democracy Stop Terror-ism?” Foreign Affairs, (September/October 2005); Francis Fukuyama and Adam Garfinkle, “A better idea:promote democracy and prevent terrorism-but don’t conflate the two,” Wall Street Journal, 27 March2006. See also Joseph Nye’s more qualified comments. Joseph Nye, “Can Democracy Defeat Terrorism?”Taipei Times, 31 August 2005. For more on the debate, see Dalia Dassa Kaye, Frederic Wehrey, Audra K.Grant, and Dale Stahl, More Freedom, Less Terror? Liberalization and Political Violence in the Arab World(Santa Monica: RAND, 2008).

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That the idea of spreading democracy as a means to reduce terroristviolence has many supporters, in fact, is unsurprising. It has profound in-tuitive appeal: provide mechanisms for the peaceful redress of grievances,and militant groups and the societies that support them will forgo violencein favor of nonviolent political action. In other words, terrorism is a tool oflast resort, used only in the absence of peaceful opportunities for politicalexpression.

Given the centrality of these ideas, both to policy debate and to thescholarly study of political violence, it is striking how little systematic studyof the relationship between democracy and terrorism has been undertaken.Aside from a smattering of case studies and large-n empirical analyses, min-imal research has been completed on the topic. As one recent study relates,when a senior Bush administration official involved in drafting the presi-dent’s 2006 National Strategy for Combating Terrorism was asked to justifythe document, he could not cite a single authoritative study in support ofthe contention that the spread of democracy reduces terrorist violence.5

The goal of this article is help address this lacuna. It does so with aparticular approach. Rather than assess different cases, as have some recent,useful efforts, or mediate the policy debate, it attempts to lay some ground-work for further analytical inquiry into the relationship between democracyand terrorism.6 It does so in three ways.

First, I seek to expand our understanding of the independent variable inthe debate: that is to highlight the importance of the implications of what weprecisely mean by “democracy” and indeed ask whether that is the most use-ful conceptualization to employ within an emergent research program. HereI highlight the core logic underlying the democracy-terror thesis, suggestingthat a broader concept, “political access,” better captures the central propo-sition that expanding opportunities to participate in political systems affectsmilitant incentives and behavior. Political access, in turn, is conceptualizedas encompassing a family of independent variables in which the specificvariable employed should depend on the analyst’s research question.

Second, I seek to expand our understanding of the outcomes that mayresult if we study the effects of political access on militant groups. Looselyconceived, the question has been framed as how democracy affects theincidence of terrorist violence—an important dependent variable. But, in fact,political access could have a number of effects on terrorist groups, aside from

5 Noted in Dassa Kaye, et al., More Freedom, Less Terror, 1, originally cited in Michael Hirsch,“Where’s the Clarity? Five Years After 9/11, Little of Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ Rhetoric Is Making Sense,”Newsweek.com, 7 September 2006, http://www.newsweek.com/id/45728?tid=relatedcl.

6 For recent case studies, see Dassa Kaye, et al., More Freedom, Less Terror; Cindy R. Jebb, P.H.Liotta, Thomas Sherlock, and Ruth Margolies Beilter, The Fight for Legitimacy: Democracy vs. Terrorism(Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2006). On the policy debate, see, for example, the exchangebetween Gause and Dobriansky. Gause, “Can Democracy Stop Terrorism”; Paula J. Dobriansky and HenryA. Crumpton, “Tyranny and Terror,” Foreign Affairs (January/February 2006).

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(directly) influencing the incidence of violent attacks. As I explain below,we need to expand our conception of the dependent variable, to exploreeffects on other innovations in strategy, methods, and organizational form.

Finally, and most substantially, this article examines the variety of causallogics that could potentially connect democracy and terrorist group activity.Here I draw from existing theories of what motivates militant groups to useterrorist violence.7 As I explain below, much of the current debate on thedemocracy and terrorism question presupposes one such theory of motiva-tion: terrorist groups are fundamentally motivated by, or constrained by, thesocieties in which they operate. There are however at least four other majorschools of thought that conceptualize the origins of terrorist violence verydifferently. Indeed, according to these alternative perspectives, the decisionto engage in terrorist attacks could result from a complex assessment of costsand benefits in which a variety of factors influence the choice of terrorism(strategic choice approaches). Alternatively, the use of terrorism by a militantgroup could originate in group or individual psychological attributes (psy-chological approaches); in ideational factors and the doctrine or ideology theleadership espouses (ideational approaches); in intra-organizational dynam-ics (organizational approaches); or, as suggested above, in pressures fromlocal society (societal approaches). In order to understand how groups mightrespond to democracy or political access, we must root our theories in clearunderstandings of what is motivating them to use terrorism in the first place.Accordingly, in this article I filter the effects of political access through thesefive models of terrorist motivation to see what the different approaches sug-gest for how groups will react if their opportunities to participate in politicsexpand.

Two major conclusions follow from the analysis. First, we begin tosee that the democracy and terrorism debate constitutes not one researchquestion, but many. Conceptualizing political access in its variety of formsraises questions about how different types of opportunities to participate inpolitics might affect militant groups’ strategies and activities. In turn, different,and sometimes contradictory, hypotheses emerge about the nature of thoseactivities when we build theories grounded in alternative approaches tounderstanding terrorist motivation.

Second, and perhaps more provocatively, we see that we must resistthe impulse to assume a positive relationship between promoting democ-racy and reducing terrorism. The prediction that follows from many ap-proaches to terrorist motivation is not that democracy should promote an

7 Note that in this article I intend the concept of terrorism to refer to the use of violence aimed atkilling— or threatening to kill—people or destroying property to generate fear and the anticipation offuture harm, as a way of coercing an opposing government, society, or authority. On the controversiessurrounding efforts to define terrorism, see, for example, Alex P. Schmid and Albert J. Jongman, PoliticalTerrorism, rev. ed. (1984; repr., New Brunswick: Transaction, 1988); Andrew Silke, “An Introduction toTerrorism Research,” in Andrew Silke, ed., Research on Terrorism (London: Frank Cass, 2004).

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easy, inevitable lessening of terrorism. In many cases, the beneficial effectsof providing militants political access depend on a range of factors and par-ticular characteristics of the group and its environment. Even more sobering,some approaches to motivation suggest political access could enhance in-centives to engage in terror attacks, perhaps even against civilians, or toother variations in strategy, such as the development of political wings asadjuncts to armed wings or to terrorist groups splintering and dividing intomultiple—including some especially violent—entities.

In short, we need to take care analytically—and by implicationpractically—in specifying the conditions under which democracy should leadto declines in terrorist attacks. The effects of political access may be contraryto that outcome, or tangential to it. Consequently, any unqualified advocacyof democracy as a panacea to terrorism should be viewed with significantapprehension. Rather, the goal should be to develop a more refined under-standing of when democracy, or other forms of political access, may reduceviolence or yield other desirable (and undesirable) outcomes. This will laythe groundwork for a research program in which we might cumulate ourknowledge and engage in greater, analytically minded, empirical research asthe basis for informed policy.

WHAT IS THE INDEPENDENT VARIABLE(S)?

Underlying the proposition that democracy reduces terrorism is a hypoth-esis about the equilibrating effects of open political systems on militantviolence: democracy increases militant groups’ opportunities to participatein institutional politics and other nonviolent forms of political activity andtherefore reduces incentives to resort to violence. Specifically, in what Joe Ey-erman calls the political access school,8 democracy is viewed as a mechanism

8 Joe Eyerman, “Terrorism and Democratic States: soft targets or accessible systems,” InternationalInteractions 24, no. 2 (1998): 151–70. In addition, the series of studies by Eubank and Weinberg all ex-plore, in various ways, how democratic institutions affect the incidence of terrorist violence at the nationallevel. William Eubank and Leonard Weinberg, “Does Democracy Encourage Terrorism?” Terrorism andPolitical Violence 6, no. 4 (1994): 417–43; William Eubank and Leonard Weinberg, “Terrorism and Democ-racy: What Recent Events Disclose,” Terrorism and Political Violence 10, no. 1 (1998); William Eubankand Leonard Weinberg, “Terrorism and Democracy: Perpetrators and Victims,” Terrorism and PoliticalViolence 13, no. 1 (2001): 155–64. See also Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Maleckova, “Education, Poverty andTerrorism: Is there a Causal Connection?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 17, no. 4 (Fall 2003); Krueger,What makes a terrorist; Alberto Abadie, Poverty, Political Freedom and the Roots of Terrorism, FacultyResearch Working Paper Series, JFK School of Government (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, October2004); James A. Piazza, “Draining the Swamp: democracy promotion, state failure and terrorism in 19Middle Eastern Countries,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 30, no. 6 (2007): 521–39; Quan Li, “DoesDemocracy Promote or Reduce Transnational Terrorist Incidents?” Journal of Conflict Resolution 49, no.2 (April 2005): 278-97.

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legalizing and institutionalizing political action, making alternative channelsfor influencing state policy available.9

Although not the only logic that connects democracy and terrorism,the political access perspective is a dominant theme in the small scholarlyliterature on the topic that currently exists.10 Herein lies a first limitationin the debate as it has been heretofore conceptualized: equating democracywith political access is conceptually and empirically problematic. Democracyis neither necessary nor sufficient for groups to enjoy political access in astate.

To start, democracy does not guarantee political access to all groupsand constituencies within society. Even if formal rules allow for competitiveelections, the actual capacity to mobilize and grow a political movementin order to contest those elections may be limited due to other features ofthe political environment. For example, political access may be truncated inprocedural or electoral democracies in which civil liberties, and thereforethe capacity to freely organize and associate, are limited. In the worst cases,social polarization and weak central authority may contribute to the govern-ment or local authorities engaging in on-going campaigns against segmentsof the population, limiting its ability to mobilize even where democraticinstitutions are formally in place.11 Moreover, even absent outright repres-sion, the efficacy of political action within democratic institutions may bein doubt. Long-standing social cleavages, domination by deeply entrenched

9 See Alex P. Schmid, “Terrorism and Democracy,” Terrorism and Political Violence 4, no. 4 (1992):14–25; Jeffrey Ian Ross, “Structural Causes of Oppositional Terrorism: Towards a Causal Model,” Journalof Peace Research 30, no. 3 (August 1993): 317-29. Note this logic suggests that the argument bestapplies to non-state actors excluded from power (rather than those within the state apparatus and whotherefore have access) using violence against their own (versus foreign) state governments and complicitpopulations. My discussion for this reason focuses on groups’ use of violence against the groups’ ownstates and not transnational violence or state-led terrorist acts.

10 One other logic relates to the inadequacy of democracies in protecting against terrorism. Per-haps best articulated by Eubank and Weinberg, according to this line of argument, the openness ofdemocratic societies makes it easier for terrorists to mobilize and harder for government officials tolaunch effective counterterror operations: democracy increases the incidence of terrorism. One immedi-ate counter is that there is tremendous variation in the nature and success of counterterror operationsin democracies. See Robert Art and Louise Richardson, Democracy and Counterterrorism: Lessons fromthe Past (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2007). Generally, however, althoughthe democracy-as-vulnerable-to-terrorism thesis merits greater analysis, I stay with the political accesslogic in this paper in large part because of its current influence in the scholarly and policy realms. SeeEubank and Weinberg “Terrorism and Democracy: What Recent Events Disclose”; Eubank and Weinberg,“Terrorism and Democracy: Perpetrators and Victims.”

11 Alternatively, a state may be in transition from authoritarianism, and the newly democratizedregime may lack the ability to credibly commit to end repression of suppressed minorities or be unwillingto do so. See Martha Crenshaw, “Political Explanations,” Addressing the Causes of Terrorism: The Clubde Madrid Series on Democracy and Terrorism, vol. 1, The Madrid Summit Working Paper Series, TheInternational Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security, 8-11 March 2005 (Madrid: Club de Madrid,2005), 15; For an example from the Basque case, see Goldie Shabad and Francisco Jose Llera Ramo,“Political Violence in a Democratic State: Basque Terrorism in Spain,” in Terrorism in Context, ed. MarthaCrenshaw (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 1995), 420. See also note 17.

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TABLE 1 Forms of Political Access

Environments or Mechanisms that Facilitate or Enhance Participation in a Political System

�Liberal Democracy�Procedural Democracy�Liberalized Autocracy�Reformed Democracy�Accommodation in Partly Free Democracy or Autocracy

�Targeted Concessions�Selective Tolerance

political parties, or other features of the party system and political institutionsmay make it difficult to enter the political system, or to have much influencewithin it. In short, competitive elections are not sufficient to ensure that thereare clear benefits to peaceful political action: democracy does not guaranteepolitical access.

Neither are democratic institutions necessary to ensure political accessfor militant groups: the absence of democracy does not (always) preventgroups from enjoying political access. Authoritarian states may liberalizeand allow space, albeit circumscribed, for political expression and groupsmay be able to capitalize on those openings and grow their movementspeacefully. Alternatively, political leaders in those states might make spe-cific allowances for a targeted group in an effort to co-opt its leadership;they may grant concessions, facilitating the group’s representation in whatis otherwise a restrictive political system. Or they may simply tolerate agroup’s existence as long as it does not overtly challenge their right torule. In other words, political access may be afforded by different forms ofstate-led accommodation in otherwise not fully democratic, or authoritarian,settings.12

In sum, democracy may be a useful shorthand, but analytically theconcept fails to capture the range of factors that influence the actual openingsfor participation in the political system. What is required, I suggest, is a familyof independent variables and accompanying measures under the rubric of“political access” (see Table 1).

There are doubtless many ways we could discriminate among the vari-ety of forms of political access. In Table 1, I provide an illustration of oneapproach, which is intended not as a definitive statement of how we shouldmake these distinctions but as a means of underscoring the potential diver-sity of forms that could be analytically significant. For example, we mightdistinguish among the following: liberal democracy (expansive political

12 On the importance of liberalization, as apart from democracy, see Dassa Kaye, et al., MoreFreedom, Less Terror; Alan. B. Krueger, What Makes a Terrorist? (Princeton: Princeton University Press,2007).

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participation, civil-liberties protections, and legal rights)13; proceduraldemocracy (elections without accompanying political rights and civil-liberties)14; liberalized autocracy (no free and fair elections but some po-litical rights and civil-liberties)15; reformed democracy (institutional or otherreforms that expand de facto opportunities for participation in otherwise dejure democracies); accommodation in partly free democracy or autocracy,which could consist of targeted concessions (explicit efforts to provide pre-rogatives that enhance political representation, even in otherwise restricteddemocratic or autocratic setting) or what might be understood as selectivetolerance (implicit tolerance of political activity by a group, where suchactivity by mass and other groups is generally circumscribed).

What the phenomena in Table 1 share is that each represents a mecha-nism or environment that creates an opening for militant groups to engagein nonviolent political activity. Where they differ is in the specific natureor manifestation of that opening; each form of political access differs inwhat exactly the opening consists and therefore the specific incentives andopportunities available to groups.

By moving beyond the concept of democracy and developing a morecomprehensive understanding of the variety of forms political access cantake, we expand our capacity to analyze how the range of changing in-centives created by political environments actually affect a group’s strategicchoices and activities. Different definitions of political access might be em-ployed, in turn, depending on the question under investigation. For example,to evaluate the effects of creating more space for political competition on

13 For a concise description of the tenets of liberal democracy, see Larry Diamond, “The Global Stateof Democracy,” Current History 99, no. 641 (December 2000): 414–15. On liberal democracy vs. illiberaldemocracy, see Fareed Zakaria, “The rise of illiberal democracy” Foreign Affairs (1997).

14 Here I refer to Freedom House’s terminology, which defines political rights as involving threesets of criteria associated with electoral processes, political pluralism and participation, and functioningof government. Civil liberties consist of attributes associated with freedom of expression and belief,associational and organizational rights, rule of law, and personal autonomy and individual rights. Fordetails, see www.FreedomHouse.org. Note that we might also include democratizing states here, if wedistinguish those as states that have established the basic institutions for competitive elections but notother features of liberal democracies. Alternatively, it might make sense to create a different category of“democratizing” states or those in transition from autocracy to democracy if we anticipate that there issomething unique about the kinds of political access and the incentives therein of states in the processof change from one system to another. For an argument that the transition phase is a unique form ofpolitical environment that engenders particular incentives, see Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder,Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). Dassa Kaye,et al., More Freedom, Less Terror argues also that change in a system—for that study, back-tracking fromnewly established liberalization measures—is especially likely to bolster political violence.

15 These can be defined as a type of political system involving guided pluralism, controlled elec-tions, and selective repression. See Daniel Brumberg, “The Trap of Liberalized Autocracy,” Journal ofDemocracy 13, no. 4 (October 2002): 56–68; Daniel Brumberg, “Liberalization Versus Democracy,” inUncharted Journey: Promoting Democracy in the Middle East, ed. Thomas Carothers and Marina Ottaway(Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005), 15–35. Alternatively, liberalizedautocracy might be seen as one point on a continuum of regime type, in which a state exhibits notable,but not comprehensive, political rights and civil liberties.

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TABLE 2 Alternative (potential) Dependent Variables

Dimensions of Militant Activity Influenced by Political Access

�Incidence of Attacks�Targeting (civilians vs. regime allies, property)�Tactics (for example, suicide bombing vs. other methods)�Intensity of campaign (degree to which group can undertake frequent, simultaneous,

coordinated attacks against secured targets)�Diversification/Hybridization (establishment of hybrid organizations with interdependent

political and military wings)�Splintering (division of group into multiple, independent groups)�End of Group (evolution into nonviolent entity, such as political party, or demise)

societal support for violence and therefore militant activity, we might defineaccess in terms of liberalized autocracy.16 To evaluate how militant leadersrespond to focused efforts to enhance their group’s participation in politicalinstitutions, emphasizing governmental officials’ accommodative strategiesmay make sense. If we want to understand how the basic opportunity toparticipate in elections shapes militant group incentives, even absent otherfeatures of liberal democracy, we could define political access in terms ofprocedural democracy (see Table 2).

In sum, democracy is too rough a concept if we are to capture and studythe actual effects of changing opportunities in the political environment onmilitant activity. We need a broader family of variables under the rubricof political access, from which analysts can then specify the form underinvestigation.

Accordingly, in the text that follows, I forgo use of the term “democracy”in favor of “political access.” For reasons of space, working through thelogic of each form of access in light of the five approaches to terroristmotivation discussed below is infeasible. So, I rely primarily on the genericconcept of political access and explore the general logic of creating moreopportunities for a group to participate in political institutions. However,where a specific definition of political access might yield especially uniqueor notable predictions, I specify more precisely how that access manifests.

WHAT IS THE DEPENDENT VARIABLE(S)?

A second step in developing a research program is expanding our under-standing of the dependent variable in the political access and terror debate.As noted above, heretofore the primary outcome of interest has been the

16 See Dassa Kaye, et al., More Freedom, Less Terror. See also Krueger, What makes a Terrorist.

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incidence of terrorist attacks.17 Yet, focusing primarily on the number of at-tacks may obscure other effects of political access on innovations in strategyor organizational form.

For example, political access may promote innovations in the qualita-tive nature of a group’s terrorist methods—including the scope and size ofoperations—who is targeted, or what tactics are used in attacks. Insightsfrom what I introduce above as a societal approach to terrorist motivationillustrate this point. From that perspective, political access affect terrorism byinfluencing the attitudes and behaviors toward the use of terrorism within agroup’s community of supporters:18 When those supporters cease to supportthe use of violence, this line of argument suggests, the group will reduce theincidence of violent attacks.

The lack of social support, however, could do more than affect theincidence of attacks. Indeed, it could deprive the group of crucial resources,such as local security, that might result in less complex forms of attacks;militants may have a harder time engaging in coordinated and simultaneousattacks against hardened and secured targets and may instead be forcedto choose more accessible locations or individuals that require less localsecurity, planning, and logistical support. Alternatively, social support couldaffect the preferred targets of terrorists—whether those be regime allies, likemilitary personnel or politicians, or bystander civilians—or it could affect thespecific tactics employed in attacks. For example, recent studies demonstratethat where local communities tolerate the use of suicide bombing, militantorganizations are more likely to engage in this especially virulent form ofkilling.19 In sum, by focusing only on the incidence of attacks, we may missthese other innovations in strategy that relate less to how much a groupattacks versus how it attacks.

Moreover, we may miss other diversifications in militant methods thatare influenced by the degree of political access groups enjoy. For exam-ple, where groups benefit from political access (as expressed in proceduraldemocracy, liberalized autocracy, or reformed democracy), they may havestronger incentive to invest in participating in political parties as comple-ments to their terrorist wings’ activities.20 Groups may develop what I callhybrid organizations. Here, the movement splits into two closely allied but

17 See Eubank and Weinberg, “Terrorism and Democracy: What Recent Events Disclose”; Eubank andWeinberg, “Terrorism and Democracy: Perpetrators and Victims”; Eyerman, “Terrorism and DemocraticStates”; Piazza, “Draining the Swamp”; Li, “Does Democracy Promote or Reduce Transnational TerroristIncidents?”

18 In many places, this is a religious or ethnic community or some subsection thereof: the IRA

(Catholics), ETA (Basque population), Hamas (Palestinians), and Hezbollah (Lebanese Shia).19 Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, (New York: Random

House, 2005), 94-100; Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Bombing (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2005), 19–44.

20 On developing political parties, see Leonard Weinberg and Ami Pedahzur, Political Parties andTerrorist Groups (London: Routledge, 2003).

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separate organizations, one of which pursues violent armed struggle and theother nonviolent political party activity.21

Alternatively, we may see the splintering and division of a movementinto wholly separate organizations as political access expands. Moderatesmay split off, as ETA experienced in Spain’s post-Franco transition, and, sub-sequently, with changes in the country’s political environment.22 Here wesee the emergence of distinct, independent entities, some of which may de-vote themselves to nonviolent political action, while others continue theirarmed activities.23

Finally, there is one other possible strategic outcome we should con-sider: the possibility a group does not just attack less but goes out of businessaltogether. Access to nonviolent forms of political activity could yield a re-nunciation of violence or the potential dismantlement or morphing of thegroup into another form of political movement, such as a political party.24

In short, when studying how political access affects militant groups, weshould not limit ourselves to strictly focusing on the incidence of attacks—despite the manifest importance of the issue—but also examine the potentialeffects on other dimensions of militant strategy and activities.

POLITICAL ACCESS AND MILITANT ACTIVITY: EXPLORING THECAUSAL LOGICS

Below I examine the implications of five approaches to militant group moti-vation for how political access affects militant activity: strategic choice, psy-chological, ideational, organizational, and societal approaches. They eachrepresent major themes of terrorist motivation in the scholarly literature. Foreach category of motivation, I examine how, given the basic premises of theapproach, changes in the exogenous, political environment might affect thegroup, its reactions or calculations, and consequently influence the strategiesit pursues. I also marshal the small amount of existing empirical evidenceand research within these traditions to see how it bears out the hypothesizedeffects of political access on terrorism.

21 These hybrids appear to be surprisingly common. One study shows that of 399 contemporaryterrorist groups, 124 are affiliates with or splits from political parties. Study cited in Ted Robert Gurr,“Economic Factors,” Addressing the Causes of Terrorism: The Club de Madrid Series on Democracy andTerrorism, vol. 1, The Madrid Summit Working Paper Series, The International Summit on Democracy,Terrorism and Security, 8–11 March 2005 (Madrid: Club de Madrid, 2005); Weinberg and Pedahzur,Political Parties and Terrorist Groups. In fact, several contemporary and historical militant groups haveaffiliated political parties or participate in party politics. Prominent examples include groups like ETA, theProvisional IRA, and Hamas.

22 Shabad and Llera Ramo, “Political Violence in a Democratic State.”23 We also see the hybrid phenomenon with the emergence of ETA’S political wing, Herri Batasuna,

and the political party’s successors.24 On the demise of terrorist groups, see Audrey Kurth Cronin, “How Al-Qaida Ends: The Decline

and Demise of Terrorist Groups,” International Security 31, no. 1 (Summer 2006): 7–48.

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Note that while I try to be complete in exploring the different frame-works, I am not able to capture in the discussion below every potentialhypothesis we might investigate. In addition, some frameworks are so skele-tal and poorly specified that extrapolating logical implications from them canyield different, even contradictory hypotheses. The goal, nevertheless is toshow how different approaches, given their different objects of analysis andassumptions about what motivates group behavior, yield variable predictionsabout how access should affect terrorism.

The Strategic Choice Approach

A strategic choice approach to explaining terrorist activity views terrorismas a means to an end—a strategy chosen from among many to achieve agroup’s stated objectives—versus a form of expression with intrinsic value.As such, a strategic choice approach exhibits two distinguishing features.First, it posits a model of decision making based on the rationality or goal-seeking nature of the group and its ability to make cost-benefit calculationsin choosing strategies best suited to attaining its goals. “Terrorist organiza-tions attempt to either maximize their expected political returns for any givenlevel of effort or minimize the expected costs necessary to achieve a speci-fied set of political objectives.”25 Terrorist groups therefore hold no intrinsicpreferences over strategy; the choice of strategy is instrumental, designed toachieve goals with the highest probability and lowest costs of attaining objec-tives. They should shift strategies readily based on estimates of the approachmost likely to achieve their objectives. Second, as commonly employed, thestrategic choice approach treats the group as a unitary actor, assuming in-ternal rationality and some stable preferences over outcomes. Consequently,events outside the group—political access, access to technology, new mili-tary capabilities, changes in the adversary’s nature and preferences—heavilyinfluence the group’s strategic choices. The key to understanding a group’sstrategic choices therefore is looking at these environmental and contextualfactors.

Using the basic premises of this approach, one can identify at least fivecausal pathways through which political access, in principle, could influencethe appeal of employing terrorist tactics relative to other strategies. Depend-ing, in part, on the specific incarnation of political access under investigation(liberalization, establishment of procedural democracy, concessions to a mil-itant group that grant position/benefits in political institutions, and the like)such opportunities could affect: (1) the costs of organizing a political party

25 Gordon H. McCormick, “Terrorist Decision Making,” Annual Review of Political Science 6 (2003):481. See also Martha Crenshaw, “The Logic of Terrorism: Terrorist Behavior as a Product of StrategicChoice,” in Walter Reich, ed. Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind,1998.

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or what Eyerman refers to as the “price of legal activity,” making it easierand therefore more attractive to use that method in pursuit of group goalsin concert with or as a substitute for armed attacks; (2) the probability ofachieving goals through operating as a political party and participating inelections, “or the gain from legal activity,” especially if the institutional orpartisan nature of the democratic system means a party representing thegroup’s interests could achieve some measure of influence in the politicalsystem; (3) the costs of using terror, or “the price of illegal activity,” if po-litical access and the nature of the system that affords them undermine thecapacity of governing authorities to apprehend militants due to civil-libertiesprotections or constraints on intelligence gathering; (4) the probability ofusing terror attacks to achieve successfully the group’s goals, or the “sum ofdemands placed against the government as a result of illegal activity,” if polit-ical access affects how responsive a government is to the civilian populationand therefore how willing it is to make concessions.26

In short, depending on how we conceptualize the effects of politi-cal access on militant incentives, the implications are diverse and oftencross-cutting, yielding different observable implications. Some might gen-erate incentives for groups to use terror tactics less frequently or to use lessoperationally sophisticated tactics (as when the price of terror goes up); oth-ers, conversely, might increase the intensity and lethality of these tactics (aswhen the costs of terror go down). Still other incentives favor the diversifi-cation in strategy such as the establishment of political wings as adjuncts toarmed wings or splintering of the movement into independent violent andnonviolent organizations (as when the costs of legal activity decreases); orthe disbanding of the terrorist group or its being supplanted by a peacefulpolitical party or nonviolent organization (when simultaneously the costs ofterror increase, the costs of legal activity fall and the odds of success increasethrough the latter increase). Consequently, from within the framework of astrategic choice approach, there is no self-evident answer as to how democ-racy should affect terrorism: it depends on how the analyst conceptualizespolitical access and conceives of how it affects the values assigned for thecosts, benefits, and probabilities that drive militant strategy and influenceorganizational capabilities and form.

The conflicting findings of the small extant literature on the democracy-terror thesis reinforce the necessity of carefully specifying the causal relation-ship between political access and militant activity. The results of those stud-ies suggest that political access, variously defined and conceptualized, cangenerate contradictory pressures for militant groups. For example, WilliamEubank and Leonard Weinberg find that terrorist incidents are most likely to

26 Eyerman, “Terrorism and Democratic States.” See also Eubank and Weinberg, “Terrorism andDemocracy: What Recent Events Disclose”; Eubank and Weinberg, “Terrorism and Democracy: Perpetra-tors and Victims.”

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occur in democracies (using data from 1994 to 1995 and 1980 to 1987).27 Eye-rman conversely finds that consolidated democracies suffer the fewest terrorattacks; like Alberto Abadie, he suggests the relationship between regimetype and terrorism is non-linear, such that democratizing states are mostvulnerable.28 Alan Krueger more recently questions the basis for Abadie’sfinding, suggesting that the incidence of terrorism is linear and inverselyrelated to the level of democracy observed in a state; that is, more democ-racy equals less terrorism.29 Similarly, Quan Li finds that terrorist attacks areless likely in democracies but more likely in more constrained institutionalsystems.30 Coming full circle from the original Eubank and Weinberg the-sis, James Piazza, in studying Middle Eastern countries, once again finds theopposite—that democracy (or liberalization) results in more terror attacks.31

In order to adjudicate among these findings, future studies must domore to parse the different logical connections between political access andmilitant strategy and derive from them different observable implications tobe evaluated empirically. As Li nicely captures it, “An aggregate indicator [ofpolitical regime type] cannot offer an empirical separation of the positive andnegative effects of democracy if competing effects are at work at the sametime.”32 Future studies should also ensure that research designs replicate theanalytical arguments in the empirical analysis. This is a limitation of somestudies, including those of Eubank and Weinberg and Li, which presume totest the political access model yet focus exclusively on transnational acts ofterrorism or fail to distinguish between attacks by citizens against their owndemocracies or other democracies.33 These improvements could advance

27 See Eubank and Weinberg, “Terrorism and Democracy: What Recent Events Disclose”; Eubankand Weinberg, “Terrorism and Democracy: Perpetrators and Victims.”

28 Eyerman, “Terrorism and Democratic States”; Abadie, Poverty, Political Freedom and the Roots ofTerrorism. On democratizing states constituting a unique form of political environment and category ofpolitical access, see note 13.

29 Krueger, What Makes A Terrorist, 82.30 Li, “Does Democracy Promote or Reduce Transnational Terrorist Incidents?”31 Piazza, “Draining the Swamp.”32 Li, “Does Democracy Promote or Reduce Transnational Terrorist Incidents?” 279.33 Li focuses exclusively on transnational terrorism whereby a domestic actor targets a foreign

installation in a country, a foreign terrorist targets a domestic target in a country, or a foreign terroristattacks some other foreign target in a country. Li, “Does Democracy Promote or Reduce TransnationalTerrorist Incidents?” 280. Eubank and Weinberg are careful to identify whether an attacker came from ademocratic state and the regime type of the target; they find that terrorism is common even when theattacker came from a democracy and the target is a democracy. (They are interested, for example, inwhether members of authoritarian regimes attack democracies or vice versa. Yet why the regime type ofthe attacker’s home country should be consequential here is unclear.) As they put it, “The prototypicalterrorist event recorded in ITERATE [the data employed] was an attack on the territory of a democraticcountry committed by the citizen(s) of a democracy against the citizen(s) or property of the same or someother stable democracy.” Eubank and Weinberg, “Terrorism and Democracy: Perpetrators and Victims,”161. Yet, as this statement reveals, they do not specify whether the terrorist and the target are fromthe same democracy. Consistent with the logic of the political access model, we should look at theincidence of militant groups employing terrorism against their own democratic states. It is only then that

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our knowledge considerably about the variable effects of political access onmilitant activity.34

Psychological Approaches

Psychological approaches to terrorism assume the primary importance ofemotional, cognitive, and psychological phenomena for militant behavior.From this perspective, how a militant group interprets external stimuli de-pends on how that stimuli interacts with psychological phenomena motivat-ing group and individual behavior.

Analysts employ psychological approaches on two levels of analysis:the individual and the group. On the individual level, scholars often studythe propensity of individuals to join terrorist movements and the psycholog-ical traits of those who do. One central debate has been about the degreeto which individuals in these movements exhibit some psychopathologyor particular psychological tendencies.35 Similarly, analysts examine howparticipation in a terrorist group feeds individuals’ psychological needs. Inthis tradition, members are understood to have some internal need met bythe group’s violent and extreme activities. “Apart from its political function,[the terrorist act] also serve[s] the individual and collective psychologicalneeds of the terrorists themselves. The resort to terrorism [is] an existentialchoice.”36 Here, terrorism is best explained by its expressive function ratherthan its instrumental role—a contrast between “those who employ terrorismon behalf of an external goal and those whose goal is to carry out acts ofterror.”37

In addition, members have important needs met through their in-volvement in the terror organization: they get a sense of purpose, belong-ing, friendship, and meaning in their lives.38 Consequently, for individualswithin the group, over time, terrorism “may become an identity for them

the incentives—the possibility to pursue nonviolent options—should have the potential to condition theutility of engaging in terrorism. On this point, see Piazza, “Draining the Swamp.”

34 Eubank and Weinberg focus on executed attacks only, finding them more common in democraciesand therefore concluding that terrorism is worse in democracies in part because they are handicapped inlaunching counter-terror operations. The selection effect obscures the possibility that democracies maysuccumb to more violent and nonviolent protests overall than autocracies and may foil more attacks thanare executed.

35 For a review, see McCormick, “Terrorist Decision Making”; see also John Horgan, The Psychologyof Terrorism (London: Routledge, 2005); Bruce Bongar, et al., Psychology of Terrorism (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2007); Jerrold Post, The Mind of the Terrorist (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007);Peter Olsson, The Cult of Osama: Psychoanalyzing Bin Laden and his magnetism for Muslim youths(Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2008).

36 McCormick, “Terrorist Decision Making,” 477.37 Ibid., 480.38 Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God (New York: HarperCollins, 2004); Rex A. Hudson, Who

Becomes a Terrorist and Why (Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 1999), 52–56.

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as much as a strategy.”39 Survival of the group therefore may trump othergoals, even the attainment of the political or ideological ends for which thegroup was purportedly formed. The decision to use terrorism is detachedfrom the group’s actual strategic environment and the costs and benefits ofemploying it.

Analysts in the psychological school also focus on the group as a whole,employing organizational and social psychology in order to evaluate groupdecision making, interactions, motivation, and action.40 Here, the clandes-tine nature of many militant groups renders them vulnerable to introversionin decision-making processes and therefore appropriate to analyze from apsychological perspective. In light of this covert nature, Gordon McCormickcontends that the dynamics of groupthink might inure militant groups toexternal stimuli; and instead, groups will experience an illusion of invul-nerability in how they evaluate information and an unquestioning beliefin the morality of the in-group and apply pressure against group mem-bers who express even momentary doubts about virtually any illusions thegroup shares.41 Groups are ill equipped to evaluate the costs and benefitsof using violence versus other strategies in a calculated, rational assessmentprocess.

Both individual and group-oriented psychological theories imply thatpolitical access could have a less than favorable effect on group strategyand activity. Groupthink may make it difficult to process events in the ex-ternal environment, such that unless those events confirm a preexisting con-sensus or conform to an emerging one, change will not occur. Terroristgroups subject to groupthink may resist information about external devel-opments, such as the emergence of greater political access, that challengetheir standard worldview that violence is an expeditious and morally justifiedmeans for pursuing goals. The group may consequently continue employ-ing violent tactics even in the face of significant changes in its politicalenvironment.

From the perspective of those that emphasize individuals’ psychologicalneeds in belonging to a group, political access—especially if it comes in theform of liberalization or reform of political institutions—might even heightenincentives to use violence. These opportunities challenge the raison d’etreof the group and subvert its cohesion by raising questions about whetherthe violent means it has used in the past justify its existence. Indeed, asthe necessity of rationalizing the group’s existence magnifies, new propa-ganda or doctrine may be issued affirming righteousness and a commitment

39 Crenshaw, “Political Explanations,” 13.40 Jerrold Post, “Psychology” Addressing the Causes of Terrorism: The Club de Madrid Series on

Democracy and Terrorism, vol. 1, The Madrid Summit Working Paper Series, The International Summiton Democracy, Terrorism and Security, 8-11 March 2005 (Madrid: Club de Madrid, 2005), 7.

41 McCormick, “Terrorist Decision Making,” 486. See Irving Janis and Leon Mann, Decision-Making:A Psychological Analysis of Conflict, Choice, Commitment (New York: The Free Press, 1972).

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to violence. The group retrenches in the face of changes in its environ-ment. Leaders may increase the lethality and intensity of terror attacks inorder to bolster group cohesion and reassure themselves of the efficacyand necessity of maintaining the organization and its clandestine, violentfocus.

A more sanguine outcome might occur if political access comes in theform of specific accommodations or dispensations within the political systemthat effectively preserve and empower the militant group’s membership. Thismight allow a group to sustain itself and feed the psychological needs ofmembers, while transforming itself from a violent entity. If, however, atleast some members are also motivated by the expressive benefits of usingviolence, as suggested in some psychological approaches, political accesscould yield splintering and the emergence of new, especially violent factions.

Like the diverse theoretical predictions suggested by the literature, theavailable evidence suggests the relationship between group and individ-ual psychology and militant strategy and activity is complicated. Profilesof terrorist actors reveal no clear pattern of psychological characteristics orpathologies. By implication, if members exhibit no uniform set of psycholog-ical features, there should be little consistency in how they and their groupsrespond to changes in the political access available to them in their states ofoperation.42

In addition, other evidence about group behavior suggests membersmay not be as uniformly insulated from changes in the external environmentas the groupthink model proposes; nor do they always operate as cohesivewholes bonded by intragroup pressures. Rather, many studies emphasizejust the opposite about militant groups: there are divisions and competitionamong different factions.43 Moreover, individuals within these groups appearoften to be hypersensitive to changes in their environments because thosechanges can affect their positions in the organization. At the least, thereseems to be great diversity in the cohesiveness of militant groups, withsome falling prey to what Frederick Miller refers to as encapsulation (andpotentially groupthink) and with others being mired in internal dissent.44 Theproperties of groups as a whole appear to vary widely, making a consistentresponse across the spectrum to opportunities for political access unlikely.

42 This is a widely observed conclusion. For examples, see the profiling work done by Hudson,Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why, 91–97; and the review of the literature by Neil J. Smelser and FaithMitchell, eds., Terrorism: Perspectives from the Behavioral and Social Sciences (Washington, DC: NationalResearch Council, National Academies Press, 2002), 31.

43 See, for example, Bloom, Dying to Kill; Cynthia Irwin, Militant Nationalism (University of Min-nesota Press, 1999); Jacob D. Shapiro and David A. Siegel, “Under funding in Terrorist Organizations,”International Studies Quarterly 51 (June 2007): 405-30. See also Frederick D. Miller, “The End of SDSand the Emergence of Weatherman: Demise Through Success,” in Social Movements of the Sixties andSeventies, ed. Jo Freeman (New York: Longman, 1983), 283.

44 Miller, “The End of SDS,” 283.

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In short, from within the psychological approach, reactions to the politicalenvironment could depend on any number of factors, including the specificincarnation of political access, the psychological disposition of members,whether the group is encapsulated and, in the latter case, the content of theprevailing consensus within the entity.

Ideational Approaches

A third set of arguments relates to the immaterial and symbolic dimensionof militant activity. Two approaches might be categorized under this rubric:ideology and organizational culture.

Scholars who emphasize the importance of ideology in explaining groupbehavior focus on the written and unwritten doctrine that guides groupaction. These prescribe and proscribe actions, while embedding them in aphilosophical framework. Some scholars stress, for example, the significanceof militants who draw from religious doctrine and how it can provide leadersnatural organizing principles for group action.45 More broadly, from within anideational approach, the tenets of group doctrine or ideology often influencethe means employed by a group, not just its goals.46

Alternatively, an organizational culture approach presumes that differentmilitant movements will have unique cultures defined in terms shared worldviews or beliefs or as a tool kit that prescribes alternative courses of action.47

This culture filters external stimuli and affects members’ understandings oftheir appropriate responses to changes in their social and political environ-ment. Distinctive about this approach is that every group should have itsown organizational culture depending on its history and other experiences.There is no universal organizational culture.48

For both ideational approaches, how changes in political access arereceived and the response they precipitate might depend on the specificcontent of the doctrine or culture and the beliefs they engender about theuse of violence versus nonviolent strategies to achieve group objectives. Tounderstand how the group will respond, one must understand the content of

45 For an especially strong articulation of the view, see Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind ofGod (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

46 Crenshaw, “Political Explanations,” 15.47 Peter Katzenstein, ed. The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 6, employs a fairly traditional definition of the conceptof culture in political science. Ann Swidler’s concept of culture might also be usefully employed, as isElizabeth Kier’s. Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). As Swidlercharacterizes it, culture, is a “ ‘tool kit’ of habits, skills and styles from which people construct ‘strategiesof action.”’ Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51(April 1986): 273.

48 For examples of this approach as applied to military organizations, see Jeffrey Legro, Cooperationunder Fire: Anglo-German Restraint during World War II (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Kier,Imagining War.

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the ideational systems and how organizational culture or doctrine influencesthe interpretation of external stimuli.

If an organization’s culture, for example, reflects a belief that nonviolentpolitical activity is normatively acceptable but has been out of the questionbecause the opportunities have not been available, then the expansion ofpolitical access might be favorably received.49 Alternatively, if the group cul-ture is reflexively suspicious of political activity and those that advocate it,these opportunities should have little influence on strategy.50 Take, for ex-ample, one analyst’s characterization of the Basque nationalist group, ETA. Inthat account, the group’s understanding of violence and its role in promotingBasque identity became core features of the group’s organizational cultureover time, such that any “change in attitudes [would be] tantamount to anepistemological change affecting the very premises on which political orderand personal identity are founded.”51 We would expect ETA, if this analyst iscorrect, to alter little its attacks or methods in the face of growing politicalaccess.

McCormick’s characterization of the late nineteenth-century anarchistmovement is similarly suggestive of how ideational factors might affect agroup’s response to political access. As he characterizes it, for anarchists,terrorist violence was the “archetypical form of human resistance . . . andthe medium through which heroic values can most fully be expressed.”52

In addition, the movement opposed hierarchical organization, including anyessential to constituting an organized political party or movement, viewing itas antithetical to the movement’s principles and “theory of victory” (in whichregime collapse would be achieved through a spontaneous popular uprisingcatalyzed by protest and violent action, not by takeover by a parallel orga-nized opposition). From the stance of an organizational culture perspective,the salience of violence and the principles espoused by the late nineteenth-century anarchists would render changes in strategy in favor of traditionalpolitical activity exceedingly unlikely.

The reaction to opportunities for greater political participation also de-pends on the capacity of the group’s leadership to situate the meaning

49 One problem here, of course, is measuring what in group discourse and belief systems is areflection of a persistent organizational culture versus what in its discourse and belief system is a reflectionof its strategic circumstances. Observance of a reflexive opposition to political action in group doctrineand statements may be a reflection of, and reinforced by, the absence of political opportunities. Someindependent measures of organizational culture are essential.

50 Given the need to sustain group support for killing innocents, organizational cultures of terrorgroups might be more prone to reflect themes of resistance to political activity and the justification ofviolence.

51 Joseba Zulakia, Basque Violence: Metaphor and Sacrament (Reno: University of Nevada Press,1988: 424.

52 April Carter, “Anarchism and Violence,” in Nomos XIX – Anarchism, ed. Roland J. Pennock andJohn W. Chapman (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 320-40, quoted in McCormick, “TerroristDecision Making,” 478.

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of those opportunities within the group’s symbolic system or doctrine orto reinterpret the doctrine to allow for alternative understandings of thestimuli. As such, group leaders can play an important role in ideationalapproaches. Analyzing the process by which political entrepreneurs or lead-ers appropriate and employ ideologies for recruitment and motivationalpurposes is an important subtheme in studies that emphasize ideationalfactors.

What evidence do we have that ideology or organizational culture isa central determinant of how groups react to the political access availablein their external environments? Like psychological approaches, research onthe topic is lacking. However, common arguments about the importanceof ideology and empirical examples about its impact on group strategy aresuggestive.

Scholars commonly distinguish groups according to particular categoriesof ideologies: religious, left-wing, right-wing, and so forth. Moreover, withinthese categories, groups with religious ideologies are considered by many tobe especially impervious to external influence and wedded to violence. MarkJuergensmeyer, for example, contends that within a terror group, religiongenerates a view of violence as an essential component of a cosmic warin which members are engaged. “Acts of religious terror serve not only astactics in a political strategy but also as evocations of a much larger spiritualconfrontation.”53

By implication, we might expect that groups with religious ideologies,such as Al Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan’s Taliban, would have been inthe past poorly receptive to political access and opportunities to engage innonviolent political activity. For example, they might resist forming hybridsin which they pair violent action with a nonviolent political party. Thissupposition may seem to resonate with empirical reality. Certainly, at leastto date, core factions of the Taliban in Afghanistan have done little to formany sort of political wing to compete in elections, while Al Qaeda in Iraqdid little to respond to (albeit problematic) opportunities for participation inelections in that country, even during the height of its influence when it wasallied with Iraq’s Sunni tribes.

We should, however, take care in advancing such cases as evidence thatreligion/ideology affects a group’s responsiveness to political access. First,there may be an omitted variable in both cases that better explains the failureto develop political wings. That is, ideology may be important to the extentthat it influences a more fundamental determinant of strategy: the nature of

53 Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, 150. In a different vein, Hoffman argues that in its mostrecent wave of attacks, religious-based terrorism is especially virulent in its commitment to violence.Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, rev. ed. (1998 repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Seealso Magnus Rangstorp, “Terrorism in the Name of Religion,” Journal of International Affairs (Summer1996).

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social support for the movement. Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Taliban may have,at least in the recent past, lacked the mass-based social constituencies thatsupport their underlying political objectives; this means that although theymay undertake some tactical alliances with local populations and other mili-tant groups, were they to enter the political system, they lack a constituencythat would support their platforms and goals. This may help explain whythese groups have fielded no political parties.

Second, there are certainly counterexamples of religious groups that doform hybrids: Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territoriesboth have joint armed and political wings. In Iraq, Moqtada al Sadr’s radical,religiously inspired ideology did not prevent his movement from building asubstantial political wing.

Organizational Approaches

Generally, organizational approaches share the view that intragroup com-plexities affect militant strategy and that changes in the group’s externalenvironment are filtered through organizational dynamics.54 I discuss threeapproaches below.

ORGANIZATIONS AS DISTRIBUTIONS OF POWER AND PREFERENCES

One approach involves defining organizations according to the differencesin the individual preferences and the balance of power among differentconstituencies within an organization’s leadership and membership. Thisapproach has two common variants. First, analysts may distinguish organi-zations according to whether they contain individuals with more and lessintense preferences over goals and strategy (moderates versus hardliners)and analyze the influence of each faction.55

The distribution of moderates versus hardliners in the organization mayin turn affect how it responds in the aggregate to political access. A dividedorganization with heterogeneous membership preferences may be vulner-able to forming hybrids: increasing political access results in the formationof a political party by moderates while hardliners maintain the armed wing.

54 I discuss three central variants, but my treatment of organizational approaches is not exhaustive.55 Sometimes they use slightly different language. Irwin refers to ideologues, radicals and politicos.

Irwin, Militant Nationalism. DeNardo refers to pragmatists versus purists. James DeNardo, Power inNumbers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Note that the meaning of these distinctions,especially for hardliners versus softliners, is not always well defined. The differences could reduce toseveral things: individuals/factions may exhibit different preferences over outcomes (that is, intensityof commitment to attainment of all goals); preferences over strategy (valuations of the costs and risksof alternative approaches to pursuing those goals); or beliefs about the causal relationship betweendifferent strategies and their outcomes—divergences that are commonly rooted in personality/intellectualdispositions or prior experiences in the organization.

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Homogenous organizations, or those in which one faction dominates, willreflect the preferences of the prevailing group. If moderates are ascendant,we may see a diminishment of armed activity and perhaps the eventualsupplantation of the violent group with a political party. Where hardlinersprevail, there may be little change in strategy as they reject outright the effi-cacy or legitimacy of using nonviolent action to achieve their goals. Finally,one potential effect of a change in political access is that it may shift thebalance of power between different factions within the organization, eitherempowering moderates, and allowing them to push the organization in apeaceful direction or causing the marginalized hardliners to split off andform a separate violent entity.

A second variant of the “organizations as distributions of prefer-ences/power” approach emphasizes the different jobs or roles of actorswithin the organization and how those might shape the actors’ prefer-ences over group strategy. For example, middle management or personnel incharge of managing operations may have different preferences over strategy,relative to the leaders or directors of the organization, because of how thosestrategies bear on private interests.56 In turn, political access may appeal moreto leaders than managers. For the former, opportunities to participate in for-mal institutional politics may generate private benefits (perquisites of officeholding, prestige, international legitimacy) that heighten incentives to pushthe organization toward nonviolent activity. Conversely, middle managers,and those running day-to-day operations may be threatened by changesin the political environment, as they could lose the material and symbolicbenefits they enjoy from their jobs running a violent, terrorist organization.Where such divisions of labor emerge in organizations, political access couldproduce splintering or hybrids.

ORGANIZATIONS AS STRUCTURES

A second organizational approach discriminates among organizations basedon their formal structure: how units with responsibility for managementtasks and operational activities are defined, organized, and relate to oneanother. There are different ways of conceptualizing “structure.” One ap-proach emphasizes the degree to which the organizations are hierarchicalor decentralized—that is how the organizations concentrate authority, divide

56 For examples of these sorts of differentiated functions, see Rohan Gunarantna, Inside Al Qaeda(New York: Berkeley Books, 2003); Stern, Terror in the Name of God. Shapiro and Siegel, in “Underfund-ing in Terrorist Organizations,” argue that middle managers benefit from the clandestine nature of theorganization and the difficulty of internal monitoring the exigencies of keeping operations secret posesfor the leadership; middle managers are able to skim funds allocated for operations as well as to drawsalaries.. They therefore have a vested interest in maintaining the terrorist activities of the organizationbecause of the private benefits that they accrue.

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and integrate specialized functions, and distribute information.57 A hierarchi-cal organization, in turn, may have better “command and control” and ca-pacity to ensure that subordinates implement changes in strategy, as well asguard against defections. This, in turn, could heighten its leaders’ incentivesto respond to political access—they know they can bring the organizationalong and therefore not sacrifice control in the event of a major shift instrategy.

A second approach focuses on the network structure of the organiza-tion and relations among the organization’s constituent members. Appliedto terrorist groups, these approaches emphasize the complex relationshipsamong individuals that operate within networks in order to evaluate issuesassociated with recruitment, evolution, and communication of ideas and in-formation. Networked organizations could face many obstacles in enforcingstrategic changes within and across nodes, potentially creating disincentivesto try and promote such dramatic change in the first place.58 In fact, con-verting to political action may be especially threatening to the enduranceof the network from the central node’s perspective because it may requirea reinterpretation of the ideology or doctrine that connects what otherwisemight be dispersed membership communities.59

In other respects, however, networks may help promote responsivenessto political access by allowing for greater innovation and adaptation to localconditions by the autonomous cells that constitute them. Hence, while wemight see fewer efforts by the central node to respond to political access,we might also see local adaptation as political access becomes available. Thehypotheses about structure are cross-cutting.

ORGANIZATIONS AS BUREAUCRACIES

A final organizational approach focuses on the specification of the prefer-ences of the entity considered as a whole. A bureaucratic politics perspectiveposits that all organizations are governed by a universal culture (as opposedto a particular, historically bounded culture) in which protecting the well-being of the organization is paramount: strategy is heavily influenced bythe need to insulate the entity from uncertainty and maintain its auton-omy, prestige and resources. Attainment of the goals of the organization

57 One might, for example, draw here on the Williamson’s work on the firm. See Oliver E. Williamson,Markets and Hierarchies: Analysis and Antitrust Implications (New York: Free Press, 1975).

58 On social network theory, see John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, Networks and Netwars (SantaMonica: Rand, 2001); James D. Thompson, Organizations in Action (New Brunswick: Transaction Pub-lishers, 2007); Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust, Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad (Philadelphia: Universityof Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

59 On the role of ideology connecting dispersed membership communities, see Stern, Terror in theName of God.

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are not irrelevant, but the nature of the goals, and valuations of the beststrategies to achieve them, will reflect a priority on protecting, if not en-hancing, the prerogatives of the organization itself.60 Members of a groupmay also internalize the need to protect the organization and be social-ized by their participation within it. Therefore the members will view prob-lems and issues through the lens of their position in the institution.61 Thehealth of the organization and its priorities color the evaluation of strategicalternatives

To the extent political access and opportunities to participate in non-violent politics enhance organizational prerogatives and resources—suchas opening up new channels for fundraising or enhancing the organiza-tion’s international and domestic prestige—they should be well received.However, the organization as a whole should be far less responsiveto growing political access if participation in nonviolent activity under-mines group autonomy, increases uncertainty, renders the groups’ fatemore dependent on events outside its immediate control, or underminesfundraising.

Empirically, there is some evidence in the scholarly literature that orga-nizational factors, variously defined, do influence group strategy and activity.Take the 2007 study by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center of lead-ership schisms in Al Qaeda from 1989 to 2006. The study identifies twoenduring factions in the movement: planners and propagandists. Plannersfavor building a military organization to attack targets in the West; propa-gandists seek to establish Al Qaeda as a global brand. The supremacy of thepropagandists (which includes bin Laden and Zawahiri), the report contends,has been a driving force of the movement’s strategy.62

Similarly, Mia Bloom’s study suggests that bureaucratic factors oftenmotivate militants.63 The desire to maximize visibility and social acclaim pro-duces “outbidding” among groups when they operate in a crowded militantfield.64 Bloom finds that in order to bolster resources (recruits, funding),enhance organizational prestige, and ensure the sustainability of the group,

60 Barry Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); Jack Snyder,“Civil-Military Relations and the Cult of the Offensive, 1914 and 1984,” in Military Strategy and the Originsof the First World War, ed. Steven E. Miller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991; Stephen VanEvera, “The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War,” in Military Strategy have allapplied this approach to understanding military organizations’ preferences.

61 See, for example, Graham Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston:Little, Brown, 1971).

62 Reports from the CTC commonly emphasize organizational factors in explaining militant groupbehavior. Also see Max Abrahms “What Terrorists Really Want: Terrorist Motives and CounterterrorismStrategy,” International Security 32, no. 4 (Spring 2008).

63 Bloom, Dying to Kill.64 Implicit in the outbidding literature is that organizations are motivated to protect their own

prerogatives and prestige (otherwise they might defer to the most “effective” among them).

780 R. Brooks

militant entities in the Palestinian territories engage in violent acts to demon-strate their superiority over their competitors.65

Despite these studies that underscore the general usefulness of orga-nizational approaches, evidence about how organizational factors specifi-cally affect how groups respond to their political environments is limited.One exception is Cynthia Irwin’s analysis of what she calls government re-sponsiveness (which is heavily influenced by opportunities to participate inelections) and organizational strategy.66 She argues that high levels of re-sponsiveness increase the balance of power in favor of factions that supportthe use of nonviolent political strategies, which can encourage a group’smovement into institutional politics. However, in a parallel study of the IrishRepublican case, on which Irwin also focuses, Peter Neumann rebuts herfindings, showing that there was no shift in the make-up of the nationalistmovement and that other dynamics explain the IRA and Sinn Fein’s shift to-ward nonviolent tactics.67 In short, a great deal remains to be known abouthow, empirically, political access interacts with organizational incentives andbehavior.68

The Societal Approach

The final approach I discuss is not well developed in the literature butnonetheless reflects a pervasive theme within it: the social context in whicha group operates and especially the degree of support it enjoys from societyaffects its strategic choices.69 Societies vary in the support they may offer

65 See Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, “Conciliation, Counterterrorism and Patterns of Terrorist Violence,”International Organization 59 (Winter 2005): 145–76; Bloom, Dying to Kill; Andrew H. Kydd and Bar-bara F. Walter, “The Strategies of Terrorism,” International Security 31, no. 1 (Summer 2006): 49-80;McCormick, “Terrorist Decision Making,” 488.

66 Irwin, Militant Nationalism.67 Peter R. Neumann, “The bullet and the ballot box: the case of the IRA,” The Journal of Strategic

Studies 28, no. 6 (December 2005).68 Note one approach not discussed here is organizational learning. Relevant here is Trujillo and

Jackson’s emphasis on how an organization’s capacity in acquisition, interpretation, distribution, andstorage of new information facilitates improvements is strategic decision making, tactical planning, oroperational activities. Accordingly, better learners may recognize and act upon the opportunities availablewhen the group has political access (for example, form hybrids), while poor learners (those that exhibitweak capacities in these areas) could be less responsive to changes in their political environment; violencewill continue at a status quo level. Horacio R. Trujillo and Brian A. Jackson, “Organizational Learning andTerrorist Groups,” in Teaching Terror, ed. James J.F. Forest (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005),52–68.

69 Cronin, “How Al-Qaida Ends,” 27, for example, suggests that society plays a central role inproviding “active and passive” support to terrorist groups. In so doing, her study echoes the common,if rarely fully developed, theme in the literature that terrorists are influenced by their need to maintainsocial support and the assistance local communities provide them. For other studies emphasizing theimportance of social support (or mass publics) and terrorism, see Pape, Dying to Win; Bloom, Dying toKill; Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, “Terrorist Factions” Quarterly Journal of Political Science 3, no. 4 (2008).

Researching Democracy and Terrorism 781

militant groups, both in how much they support the militants’ goals andin their tolerance for the groups’ use of violence in pursuit of those objec-tives. Specifically, a societal approach implies that political access will affectmilitant strategy through two causal steps.

First, it presumes that where political access is available to the public,social tolerance for the use of violence by militant groups will be affected:that is, when militant groups have other means to pursue their goals, andthe population itself has some recourse through the political system, masspublics who might otherwise support the militants’ goals will oppose the useof terrorism to achieve them. Second, the approach requires that this levelof social support will condition the militant group’s choice of strategy orviolent activities. Specifically, when society withdraws its support, militantshave incentives to pursue alternative strategies, especially nonviolent meth-ods, and invest less in terrorist campaigns, either because the legitimacyof those means is in question or they lose access to vital resources fromsociety.

The logic of this approach can be seen in some intriguing research rel-evant to the democracy-terror debate. One study, for example, stresses theimportance of “shifts in societal attitudes” stemming from democratic transi-tions as key to reducing terrorist violence. It argues that the establishment ofdemocratic institutions enhances popular faith in the legitimacy of the polit-ical system and the commitment to liberal, democratic values and, therefore,reduces society’s tolerance for militant violence.70 Another recent analysisof several Middle East cases suggests that liberalization in the political sys-tem could work to undercut terrorism by promoting norms of tolerance,creating functioning and inclusive institutional structures and increasing thelegitimacy of the political system.71

Equally influential has been the logic of the societal approach in policydebate. Take, once again, George Bush’s 2006 National Security Strategy.It contends that terrorism is furthered in states where people suffer from“political alienation” and “see no legitimate way to promote change in theirown country.”72 Accordingly, expanding political access for local populationsshould lessen societal support for terrorism. Facing trouble recruiting andgaining sanctuary within a hostile environment, militant movements willbe marginalized and forced to relinquish their violent tactics. In short, thisstrategy sees society as a lynchpin in the counterterror equation: lesseningsocietal tolerance for terrorists is a central means for stamping out theirmovements.

What evidence is there for either causal step in the democracy-society-terrorism equation? On the first, there has been little direct, specific study

70 Jebb, et al., The Fight for Legitimacy, 8.71 Dassa Kaye, et al., More Freedom, Less Terror.72 The National Security Strategy, 10.

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of how political access affects social support for terrorism. Within the fewstudies that explore the issues indirectly or limitedly, views tend to diverge.Most pessimistic is Gregory Gause in his widely cited essay on democracypromotion in the Middle East, which argues that there is not “any evidencethat democracy in the Arab World would ‘drain the swamp,’ eliminating softsupport for terrorist organizations among the Arab public and reducing thenumber of potential recruits for them.”73 Similarly, Katerina Delacoura findslittle evidence of a causal relationship between the lack of democracy inthe Middle East and the pervasiveness of religiously motivated groups usingterrorist methods.74 Considerably more optimistic is the study by Cindy Jebb,et al., of how democratic transitions yield a political culture less tolerant ofviolence and therefore more likely to lead to the marginalization of militantgroups.75 In the intermediate case falls the study by Dalia Dassa Kaye, et al.,which offers a positive but carefully qualified endorsement of the hypothesisthat in some respects, political liberalization can reduce support for politicalviolence.76

In short, the studies we have on how democracy influences societalsupport for terrorism are far from monolithic in their conclusions. Perhapswe should not be surprised. Examination of the broader, scholarly literaturesuggests that social receptiveness to violence and militancy is a complexphenonemnon, determined by many factors.77

Indeed, the most developed debate—that which stresses the socio-economic “root causes” of terrorism—reveals the difficulty of determiningthe basis of social support or opposition to violence.78 Some studies in thisvein support a clear link between social support for terrorism and poverty.79

Others affirm a relationship but see it as mediated by the schools with radicalreligious-based curricula that emerge in the vacuum of public education insome impoverished countries.80 Others challenge altogether the purported

73 Gregory Gause III, “Can Democracy Stop Terrorism,” Foreign Affairs (September/October 2005).74 Katerina Delacoura, “Islamist Terrorism and the Middle East Democratic Deficit: Political Exclusion,

Repression and the Causes of Extremism,” Democratization 13, no. 3 (June 2006): 508–25.75 Jebb, et al., The Fight for Legitimacy.76 Dassa Kaye, et al., More Freedom, Less Terror.77 See Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil-Wars (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,

2006).78 For a review of the debate, see, for example, Pape, Dying to Win, 17-20; Krueger and Maleck-

ova, “Education, Poverty and Terrorism”; Abadie, Poverty, Political Freedom and the Roots of Terrorism;Krueger, What Makes a Terrorist.

79 See Paul R. Ehrlich and Jianguo Liu, “Some Roots of Terrorism,” Population and Environment24, no. 2 (November 2002). For an approach that emphasizes other socio-economic and demographicfactors, see Brian Nichiporuk, “Regional Demographics and the War on Terrorism,” RUSI Journal 148, no.1 (February 2003): 22–29.

80 Moniza Khokhar, “Reforming Militant Madaris in Pakistan,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 30,no. 4 (April 2007): 353–65. For an alternative view, see Peter Bergen and Swati Pandley, “The MadrassaScapegoat,” The Washington Quarterly (Spring 2006).

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link between poverty and support for terrorism.81 For example, Alan Kruegerand Jitka Maleckova find in the Palestinian case that more educated and well-off individuals are more likely to support terrorist violence than those whoare impoverished.82 In this vein, also interesting are Judith Harik’s findingsthat Lebanese Shia supporters of Hezbollah are not in overwhelming num-bers the most politically alienated nor economically deprived segment ofthat population.83 Yet others suggest it is not poverty per se that motivatessupport for violence but perhaps inequality, relative deprivation, or, morebroadly, perceptions that an absence of economic opportunity can be dueto a foreign adversary or repressive government.84

Beyond studies in the socio-economic root causes tradition, other re-search too underscores the diversity of causes of social attitudes, such asthose that point to the impact of governing authorities’ strategies on supportfor terrorist methods,85 or to cultural factors, such as “social habits and his-torical traditions that sanction the use of violence against the government.”86

Finally, in a very different context, we see arguments that link tolerancefor violence and terrorism to a local population’s lack of security and senseof community well-being. This approach is well expressed in the currentcounterinsurgency field manual for the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, whichsupplies the philosophical and practical basis for strategy in the Afghanistanwar.87

Finally, it may be of interest to observe that public opinion researchreinforces the notion that social views toward terrorism can be highly com-plex.88 Take the 2007 Pew Global Attitudes Project poll, which underscoresthe potential for attitudes to shift independently from any change in the op-portunities for political participation available to the populace. From 2002 to2007 the poll cites sharply shifting attitudes toward the use of suicide terror-ism in Lebanon, Jordan, and Pakistan (the 2002 to 2007 change, respectively,

81 Krueger and Maleckova, “Education, Poverty and Terrorism.”82 Ibid., 126–27.83 Judith Palmer Harik, “Between Islam and the System: Sources and Implications of Popular Support

for Lebanon’s Hizballah,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 40, no. 1 (March 1996): 41–67.84 This is a central theme in Stern, Terror in the Name of God. See also Andrea Elliott, “Where Boys

Grow up to be Jihadis,” New York Times Magazine, 25 November 2007.85 Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, “Conciliation, Counterterrorism and Patterns of Terrorist Violence,”

145–76; Robert W. White, “From Peaceful Protest to Guerilla War: Micromobilization of the ProvisionalIrish Republican Army,” The American Journal of Sociology 94, no. 6 (May 1989): 1277-302; Kydd andWalter, “Strategies of Terrorism.”

86 Martha Crenshaw, “The Causes of Terrorism,” Comparative Politics 13, no. 4 (July 1981): 382.87 The U.S. Army, Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2007).88 On controversies about how to measure social support and whether attitudes (as evident in

polls) are good indicators, see Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil-War (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2006).

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is −40 percent, −20 percent, and −24 percent), independent of any system-atic change in political access in any of the three countries.89

Last, turning to the second causal step in the societal approach, wepotentially see greater, albeit still modest, support for the thesis that vari-ation in social support—however determined—does affect militant strategyand activity. For example, Pape finds that populations in which govern-ments have made concessions to self-determination movements are lesswilling to support suicide terrorism and that there is an empirical patternthat links that lack of support and the forswearing of these tactics by thegroup.90 Bloom similarly links shifting attitudes toward the use of violencewith the tendency to use suicide tactics in the Palestinian case.91 Finally,Neumann finds that public opinion in the Irish Republican case has an im-portant role in supporting movement toward electoral strategies and awayfrom terrorism over the long term.92 Hence social support may play a rolein determining militant strategy and the violent methods groups employ orincentives to invest in a political wing. Yet the question remains whetherthe presence or absence of political access in a state is a central deter-minant of its society’s support for violence and, if so, how and in whatdegree.

SCHOLARLY AND PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS

This article has two sets of implications. The first relates to the academicstudy of terrorism. Most significantly, the essay suggests three importantlessons for research on the relationship between political access and terror-ist activity. First, it suggests analysts carefully refine and clearly distinguishthe specific meaning and form of political access relevant to their researchquestions. Second, analysts should consider the range of possible outcomesthat different forms of political access could yield, without a priori limitingthemselves to a single dependent variable, such as the incidence of attacks.Finally, the essay suggests that the best research will emerge when analystsare explicit about the approach to terrorist motivation in which their theoriesare grounded and how their approaches shape the levels of analysis, objectsof analysis, and their assumptions about the forces that drive militant behav-ior. Indeed, one message of this article is that the assumptions analysts makeabout what motivates groups and individuals to engage in terrorist activity

89 The Pew Global Attitudes Project, Global Opinion Trends 2002-2007: A Rising Tide Lifts Mood inthe Developing World, http://pewglobal.org/reports/pdf/257.pdf.

90 Pape, Dying to Win, 94–100.91 Bloom, Dying to Kill, 19-44.92 Neumann, “The bullet and the ballot box.”

Researching Democracy and Terrorism 785

have major implications for what we expect will happen when groups arefaced with growing opportunities to participate in nonviolent politics. Insum, we should recognize that studying how militant groups respond to po-litical access encompasses a wealth of research questions, while recognizingat the same time the necessity of carefully specifying the particular questionunder investigation at any given point in time.

A second set of implications relates to the overall implications of thehypotheses developed in this essay—and in particular what it means for pol-icy analysts interested in finding solutions to the problems posed by globalterrorist activity. Specifically, the essay suggests we should take care in antic-ipating a natural and inevitable relationship between spreading democracyand reducing terrorist violence. Despite our best intensions and intellec-tual intuitions that increasing peaceful alternatives for expressing grievancesshould reduce the appeal of terrorist activity, the relationship often doesnot deductively hold. That is, in many cases a relationship does not logi-cally follow when one traces the causal processes connecting political ac-cess and the actual motivations of groups to engage in violent behavior.In only some circumstances do the five approaches suggest that democ-racy should reduce the incidence of violence. Some predict the oppositeoutcome—an increase in violence—while others predict diversifications andinnovations in strategy (potentially) independent from changes in the levelof violence employed. Even where increasing political access might nega-tively impact the level of militant violence, that relationship is apt to dependon variables that have little to do with the effects of the political environ-ment; in other words, many of these theories are indeterminate in predict-ing a clear relationship between political access and terrorist violence (seeTable 3).

Nor does the (admittedly limited) empirical research relevant to thetopic offer cause for unqualified optimism (see Table 4). The scanty findingsrelevant to the democracy and terror debate offer little cause for sweepingoptimism that expanding political access will prove the panacea to terroristviolence that we might hope it would.

Here, in fact, is where the academic and practical implications of thisessay merge. Only by engaging in careful research will we begin to see when,and in what cases, providing opportunities for greater political access mighthave a favorable effect on terrorist activity. The detailed research prescribedabove (hopefully) will help reveal which forms of political access, in whatcountry and for which groups, will generate desirable outcomes. This willhelp us refine our policy tools and approaches rather than requiring us torely on the blunt instrument of democracy promotion.

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TABLE 3 Theoretical Predictions: Political Access and Group Strategy

Analytical School/ Contingency Strategy/Militant Other (likely)Approach to Activity Strategic Outcomes

Terrorist Motivation (Does political (no change/statusaccess reduce quo; incidence ofincidence of attacks increases;

terror attacks?) change in tactics/targets; hybrid forms;splintering; terrorism

ceases/ends)

Strategic Choice Depends on howform of politicalaccess affects costs,probabilities, andbenefits of legalversus illegal action

Only in particularconditions—e.g.,when expectedutility of nonviolentpolitical activityexceeds that of usingterrorist attacks

Attacks increase;change in tactics;Hybrid is formed;Terrorends—political partysupplants terrorgroup

PsychologyGroup level Depends on content

of groupthinkconsensus

Possible if prevailingconsensus is toreduce violencewhen have politicalaccess

Attacks continue atSQ

Individual level(Members attracted toviolence or toexperience ofmembership; or exhibitpsychopathology)

Unlikely Attacks increase;Splintering

Ideational Depends on contentof ideology ororganizational culture

Possible ifculture/doctrinereceptive tononviolent activity

Violence continues atSQ

OrganizationalDist of pwr/prfs(Variants: 1. def. byintensity of prefs; 2. def.by job/role inorganization. See text.)

Depends on degreeof heterogeneity inorganization andspecific preferencesof dominant faction

Possible ifmoderates prevail(variant 1) or ifleaders prevail overmanagers (variant 2)

Violence Increases;Hybrid Forms;Splintering

Structure Decentralized orgs.subject tocross-cuttingpressures; hierarchymay be moreresponsive to changeby leadership

Possible if leaders inhierarchy want it orlocal cells indecentralizedorganizationinnovate

Violence at SQ;Splintering

Bureaucracies Depends on howaccess affect budgets,autonomy, etc.

Likely if org. benefits> costs

Violence at SQ

Societal Depends on (1) howaccess affects socialsupport and (2) howsocial support affectsmilitant incentives

Likely if 1 and 2 hold Change in tactics/targeting; Hybridforms; Endterror—political partysupplants militantgroup

Researching Democracy and Terrorism 787

TABLE 4 Relevant Empirical Studies and Implications for Research

Analytical Representative Key (relevant) Suggestions ForSchool Studies (Examples) Findings Future Research

StrategicChoice

Eubank and Weinberg,1998; 1994, 1998, 2001;Eyerman, 1998; Li, 2005;Piazza, 2007; Schmid,1992; Ross, 1993;Weinberg and Pedahzur,2003; Crenshaw, 1998;Kydd and Walter, 2006;Pape, 2005

Among SC studies ondemo/terror,empirical tests revealcontradictory results,reflecting failure todisaggregate andevaluate competingeffects and to specifyclearly analyticalconnections b/wmilitant activity anddifferent forms ofpolitical access

Need to parse causalsteps and develop partialtheories for howalternative factors affectterrorist strategy andactivity; clearly specifyform and expectedeffects of political accessunder investigation

Psychology Post, 2007; Olsson,2008; Bongar, et al.,2007; Horgan, 2005;McCormick, 2003; Post,2005; Smelser andMitchell, 2002; Hudson,1999

Some evidence ofpsychological appealof terrorist activities,but no consensusthat individualmembers or groupsexhibit consistentpsychologicalcharacteristics (esp.psychopathology)

Especially for grouppsychology, need furtherdiscrimination amonggroups according todegree to which they areencapsulated andcohesive versusfactionalized andresponsive to externalstimuli

Ideational Juergensmeyer, 2003;Hoffman, 2006; Stern,2004; Rangstorp, 1996

Despite contentionthat ideology (esp.religion) caninfluence groupaction, unclear itcorrelates empiricallywith strategiesgroups employ inresponse to politicalaccess

Need means fordiscriminating ideologies(such as, according tocontent andflexibility/ease ofreinterpretation) topotentially assess howreceptive groups will beto changes in pol. access

Organizational Gunarantna, 2003;Arquilla and Ronfeldt,2001; Bueno deMesquita, 2007; Bloom,2005; Irwin, 1999;Neumann, 2005; Shapiroand Siegel, 2007;Wasserman andFaust,1994; Sageman,2008; Abrahms, 2008

Evidence thatorganizational factorsare empiricallysalient, although notclear they yieldsystematic responseto changes inpolitical access

Need studies that clearlyspecify org. approach,whether defined bydistribution ofpreferences(hard/softliners ormembers’ jobs/roles),structure, or bureaucraticparochialism andgenerate from thoselogics hypotheses forhow groups will react tochanges in politicalaccess

788 R. Brooks

TABLE 4 Relevant Empirical Studies and Implications for Research (Continued)

Analytical Representative Key (relevant) Suggestions ForSchool Studies (Examples) Findings Future Research

Societal Abadie, 2004; Harik, 1996;Krueger and Maleckova,2003; Pape, 2005; Bloom,2005; Jebbs et al., 2008;Dassa Kaye, et al., 2008

Evidence that groupsrespond to socialopinion, but unclearopportunitiessystematically affectsocial attitudes

Need more systematicstudy of (1) how changesin political access affectsocial support for terroristactivity and (2) how groupsrespond to societalsupport/opinion

Note: For complete bibliographic information on the works referenced in Table 4, see article’s notes.