Terrorism and Civil Society: Organizational Opportunity and Repression in Cross-National Perspective, 1970-2006

• In Event: 444 - Section on Political Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 04. Terrorism and Legitimacy in Political Sociology

Abstract

In this paper we examine the connection between a nation’s level of civil society openness and the number domestic terrorist attacks across 135 countries from 1970 to 2006. Building upon the political process model in social movement theory, we argue that nations provide institutional environments that either foster or hinder social movement activity. Following the contentious politics approach (McAdam et al. 1996; 2001; Tarrow 1998; Beck 2008), we conceptualize terrorist organizations as engaged in high risk movement activity and sensitive to organizational opportunities that make contention more likely. Testing our models using panel fixed-effects negative binomial regression models, we find support for our hypothesis that a nation’s level of civil society openness should lead to higher counts of domestic terrorist attacks. Going further, we also find specific effects by regime-type, with much of the main effect between civil society openness and the count of domestic terrorist attacks being driven by autocratic nations with relatively open civil societies. This work connects social movement theory with the cross-disciplinary industry working to understand terrorism, offering an explanation for attacks rooted in the organizational opportunities paradigm, a useful tool for future work on social movements in cross-national perspective, as well as further work on terrorist organizations.

Authors

• Andrew Davis, University of Arizona

• Yongjun Zhang, University of Arizona