Do Terrorist Attacks Motivate Citizens to Participate in Politics?

• In Event: Poster Session: State Politics & Conflict Processes: Violence and Contention by States and Non-State Actors
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Conflict Processes: Violence and Contention by States and Non-State Actors

Abstract

In the last two decades, many elections were held under shadow of terrorist attacks. On 11 March 2004, only three days before the Spanish national elections, Madrid was attacked by a terrorist bombing. The 2017 French general elections also took place under an emergency rule decree following bombings in Paris. In another example, a terrorist leader from the Caucasus region, Doku Umarov, stated that the motivation behind the 24 January 2011 attack at the Moscow Airport was to influence the upcoming Russian elections. In Afghanistan, parliamentary elections have been delayed for three years because of Taliban attacks and held in October 2018.
It is often argued that terrorism aims to pressure societies to coerce their governments to grant concessions to the terrorist organization's cause. If this claim is valid, then whether terrorism is an effective way of coercion or not depends on how the targeted societies react to terrorist attacks. In democracies, the ballot box constitutes the main venue where people can best exert influence on government policies. Thus, scholars are interested in exploring the impact of terrorism on citizens’ electoral behavior. Existing research concludes that exposure to violence affects electorates' likelihood to participate in elections but there is a lack of agreement on the direction of this affect. Does terrorism increase the level of participation in elections or does it depress the level of voter turnout?
To answer this question, I borrow from the retrospective (performance) voting theory that mostly looks at the consequences of economic performance. This study applies the retrospective voting theory to the terrorism literature. I argue that the number of terror events and the amount of terrorism can provide a clue about the competence of the incumbent. When there is no security threat, citizens lack a clue about the incumbent performance on security. However, terrorist attacks provide a strong motivation for participation by signaling the incompetency of the government. When there is no security threat, there is little reason for potential voters to think that changing the government will make their situation better. Therefore, I hypothesize that terrorist attacks increase the level of turnout in elections.
Moreover, the contradictory results in the literature on the direction of the relationship between terrorism and political participation signal that there are particular conditions that determine individuals’ willingness to vote in elections following a terrorist attack. I argue that the factors that affect citizens’ likelihood to blame their governments for terrorist attacks and use elections as a mean to express their discontent determine those conditions. I focus on three conditions: the ideology of the government, the form of the government, and the type of the attack. First, if the incumbent party is a left-wing party citizens will have even a greater motivation to participate in politics and change the incumbent because the literature shows that left-wing parties are perceived as less competent in the eyes of voters. Second, if citizens cannot determine those who are responsible for political violence, their motivation to go to the polls and vote out the incumbent will be mitigated. Therefore, I expect to see diminished positive impact of terrorist attacks on electoral turnout under coalition governments because coalition governments make it harder for citizens to blame the government by increasing the sophistication of decision-making process regarding to vote or note. Third, I argue that both perceiving the incumbents as a symbol of unity and a more complex counterterrorism policies in the case of international terrorism lead people to support the government while they blame the government when the threat is domestic. Therefore, given that the main mechanism of increasing participation is increasing discontent, I expect to see a greater positive change in political participation when an attack is carried out by a domestic group.
I test my hypotheses in the context of I include the levels of voter turnout in national elections from 51 states between 1975 and 2019. The data on terrorist attacks comes from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD). The data on voter turnout comes from the International IDEA Voter Turnout dataset. The data is structured in this study as panel data, which provide multiple observations on each country over time. I make use of panel data and estimate it using panel regression which includes fixed effects. I find support for my hypothesis by showing participation in elections increases as terrorist incidents increase. Moreover, the main insight of this study is that the relationship between exposure to terrorism and participation in politics is conditional on the structural factors. This paper contributes to both literatures on political violence and political behavior by standing at the intersection of these two fields.

Author

• Cigdem Unal, University College London