IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_2864.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Terrorism Prevention and Electoral Accountability

Author

Listed:
  • Tiberiu Dragu
  • Mattias Polborn

Abstract

How does electoral accountability affect the effectiveness of terrorism prevention in a democ- racy? We analyze the connection between electoral accountability and policy effectiveness in the context of terrorism prevention. We develop a formal model of an interaction between a government, a minority community, and a representative voter. All actors share the objective of terrorism prevention and have symmetric information. We show that electoral pressures to be successful in terrorism prevention create a commitment problem for the government and this can lead to less security. If the representative voter cares more about terrorism prevention, the government intensifies anti-terrorism activities that are under its direct control, but cooperation by the minority community weakens, and, as a result, security may decrease. We also show that commitment to ex-post suboptimal anti-terrorism activity is desirable for the government, but such commitment is difficult to achieve without explicit institutional constraints such as an effective judicial review on government’s antiterrorism actions.

Suggested Citation

  • Tiberiu Dragu & Mattias Polborn, 2009. "Terrorism Prevention and Electoral Accountability," CESifo Working Paper Series 2864, CESifo.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_2864
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp2864.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Kenneth Rogoff, 1985. "The Optimal Degree of Commitment to an Intermediate Monetary Target," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 100(4), pages 1169-1189.
    2. Bagwell, Kyle, 1995. "Commitment and observability in games," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 8(2), pages 271-280.
    3. Alberto Abadie, 2006. "Poverty, Political Freedom, and the Roots of Terrorism," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(2), pages 50-56, May.
    4. Timothy Besley, 2005. "Political Selection," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 19(3), pages 43-60, Summer.
    5. Matthias Messner & Mattias K. Polborn, 2004. "Voting on Majority Rules," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 71(1), pages 115-132.
    6. Todd Sandler & Kevin Siqueira, 2006. "Global terrorism: deterrence versus pre-emption," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 39(4), pages 1370-1387, November.
    7. Blomberg, S. Brock & Hess, Gregory D. & Weerapana, Akila, 2004. "Economic conditions and terrorism," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 20(2), pages 463-478, June.
    8. Powell, Robert, 2007. "Allocating Defensive Resources with Private Information about Vulnerability," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 101(4), pages 799-809, November.
    9. Bueno de Mesquita, Ethan, 2007. "Politics and the Suboptimal Provision of Counterterror," International Organization, Cambridge University Press, vol. 61(1), pages 9-36, January.
    10. Dal Bo, Ernesto, 2006. "Committees with supermajority voting yield commitment with flexibility," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 90(4-5), pages 573-599, May.
    11. Ethan Bueno de Mesquita & Eric S. Dickson, 2007. "The Propaganda of the Deed: Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Mobilization," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 51(2), pages 364-381, April.
    12. B. Peter Rosendorff & Todd Sandler, 2004. "Too Much of a Good Thing?," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 48(5), pages 657-671, October.
    13. de Mesquita, Ethan Bueno, 2005. "Conciliation, Counterterrorism, and Patterns of Terrorist Violence," International Organization, Cambridge University Press, vol. 59(1), pages 145-176, January.
    14. Powell, Robert, 2007. "Defending against Terrorist Attacks with Limited Resources," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 101(3), pages 527-541, August.
    15. Gassebner, Martin & Jong-A-Pin, Richard & Mierau, Jochen O., 2008. "Terrorism and electoral accountability: One strike, you're out!," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 100(1), pages 126-129, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Sanghoon Lee, 2010. "Dynamic Inconsistency in Counterterrorism," Conflict Management and Peace Science, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 27(4), pages 369-385, September.
    2. Tiberiu Dragu, 2017. "On repression and its effectiveness," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 29(4), pages 599-622, October.
    3. Haritz Garro, 2019. "Terrorism prevention with reelection concerns and valence competition," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 31(3), pages 330-369, July.
    4. Friedrich Schneider & Tilman Brück & Daniel Meierrieks, 2010. "The Economics of Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism: A Survey (Part II)," Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin 1050, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research.
    5. Deniz Aksoy & David Carlson, 2022. "Electoral support and militants’ targeting strategies," Journal of Peace Research, Peace Research Institute Oslo, vol. 59(2), pages 229-241, March.
    6. Nicola, Brugali & Paolo, Buonanno & Mario, Gilli, 2018. "Political Regimes and the Determinants of Terrorism and Counter-terrorism," Working Papers 384, University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Economics, revised 13 Jul 2018.
    7. Freytag, Andreas & Krüger, Jens J. & Meierrieks, Daniel & Schneider, Friedrich, 2011. "The origins of terrorism: Cross-country estimates of socio-economic determinants of terrorism," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 27(S1), pages 5-16.
    8. Catherine C. Langlois & Jean-Pierre P. Langlois, 2011. "The Escalation of Terror: Hate and the Demise of Terrorist Organizations," Conflict Management and Peace Science, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 28(5), pages 497-521, November.
    9. Cárceles-Poveda, Eva & Tauman, Yair, 2011. "A strategic analysis of the war against transnational terrorism," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 71(1), pages 49-65, January.
    10. Khusrav Gaibulloev & Todd Sandler, 2023. "Common myths of terrorism," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 37(2), pages 271-301, April.
    11. Thomas Jensen, 2012. "National Responses to Transnational Terrorism: Intelligence and Counterterrorism Provision," Discussion Papers 12-22, University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics.
    12. Levitin, Gregory & Hausken, Kjell, 2009. "Intelligence and impact contests in systems with redundancy, false targets, and partial protection," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 94(12), pages 1927-1941.
    13. Jun Zhuang & Vicki M. Bier, 2007. "Balancing Terrorism and Natural Disasters---Defensive Strategy with Endogenous Attacker Effort," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 55(5), pages 976-991, October.
    14. Yang Jiao & Zijun Luo, 2019. "A model of terrorism and counterterrorism with location choices," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 179(3), pages 301-313, June.
    15. Michael Jetter & David Stadelmann, 2019. "Terror per Capita," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 86(1), pages 286-304, July.
    16. Jean-Paul Azam, 2012. "Why suicide-terrorists get educated, and what to do about it," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 153(3), pages 357-373, December.
    17. M. Akif Yardimci, 2024. "Terrorism, counter‐terrorism, and voting: The case of Turkey," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 36(2), pages 901-927, July.
    18. Bakker, Craig & Webster, Jennifer B. & Nowak, Kathleen E. & Chatterjee, Samrat & Perkins, Casey J. & Brigantic, Robert, 2020. "Multi-Game Modeling for Counter-Smuggling," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 200(C).
    19. Bandyopadhyay, Subhayu & Sandler, Todd, 2023. "Voluntary participation in a terror group and counterterrorism policy," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 215(C), pages 500-513.
    20. Sergey Zhavoronkov & Konstantin Yanovskiy & Timofey Ginker & Ilia Zatkovetsky, 2016. "To Kill Hope? In Search of a Reliable Strategy to Fight Terrorism," Working Papers 149, Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy, revised 2016.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    terrorism; elections; accountability;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D70 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_2864. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Klaus Wohlrabe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesifde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.