Voting for Trouble? Partisan Electoral Interventions and Domestic Terrorism

Abstract

© 2018 Taylor & Francis What are the effects of partisan electoral interventions on terrorism in the intervened countries? Attempts by the great powers to affect the election results in other countries have been quite common in the postwar world with electoral interventions occurring in nearly one of every nine competitive elections between 1946 and 2000 as well as in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. However little research has been done on the possible effects such interventions can have on the target countries chances to suffer from domestic terrorism. In this paper I analyze the effects of electoral interventions on terrorism utilizing measures of domestic terrorism and of terrorist group emergence between 1970 and 2000 and 1968 and 2000 respectively. I find that while not all electoral interventions have terrorism inducing effects, overt interventions of this kind significantly increase the amount of domestic terrorism in the target as well as the probability of new domestic terrorist groups emerging