Veto Players and Terror.

A recent explosion of work has occurred seeking to understand under what conditions groups use terror to pursue their goals. Regime type is one condition that is prominently discussed. Democratic regimes have been linked to terrorism for contending reasons with some scholars claiming that constraints on the executive and free civil rights increase the likelihood of these regimes experiencing terror while other scholars claim that democracy promotes nonviolent political participation thus reducing the likelihood of terror.Corroborating evidence has been used for both relationships leading to the following puzzle: why do some democratic regimes seem to foster terrorism while others do not? We offer three contributions to this debate. Beginning with the assumption that terror groups want to change government policy, we argue that the more veto players present in a political system, the more likely the system is to experience deadlock. Given the inability of societal actors to change policies through nonviolent and institutional participation, these regimes will have a greater likelihood of experiencing terror events. Second, we argue that the terrorism data generating process has been misidentified. In short, two types of zeros exist in terrorism data that are different but have been treated the same in previous models.Some states across the entire period of most samples never experience terror while other states only experience terror in a few years and thus have some probability of experiencing terror in the future. We use zero-inflated count models to model this process. Third, we use new data from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) that was previously unavailable. Unlike previous terrorism databases, this new data incorporates both domestic and international incidents of terrorism while spanning from 1970 to 1997. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]