Terrorism and Democracy

Abstract

Abstract This article proposes a new explanation of the positive correlation between democracy and terrorism detected in many previous studies. It is shown that this might be accounted for by the fact that factional democracies are subjected to more terrorist attacks than the other political regimes. A positive relationship between the democratic regime and the level of terrorist activity can be obtained due to the inclusion of factional democracies in the sample of democratic states. If factional democracies are excluded from the sample, the relationship between the level of terrorist activity and the democratic regime is negative. The analysis allows to maintain that factional democracy is a rather powerful factor of a high level of terrorist activity, while non-factional democracy turns out to be rather a statistically significant predictor of a relatively low intensity of terrorist attacks.