The Devil You Know but Are Afraid to Face

Abstract

Despite substantial progress in the applied study of terrorism, one important methodological issue has remained underdeveloped. Multiple warnings have urged for caution as the validity of extant findings may have been distorted from the well-known “devil” of underreporting bias. Yet, extant research has fallen short from addressing the issue in a systematic fashion. This article discusses a way for assessing whether underreporting is present by using the widely studied relationship between terrorism and regime type as its laboratory. After formally presenting a setup for the accommodation of underreporting bias, the authors discuss how it relates to press freedom. According to their results, underreporting is indeed present, implying that the used databases for terrorism represent an understatement of the true number of terrorist incidents.