Democracy's Effect on Terrorist Organizations: Regime Type and Armed Group Behavior in Chile

How does democracy influence terrorism? The regime-responsive school argues that lack of representation in autocracies motivates violence; the regime-permissive school posits that individual liberty in democracies allows it. The schools thus disagree about the democratic feature to which violence re...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Terrorism and political violence 2015-03, Vol.27 (2), p.243-267
Main Author: Esberg, Jane
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Chile
Democracy
Freedom
Freedoms
Latin America
Motivation
Organization theory
organizational theory
Political representation
Radical groups
regime type
Terrorism
Violence
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Summary:How does democracy influence terrorism? The regime-responsive school argues that lack of representation in autocracies motivates violence; the regime-permissive school posits that individual liberty in democracies allows it. The schools thus disagree about the democratic feature to which violence responds-representation or individual liberty. These arguments are problematic in two ways. First, neither accounts for the potentially competing effects of different democratic features. Second, treating terrorism as a set response to operating context ignores the operational processes behind violence, described in organizational theories of terrorism. This article develops a bridge between the regime-responsive and regime-permissive schools by applying organizational theories of terrorism to their key arguments. I argue that representation and individual liberty have independent, and sometimes competing, effects on armed groups' missions, hierarchies, and membership-collectively organizational capacity, the ability to survive and influence the environment. This explains the mixed effects of democracy on terrorism: both high-functioning democracy and repressive autocracy weaken organizational capacity, but decreased representation in a democracy or higher individual liberty in an autocracy removes organizational stresses. New research on Chile between 1965 and 1995-representing five government periods, with four armed groups operating-acts as an initial test of these relationships.
ISSN:0954-6553
1556-1836
DOI:10.1080/09546553.2013.800049