Thursday, March 29, 2007

Amazing, Absolutely Academically Amazing

The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 51, No. 2, 329-348 (2007), published by Sage, contains an article entitled:

Does Democracy Matter?
Regime Type and Suicide Terrorism

by Sara Jackson Wade of the Department of Political Science Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia and Dan Reiter, also of the Department of Political Science Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Here's the abstract and not the conclusion:

This article conducts quantitative tests on the relationship between regime type and suicide terrorism for 1980 to 2003. We present the recently popularized argument that democracies are more likely to experience suicide terrorism and a new hypothesis that mixed regimes are especially likely to experience suicide terrorism. We offer several improvements in research design, including using more controls, the nation-year as the unit of analysis, and more appropriate statistical techniques.

Using both Freedom House and Polity data, we find that in general, regime type is uncorrelated with suicide terrorism. We do find that there is a statistically significant interaction between regime type and the number of religiously distinct minorities at risk (MARs) with suicide terrorism, but the statistical significance of this finding is limited, and its substantive impact is marginal.

We also find that national size, Islam, national experience with suicide terrorism, and global experience with suicide terrorism affect the likelihood of suicide terrorism.


Amazing, eh?

Absolutely academically amazing.

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