Regime type and the propensity to negotiate with insurgents during civil conflict

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2311611_ (Table of contents)

Conventional wisdom in the literature of terrorism suggests that groups using terrorism selectively attack governments based on their expectations about government compliance. Domestic institutions, in this respect, emerge as one of the important factors that encourage and/or discourage terrorism. However, researchers have not empirically addressed how differing domestic institutions condition governmental responses to terror attacks. This thesis aims to fill this gap in the literature by examining the interactive effect of regime type and terror attacks on a government’s tendency to negotiate with insurgent groups during civil wars that took place between 1989 and 2009 in Africa. Using the regime type categorization by Geddes, Frantz, and Wright (2014), I find that terror attacks have a positive effect on the probability of government negotiations with insurgent groups in democracies, single party regimes, and in military regimes, but a negative effect in personalist regimes. Prior work on the relationship between regime types and political outcomes suggest that democracies, single party regimes, and military regimes tend to accommodate groups using terrorism, due to (i) high costs of repressive counterterrorism measures, (ii) low tolerance towards civilian casualties, and (iii) constraints on exercise of coercive power. In contrast, terrorism does not translate into government compliance in personalist regimes, because personalist leaders are (i) immune to political costs of repressive counterterrorism measures, (ii) unsensitive to civilian casualties, and (iii) unconstrained in their exercise of coercive power