Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Ballots, Bargains, and Bombs: Terrorist Targeting of Spoiler Opportunities

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 36; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03050629.2010.502453

1547-7444

Alex Braithwaite, Dennis Foster, David Sobek,

Religion and Society Interactions

Abstract Benjamin Netanyahu's come-from-behind victory over Shimon Peres in the Israeli national elections of May 1996, following an apparent intensification of Palestinian terrorism over the course of that spring, reminded observers of the political ramifications of terrorism. Since May 1996 was also the month in which Israel reentered Final Status negotiations with a Palestinian delegation in Taba, Egypt, the timing of this surge in violence encourages us to ask if terrorists regularly conceive of elections and rounds of negotiations as “spoiler opportunities,” or opportune times to undermine peaceful political processes. We address this question in the context of Israel's long‐running experience with elections, negotiations, and terrorism. We hypothesize that attacks resulting in fatalities are likely to increase in periods immediately surrounding Israeli general elections and key rounds of negotiations affecting the fate of the Palestinian population. Negative binomial event count analyses of the period 1970–2007 suggest that violent opponents indeed viewed the periods preceding negotiations and the ends of electoral cycles as “spoiler opportunities.” Keywords: electionsIsraelnegotiationsspoiling behaviorsterrorism Notes 1Peres led Netanyahu 50% to 36% on the February 21, yet just 7 days later the candidates were tied at 48%. 2We conceive of terrorism as the use of violence against government, military, and public targets by non-state actors looking to affect some policy change. In the context of democratic institutions, more specifically, we believe that one key motivation of the terrorist organization is the desire to provoke the government into conducting disproportionate retaliatory strikes in order to undermine their democratic credentials (see, especially, CitationFromkin 1975; CitationPape 2003; CitationWilkinson 1986). 3In his analysis of American electoral politics, CitationMacKuen (1983) finds that elections serve as referenda not on the president's performance over the previous four years, but on the previous several months. Such a conclusion lends credence to the argument that events (including terrorist attacks) taking place shortly before elections are likely to play a crucial role in molding electorate perceptions of leaders' performances and efficacy. 4For this purpose we use the Global Terrorism Database (GTD). This contains all attacks against Israel for the period 1970 to 2007. This means that we have data beginning just 6 years after the formation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and 3 years after the emergence of Palestinian terrorism as a novel threat to Israeli security (CitationMaoz 2007). The focus upon terrorist attacks that result in some number of fatalities is consistent with the approach of CitationBerrebi and Klor (2008). 5Each of the spoiler opportunities included in our analyses are detailed in Web Appendix 1. 6The detailed coding rules as well as the data file are available online. http://spirit.tau.ac.il/poli/faculty/maoz/conflict/hostil4.html 7This finding is robust to alternative variable construction. The findings remained consistent when we replaced it with 3-month, 6-month, and 12-month averages of monthly attacks, for instance.