lee democracy civil liberties hostage taking terrorism

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Democracy, civil liberties, and hostage-taking terrorism

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Democracy, civil liberties, and hostage-taking terrorism

Chia-yi Lee

Department of Political Science, Washington University in St Louis

AbstractWhile hostage-taking has been a common form of terrorism for decades, which types of governments are more proneto it remains unclear. Does democracy motivate terrorists to engage in hostage-taking acts because of how easy nego-tiating with a democratic government is? Or does democracy impose ‘audience costs’ on the government leaders,driving them never to negotiate with hostage-taking terrorists following the long-held principle of no negotiation?This article argues that hostage-taking terrorists are more inclined to target democratic governments because of thegreater value given to human life and personal freedom in democracies. Additionally the helplessness of held hostagesis more freely exposed by the media in democracies, which leads to the audience focusing on the hostages themselvesrather than on the interests of the nation. This in turns compels decisionmakers to concede, especially near electiontime. It is only when institutional constraints on the executives are high that democratic leaders refuse to makeconcessions. Using data on hostage events from 1978 to 2005, this article finds strong evidence that supports thistheory, showing that democracy has competing effects on hostage-taking terrorism – civil liberties and press freedomare positively associated with hostage-taking incidents, whereas executive constraints have a negative association.

Keywords

bargaining, civil liberties, democracy, hostage-taking, terrorism

Introduction

Hostage-taking is a unique form of terrorism because itinvolves direct negotiation between the state andhostage-takers under time pressure. It also attracts enor-mous attention from the public and the media becausethe act itself typically lasts longer than other forms ofterrorism and there is a buildup leading to the outcome.However, which types of governments are more likely tobe the targets of hostage-taking terrorists remains anunanswered question. Does democracy represent anincentive for hostage-taking terrorists because of the easeof negotiating with a democratic government? Or doesdemocracy generate ‘audience costs’ (Fearon, 1994) onthe government by the promise of never negotiating withhostage-taking terrorists?

In the terrorism literature, a predominant and impor-tant finding is that democracies suffer terrorist attacksthe most (Eubank & Weinberg, 1994, 2001; Weinberg

& Eubank, 1998; Piazza, 2008). Hostage-taking is asubset of transnational terrorism, but the reasons whydemocracies are plagued by transnational terrorism maynot be able to explain the case of hostage-taking. Further,terrorists seize hostages for specific aims, such as ransom,safe conduct, or the release of their imprisonedcompatriots, so hostage-taking terrorism usually involvesbargaining between the hostage-takers and their targets,which, compared to other forms of terrorism, may attractgreater public attention, may mobilize more governmentresources for the purpose of the bargaining process, andmay lead to more such future incidents occurring if thehostage-takers should succeed in their endeavor. There-fore, distinguishing hostage-taking from other types ofterrorism may uncover distinct theoretical mechanisms

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that condition democracy’s correlation to terroristactivities.

In this article, I argue that democracies are more likelyto be targeted by hostage-taking terrorists, just as they aremore likely to suffer all types of transnational terrorism,though the mechanisms differ. Democracies are morelikely to be attacked by transnational terrorists becausetheir active foreign involvement often triggers hatred anddiscontent abroad (Savun & Phillips, 2009), becausedemocratic accountability may weaken the government’sability to combat terrorism (Li, 2005), and because ahigh level of political competition may motivate terroristgroups to pursue political influence through violence(Chenoweth, 2010). Hostage-taking is different in thatthe key to the outcome hinges on the decisionmaker’scost/benefit calculations regarding whether to compro-mise with hostage-takers, which are largely shaped by thedomestic political environment. One feature of democ-racy, the respect for personal freedom and human life,leads the public to focus on the security of hostages. Themedia coverage of a hostage situation in democracies alsomagnifies and conveys the public sentiment. The deci-sionmaker, who cares about being re-elected, is drivento associate personal political interests with the hostages’interests while casting aside national interests. Onlywhen the leader’s decisionmaking power is heavily con-strained can national interests be stressed. As a result, ter-rorists tend to undertake hostage-taking to makedemands on democratic governments since their goalsare more likely to be achieved, particularly when electiontime is near, but governments that are highly constrainedare less susceptible to public pressure and thus less likelyto suffer from hostage-taking terrorism.

I examine my hypotheses using a unique dataset onhostage-taking incidents from 1978 to 2005. The resultsshow that democratic governments are more likely to bethe targets of hostage-taking terrorists, although the rela-tionship is statistically weak. By decomposing democ-racy, I find that hostage-taking terrorism is positivelycorrelated to civil liberties and freedom of the press butnegatively correlated to executive constraints. The tim-ing of the next election also matters; as electionsapproach, hostage-taking events are more likely to occursince government executives are more sensitive to publicopinion. These results are robust to the exclusion of anoutlier country, an alternative measure of civil liberties,and alternative estimators.

While the findings indicate a similar correlationbetween democracy and hostage-taking terrorism to thatbetween democracy and transnational terrorism, thisstudy is significant in two respects. First, it provides a

novel theoretical explanation of why hostage-taking ter-rorists prefer to target democratic governments, which isdistinct from the existing explanations of all forms of ter-rorism. In particular, this study emphasizes the key roleplayed in a hostage-taking situation by a decisionmakerwho is constrained by the domestic pressure from thepublic and the media as well as by government bureau-cracy. The theory and empirical results contrast withexisting work on other forms of terrorism (Li, 2005).Second, this study then suggests policy implications thatare specific to reducing hostage-taking terrorism. Theresults imply that, facing hostage-takers, governmentsmay be better advised to take a firm stand to try to notonly counter the belief that they tend to give in to terror-ists, but also prevent the occurrence of such futureevents.

In the next section, I will review the literature thatdiscusses the relationship between democracy andterrorism, and argue for the need to disaggregatehostage-taking from other types of terrorism. I will thenintroduce the ‘dilemma of democracy’ (Enders &Sandler, 2006; Netanyahu, 1997) which occurs notonly in the general prevention of terrorism but alsomore ostensibly in the negotiation with hostage-taking terrorists. My arguments are also advanced in thesame section. The section that follows will present theresearch design and data followed by the results andmodel checking. The final section will conclude andprovide policy suggestions.

Democracy, terrorism, and hostage-taking

Whether democracy promotes or reduces terrorism istheoretically debatable. One argument posits that someinherent characteristics of democratic political systems,including political participation, rule of law, civil society,and free and fast transmission of information, can miti-gate the resentment toward governments and reduce thepossibility of the recruitment of extremists (Windsor,2003; Li, 2005). In contrast, some scholars argue thatdemocracy is not useful in reducing terrorism since ter-rorists’ interests are not represented through democraticpolitics (Gause, 2005). Still others contend that terror-ism flourishes primarily in prosperous democraciesbecause several factors exist in democratic regimesdirectly or indirectly resulting in grievances or the easewith which terrorists undertake their activities, such asthe accessibility of victims by terrorists, civil liberties thatpermit the freedom of movement, freedom of and accessto the media, and the free expression of dissatisfactionand disagreements (Ross, 1993).

236 journal of PEACE RESEARCH 50(2)



Empirically, a majority of studies discover a positiverelationship between democracy and transnational terror-ism (Eubank & Weinberg, 1994, 2001; Weinberg &Eubank, 1998; Piazza, 2008), and this relationship per-sists even when the sample is limited to Middle Easterncountries (Piazza, 2007).1 Given this predominant find-ing,2 a new scholarly trend is to examine the disaggregatedfeatures of democracy or to explore the mechanismsthrough which terrorism thrives in democracies. Li(2005) shows that democracy has two competing effects;democratic participation reduces the number of transna-tional terrorist incidents because of the lowered grie-vances, but government constraints increase thenumber, because checks and balances often lead to polit-ical deadlock. Chenoweth (2010) argues that democraticcompetition induces terrorist groups to resort to violence,and the evidence indicates a positive association betweenpolitical competition and terrorism. Savun & Phillips(2009) show that terrorist activities are more related toactive foreign connections than to democracy.

In short, there is near consensus that democraticregimes face more terrorist threats because of a higherlevel of institutional constraints, because of a greaterdegree of political contestation, or because of their activeforeign policies. These factors, however, do not necessa-rily lead to more incidents within a subtype of terrorism.For example, a higher level of executive constraints mayweaken the state’s ability to fight terrorism in general,leading to more terrorist attacks (Li, 2005), but, as Iargue in the next section, it may lower the possibility thatthe executive arbitrarily concedes to hostage-takers, thusreducing hostage-taking terrorism. So, singling outhostage-taking incidents is vital to understanding howthe effects of political institutions may differ dependingon terrorism type.

Existing studies that isolate hostage-taking fromother types of terrorist attacks can be classified by theresearch approach they utilize. Scholars in one groupexamine the logic of hostage-takers through psychologi-cal approaches (Wilson, 2000; Houghton, 2006).

Those in a second group conduct case studies to probeinto specific and famous incidents, such as the 1979Iran hostage crisis and the 2002 Moscow theaterhostage crisis (Piadyshev, 2003). Others draw uponquantitative analyses to delve into the factors affect-ing bargaining success in hostage seizures (Atkinson,Sandler & Tschirhart, 1987; Sandler & Scott, 1987;Gaibulloev & Sandler, 2009) or rely on game theoryor time-series analyses to explore the attributes ordynamics of hostage events (Lapan & Sandler, 1988;Brandt & Sandler, 2009).

Indeed, these studies contribute greatly to the researchon hostage-taking terrorism, but they focus mainly onthe bargaining process or the features of hostage-takersrather than on the targets. In reality, terrorists may ran-domly choose the victims, but they do not target a gov-ernment unintentionally (Mani, 2004). In this article,therefore, I focus on the targets of hostage-takers, askingwhat types of governments are more likely to be the tar-gets of hostage-taking terrorists. I intend to discover thepolitical factors of hostage-taking from the government’sperspective. In so doing, I hope to contribute to thedevelopment of a better understanding of hostage-taking terrorism and the provision of more effectivecounter-terrorism policy advice.

The dilemma of democracy in hostage-takingcrises

Liberal democracies face a dilemma between the pur-suit of democratic values and counter-terrorism. Onthe one hand, democratic governments are expectedto secure the lives and property of their citizens with-out severely encroaching on civil liberties and personalfreedom. On the other hand, political and civil free-doms and the protection of human life in liberaldemocracies provide a vulnerable environment for ter-rorists to engage in terror activities (Enders & Sand-ler, 2006; Netanyahu, 1997).

In a hostage-taking situation, this dilemma gets morecomplicated since the government directly faces a trade-off between fighting with terrorists and rescuinghostages. The decisionmakers may face pressure fromvarious sources, including the hostages’ families, thedomestic constituency, the media, the bureaucracy, andeven foreign governments. They need to consider andevaluate three sets of competing interests – nationalinterests, personal political interests, and hostages’ inter-ests (Nacos, 1994: 136). Therefore, the dilemma ofdemocracy is most evidently exhibited in hostage-taking terrorism.

1 Yet, Eyerman (1998) finds an inverse-U relationship betweendemocracy and terrorism, whereas Gassebner & Luechinger (2011)point out no relationship between them.2 In addition to the statistical results, direct evidence comes from thedata. According to the transnational terrorism data partitioned byEnders, Sandler & Gaibulloev (2011) from the Global TerrorismDatabase, from 1970 to 2007, 36.8% of the transnational terroristevents occurred in North America and Western Europe, more thanthose occurring in Latin America, Middle East, and North Africa,which account for 32.1% of the total.

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Positive effect of democracyBased on the above idea, I argue that democracy is morelikely to induce hostage-taking terrorism for two rea-sons. The first and most important point hinges on thevalues people widely hold in liberal democracies.Human rights and personal freedom are highlyrespected in the democratic world (Beetham, 1999;Sen, 1999; Dahl, 2000).3 The limit to the hostages’personal freedom and the threat to the hostages’ livesare therefore difficult for the audience in democraciesto bear. And since terrorists employ terrorism in orderto influence a larger population than solely the victims(Crenshaw, 1981; Hoffman, 2006), how the mass pub-lic responds to terrorist attacks shapes the conditions onwhich they act. Terrorists understand that seizinghostages has greater impact on the public feeling indemocracies than in authoritarian regimes and hencetend to target democratic governments.

This ‘respect for human life’ characteristic combinedwith another important feature of democracy – regularand effective elections – drives democratic leaders to havedifferent considerations from authoritarian leaders. It iswidely agreed that public opinion can substantially con-strain or influence democratic decisionmakers in foreignpolicymaking or international negotiations (Putnam,1988; Holsti, 2004), especially when the intensity ofissues under negotiation is high (Trumbore, 1998).When a hostage crisis happens in democracies, the publicis unlikely to accept sacrificing hostages, and therefore arational decisionmaker who faces pressure from constitu-ents usually sees rescuing hostages as a higher priority. Inother words, democratic leaders who are concernedabout their political prospects have to link their personalinterests to the hostages’ interests because the latterreceive more public attention.

In contrast, authoritarian leaders do not place theirpolitical survival in voters’ hands. They need a relativelysmaller winning coalition to secure their leadership andhence lack a motivation to provide public goods (Buenode Mesquita et al., 2005). Once a hostage incidentoccurs, an authoritarian leader will tend to consider con-cessions costly since capitulation may encourage moreterrorist activities, which may be more problematic thanthe loss of hostages’ lives. Only when hostages are crucialto political survival – for example, if patrons are taken

hostage – are authoritarian leaders willing to provide pri-vate goods to trade for the hostages’ lives.

Second, in democracies, the media play an importantrole in affecting public attitudes during hostage-takingincidents. Terrorists, to a large extent, depend on mediaexposure to gain access to the public agenda (Nacos,1994; Hoffman, 2006), and they may thus strategicallyselect a form of attack that can help attract the highestmedia attention. While literature on public opinionshows that public support for wars, counter-terrorism,or wartime presidents tends to be high (Holsti, 2004;Willer, 2004; Huddy et al., 2005; McFarland, 2005),particularly due to the media coverage of threateningimages (Gadarian, 2010; Nacos, Bloch-Elkon & Sha-piro, 2011), this effect can be counteracted by casualties(Mueller, 1973; Gartner & Segura, 1998, 2000; Karol &Miguel, 2007), which suggests that public opinion issensitive to human costs. Building upon this literature,I argue that, although people are apt to support hawkishanti-terrorism policies, their attitudes may depend on themedia focus. In a hostage situation, hostages’ lives are atrisk, which not only provides news values to media butalso creates a negative atmosphere among the public andwithin the government. The media emphasis on the vic-tims further increases people’s sympathy for these inno-cents and reduces attention to government officials. Thegovernment leader recognizes that the public attitude isin favor of the hostages and of their loved ones, and thusis eager to wind up the event peacefully. In his/her calcu-lations, resistance is more costly than capitulation, so thefinal decision is highly likely a concession, and nationalinterests may be cast aside.

In fact, one of the longstanding tenets of US counter-terrorism policy is no concessions and no deals with ter-rorists, such as ransom payments. Making concessions orstriking a deal not only creates incentives for terrorists tokeep engaging in such activities but also generates moralhazards; that is, citizens may take more risks since theyknow the government will cover them (Pillar, 2004:214). However, this principle is often broken by presi-dents because of their personal political considerations,which are influenced by the domestic pressure from thepublic and the media (Nacos, 1994: 123–124). In the1985 TWA hostage crisis, for example, 153 hostageswere taken captive, including 85 Americans. The firstpriority for the Reagan administration was to get theUS hostages home, partly because the media incessantlyspotlighted the predicament of the victims (Nacos, 1994;Hoffman, 2006). Compelled by the US government,Israel finally released 756 Shia prisoners, as the hijackersdemanded, to free the hostages. This case highlights the

3 For instance, Dahl (2000: 51) mentions that ‘a democratic cultureis almost certain to emphasize the value of personal freedom and thusto provide support for additional rights and liberties’.




importance of media and how they may affect the deci-sionmaking process.

A critical issue that arises concerns the ‘audience costs’generated in democracies.4 Based on this theory, consti-tuents may blame government leaders who surrender toterrorists since the publicly announced policy is not toconcede. A hostage-taking situation, however, differs inthat citizens typically prefer to see hostages set free. Theymay not want a public concession to terrorists, but apeaceful outcome can mitigate their disapproval. Theformal model developed by Browne & Dickson (2010)shows that leaders can more likely induce terrorists toenter secret negotiations by making a public commit-ment to never negotiating with terrorists because theaudience costs of reneging on this promise is high. Simi-larly, in a hostage-taking crisis, without a certainty thatterrorists can be wiped out without hurting any hostage,the government leader may choose to accept thedemand, although probably fulfilling it in secret or withother cover. Terrorists are aware of the costs imposed ondemocratic leaders when the non-concession policy isbroken and thereby prefer to target democratic govern-ments since the leaders cannot withstand the conse-quence of failed bargaining.

In short, the above discussion can be summarized intothree testable hypotheses:

H1: Hostage-takers are more likely to target a demo-cratic government.

H2: A country in which people have higher respect forpersonal freedom and human life is more likely tobecome the target of hostage-takers.

H3: A country with a higher level of press freedom ismore likely to become the target of hostage-takers.

Negative effect of institutional constraintsDemocracy provides a favorable environment for terror-ists to engage in hostage-taking activities, but some attri-butes of democracy may bring about a counteractiveeffect. A significant attribute is the constraints on thegovernment. Li (2005) argues that institutional con-straints may lead to an increase in terrorist events becauseof the political stalemate and the weakened counter-terrorism ability. In this article, conversely, I argue fora negative effect of executive constraints on hostage-taking, and the key is the structure of decisionmaking.

Returning to the discussion of the competing interestspolitical leaders face during hostage-taking events, Iargue that in democracies the leaders’ political interestsare greatly influenced by the hostages’ interests since thepublic and the media pay more attention to the latter.When decisionmakers put their personal interests ahead,national interests can only be represented by the govern-ment bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is composed of gov-ernment officials or technicians who are independent ofpolitical pressure, and national interests involving theinterests of their branches or their expertise would betheir focus. In other words, some relevant administra-tions such as the army or the security department maybe the main voice insisting on the adherence to thenon-concession policy during a hostage-taking crisis.And only in a government in which checks and balancesare functioning well and the decisionmaker is horizon-tally accountable can the bureaucratic concerns surpassthe leader’s political concerns.5

A second reason why institutional constraints serve toprevent hostage-taking terrorism is that leaders are lessable to take unilateral action given the constraints. Whenthe chief executive’s power is less limited, the negotiationwith terrorists can be informal and flexible. When thedecisionmaking power is highly constrained or institutio-nalized, most of the governmental decisions should bemade via standard operating procedures (Allison & Zeli-kow, 1999), which means the head of the government hasto stick to formal rules and has less leeway to make anindependent decision. In a hostage-taking situation, as aresult, greater constraints on the executive lead to a firmerstance against terrorists, which is the long-held principle.6

4 Audience costs punish leaders who take action in the first place butdo not follow through (Fearon, 1994). This idea was initiallydeveloped in the research on conflicts and has been applied inmany other fields afterwards.

5 This argument implies that countries setting up centralized orindependent counter-terrorism agencies can be more effective incombating terrorists or in rescuing hostages during a hostage crisis.This implication proved true in the Lufthansa case in 1977 and theIranian embassy siege in 1980. In the former event, four Palestinianterrorists hijacked a German aircraft and, five days after the hijacking,the German counter-terrorist unit GSG9 successfully stormed the air-craft and rescued 86 passengers (Wilkinson, 2006: 66). The Iranianembassy siege began with six terrorists seizing the embassy in Londonand ended up with the British Special Air Service attacking the build-ing and executing the rescue (Wilkinson, 2006: 96). The success ofthe rescues in these two cases is to some extent attributed to the estab-lishment of independent counter-terrorism forces.6 In other issue areas, it is also found that the constraints on the chiefexecutive can largely reduce the government’s arbitrary actions orprevent the political leader’s rent-seeking behavior. For example, Jen-sen (2008) shows that democracy provides a friendly environment forforeign direct investment and decreases political risks through theconstraints on the executive.

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The argument that a higher level of executive con-straints helps reduce hostage-taking incidents corre-sponds to the findings in the existing terrorismliterature. Sandler, Tschirhart & Cauley (1983) showthat the no-negotiation policy tends to be more effectivewhen terrorists engage in riskier activities such ashostage-taking. Lapan & Sandler (1988) demonstratethat the no-negotiation policy is more credible when thebehavior of the government is time-consistent, and thiscan be achieved by a formal rule that removes the discre-tion of government negotiators (Sandler & Enders,2004). In other words, the more institutional constraintsthat are placed on the decisionmaker, the more likelythat the no-negotiation or non-concession policy wouldbe obeyed, and the less likely terrorists would resort tohostage-taking:

H4: A country in which the executive is more con-strained is less likely to become the target of hos-tage-takers.

While the executives are simultaneously constrainedby government bureaucracy, media, and public opinion,how they react to different sources of pressure maydepend on the timing. As the public opinion literaturesuggests, wars or casualties impose high electoral costson the executives by reducing their votes in the upcom-ing election (Abramson et al., 2007; Karol & Miguel,2007). This effect may be similar or even stronger in thehostage-taking case because hostages are typically inno-cent citizens and a failed rescue may engender greaterpublic discontent. This means that, as election timeapproaches, the leader should be prone to negotiate sincethe event will be more salient in the public’s mind. Ter-rorists, as a result, are more likely to undertake hostage-taking when election time nears, even if the institutionalconstraints on the executive are binding:7

H5: A country is more likely to become the target ofhostage-takers as time to the next electionapproaches.

In sum, democracies are more likely to be harassed bytransnational terrorism because of their inherent charac-teristics, including their foreign involvement, checks andbalances, and political competition (Li, 2005; Savun &Phillips, 2009; Chenoweth, 2010). The climate indemocracies favors hostage-taking terrorists as well, butthe key lies in public attitudes and how they affect

decisionmakers. In democracies, the public views humanlife as being of great importance. Free media further dis-play the helplessness of hostages to the public, which inturn presses government leaders not to take harsh mea-sures, particularly when an election is close. When lead-ers’ decisionmaking powers are largely constrained, theyare more likely to not compromise with terrorists.

Research design and data

To examine my hypotheses, I conduct a quantitative anal-ysis of time-series cross-sectional (TSCS) data. The unit ofanalysis is the country-year. The data I use are from theITERATE (International Terrorism: Attributes of Terror-ist Events) database, which contains a comprehensive listof transnational terrorist incidents and is continuouslyupdated (Mickolus et al., 2006). ITERATE includes aHOSTAGE file, which covers hostage-taking events from1978 to 2005 and has information about the targets ofdemands. Because the research objective is the state, Iexclude events in which the targets are unknown or arenot nation states. In many cases, terrorists made demandson more than one country; those countries are all counted.In other words, the outcome variable is the number ofcountries that are targets in a hostage-taking incident inone year. Between 1978 and 2005, there were a total of358 hostage-taking events in which governments were thetargets. Among these cases, there existed a second target in201 cases and a third target in 61 cases, so the sum is 620.Since I do not model event-specific but only country-specific factors, the existence of multiple targets does notbias my analysis.

Table I shows a list of the top nine countries that suf-fered from most hostage-taking events, all of which havereceived demands from hostage-takers at least 15 times.The number of events occurring in these countriesaccounts for more than two-thirds of the total events(241 out of 358). More than half of the hostage-takingevents (205) occurred during the Cold War.

CovariatesTo test if democracies are more likely to be the targets ofhostage-taking terrorists, the first explanatory variable isdemocracy, and the data are taken from the Polity IVdataset (Marshall & Jaggers, 2007), which is the mostcommonly used and acceptable measure of democracyin the political science literature. The Polity index rangesfrom –10 to 10 with 10 as the highest degree of democ-racy. In Table I, the fifth and sixth columns report thePolity scores for the top nine victim countries, and thelast column categorizes these countries by regime type.7 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this excellent suggestion.




As can be seen, most of the top victim countries aredemocracies or have transitioned to democracy, offeringpreliminary evidence that democracies suffer from morehostage-taking incidents.

Moreover, I argue that in democracies members of thepublic place high value on personal liberty and humanlife, forcing political leaders to put the rescue of hostagesas the first priority. Thus, I employ a variable, civil lib-erty, to measure the importance of personal freedom andhuman life. The data are from the Freedom Houseindices, which are composed of two scores – politicalrights and civil liberties – and I use the latter because thepoint here lies in the democratic values people embracerather than the real political rights they enjoy. Indeed,the civil liberties variable may not fully capture the con-cept of ‘respect for human life’ I discuss, but this indexcan be a good proxy for how people view and enjoy per-sonal freedom in a society. And since deeply embeddeddemocratic values are actually immeasurable, the Free-dom House index as a widely utilized measurement isa reasonable choice here. This index ranges from 1 to7 with 1 as the highest level of civil liberties, and I reversethe order so that a higher score represents a higher levelof liberties.

I also stress the importance of mass media, which canlargely affect and transmit the public sentiment. Anothervariable, press freedom, is therefore used. The data are gath-ered from the Freedom House, in which the level of pressfreedom in each country is categorized into free, partlyfree, and not free, and I numerate them to 3, 2, and 1.

To test the hypothesis that institutional constraintslead to an adherence to the non-concession policy andthus less hostage-taking incidents, the other variable Iutilize is executive constraints, which is retrieved from the

Polity IV dataset. In the Polity data, the executive con-straints variable refers to ‘the extent of institutionalizedconstraints on the decisionmaking powers of chief exec-utives’. These limitations may be imposed by any‘accountability group’, such as political parties, indepen-dent judiciary, or powerful advisers (Marshall & Jaggers,2007: 23), but the point is that decisionmakers are lesslikely to act unilaterally given these institutional con-straints. This index is from 1 to 7 with 7 being the mostlimitations on the executive leaders.

Furthermore, the theory suggests that the executive ismore likely to negotiate as election time approaches sincethe executive is sensitive to public opinion due to the re-election concern. I thus include a variable time to electiondenoting the number of years left in the executive’s cur-rent term, which is equivalent to the time to the nextelection. The data are taken from the Database of Polit-ical Institutions (DPI) (Beck et al., 2001).

In addition to democracy and its related components,I include a battery of control variables. The logarithm ofGDP is used to test if wealthier countries are more likelyto become the targets since in many hostage-takingevents terrorists ask for ransom. Economic growth canmeasure the short-term economic performance. Dataon both variables are gathered from the World Bank’sWorld Development Indicators (WDI) database.

Crisis is the number of involvements in foreign policycrises; US ally is whether this country has alliance tieswith the USA. These two variables, particularly US ally,are too important to exclude because hostage-takers maytarget a government due to the resentment caused by thisgovernment’s active foreign activities. Without thesevariables, we cannot tell whether it is democracy per seor the foreign policy behavior democratic countries

Table I. Top nine victim countries of hostage-taking, 1978–2005

Number of hostage events Polity score

Political regime1978–1991 1992–2005 Sum 1985 2005

USA 21 25 46 10 10 DemocracyColombia 20 14 34 8 7 DemocracyFrance 27 6 33 7 9 DemocracyYemen 0 27 27 –6 –2 AuthoritarianPhilippines 9 16 25 –6 8 TransitionedGermany 10 11 21 10 10 DemocracyRussia 8 12 20 –7 7 TransitionedEl Salvador 19 0 19 6 7 DemocracyTurkey 9 7 16 7 7 DemocracyTotal number 205 153 358

Political regime: democracy if Polity score is � 6 in both years; authoritarian if Polity score is < 0 in both years; transitioned if Polity scoretransitioned from negative to � 6.

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usually exhibit that actually results in a higher hostage-taking frequency. Following Savun & Phillips (2009),data on foreign crises are from the International CrisisBehavior Project Version 9.0 (Brecher & Wilkenfeld,1997), and data on US allies are collected from the Alli-ance Treaty Obligations and Provisions dataset withoffensive, defensive, and neutral alliances counted (Leedset al., 2002).

Another control variable is national capabilities. Astrong country may have a greater ability to fight terrorists,and hostage-taking terrorists are no exception. The dataare from the National Material Capabilities Data Version4.0 in the Correlates of War project (Singer & Small,2010). Regime durability is the number of years since themost recent regime change, coded from the Polity data. Itis an important variable in the terrorism literature becauseof the finding that a stable regime is less susceptible to ter-rorist attacks (Eyerman, 1998; Li, 2005).

The next two variables are the logarithm of land area(in millions of square kms) and the logarithm of popula-tion (in thousands of people), both of which are from theWDI. I also add a regional dummy Middle East, whichcontrols for the possibility that Middle Eastern countriesare more frequently harassed by terrorism due to specifichistorical and cultural factors. All the explanatory vari-ables except time to election are lagged one year behindthe outcome variable to avoid the simultaneity bias orinverse relations.

Statistical modelThe outcome variable is a discrete and non-negativecount of the occurrence of hostage-taking events; thedata are TSCS, which is a structure of multilevel data.I thus employ a multilevel Poisson model and allow forvarying intercepts across countries to control for countryheterogeneity. This model provides the advantage thatboth within- and between-country differences are appro-priately considered depending on the sample size and thevariation in each country (Gelman & Hill, 2007).

Since the data are TSCS, dynamics is an issue thatshould be taken into account (see Wilson & Butler,2007). Theoretically, all hostage-taking incidents are inde-pendent of one another, but it does not rule out the possi-bility that a country that has experienced incidents in thepast has a certain propensity to become a target again.Thus, following Li (2005), I create a variable history, whichis the average annual number of hostage-taking events thathave occurred in one country since 1978 until the year ofobservation. Using history rather than the lagged outcomevariable provides a longer-run view on time dependence.

Moreover, the end of the Cold War and the 11 Sep-tember 2001 attack are two striking events that havechanged or shocked the international system. Terroristor hostage-taking events may have declined after theCold War due to the fewer chances governments haveto employ terrorism as a tool to destabilize enemy coun-tries (Enders & Sandler, 1999); they may have alsodecreased after the 11 September 2001 attacks becauseof increasingly strict counter-terrorism policies and mea-sures (Enders & Sandler, 2005). Thus, I add two time-period indicators: post-Cold War denotes the time periodfrom 1992 to 2001 and post-9/11 from 2002 to 2005.These two variables as well as the history variable helpcontrol the temporal effects.

In summary, the multilevel Poisson model can bestated as follows:

yit� PoissonðlitÞ ð1Þ

log ðlitÞ ¼ ai þ bXi;t�1 ð2Þ

ai�N ðma;s2aÞ ð3Þ

where i denotes the country and t denotes the year. Xi;t�1

are the covariates lagged one year. The first level in themodel is the country-year and the second level is thecountry. The varying intercepts ai help control for unob-served country heterogeneity but compromise thebetween- and within-country variations.

Results

Table II presents the results.8 In Model 1, the coefficientfor democracy is positive, as expected, but it does notachieve statistical significance at the 95% level,9 whichsuggests that democracy may carry competing effectsworking against one another.

In Model 2, I disaggregate democracy into civil liberty,press freedom, and executive constraints. All the coefficientsfor these three variables reach statistical significance, butexecutive constraints has a negative sign whereas the other

8 I conduct multiple imputation to account for missing values,generating ten datasets. The R package used to impute missingdata is AMELIA, developed by Honaker, King & Blackwell(2011). The coefficients I present are the averages of thecoefficients estimated from ten datasets. The standard errors areadjusted upward as a function of the average variance (within-imputation variance) and the between-imputation variance (Little& Rubins, 1987), so the uncertainty is slightly larger than that usingthe conventional casewise deletion approach.9 However, it achieves statistical significance at the 90% level if weuse a less conservative criterion.




two have positive signs, lending support for Hypotheses2, 3, and 4. Hostage-taking terrorists are more likely totarget a country where people value personal freedomhighly. Countries with a higher level of press freedom arealso more vulnerable to hostage-taking terrorism.10 Theinstitutional constraints on the executive, contrarily, leadto a reduction in hostage-taking incidents.

Other things being equal, a one-unit increase in thecivil liberties index is associated with a 16.5% increasein hostage-taking events; a change from not free to partlyfree or a change from partly free to free in the press free-dom variable is associated with a 31% increase inhostage-taking events. In contrast, a one-unit increasein the executive constraints variable leads to a reductionof 12.5% in hostage-taking events. Comparing the mag-nitudes of these coefficients, we can see that the positiveeffects resulting from civil liberties and press freedomoutweigh the negative effect of executive constraints,which contributes to the positive sign of democracy inModel 1.

From Model 3 to Model 5, I allow civil liberty, pressfreedom, and executive constraints to enter the modelsindividually. As can be seen in Model 3, civil liberty ispositively associated with hostage-taking terrorism, sup-porting the second hypothesis. In Model 4, press freedom

has a positive effect as well, indicating its importance indetermining hostage-taking terrorism.

In Model 5, the variable executive constraints has anegative sign, as expected, but it does not reach statisticalsignificance. This actually makes sense because a highlevel of institutional constraints on the executive is anessential ingredient of democracy and it may thus carryother effects working against its primary negative effect.For instance, representation in democracies helps trans-mit the interests of hostages and their families to deci-sionmakers, which may instead make hostage-takingincidents more likely. That is, the negative effect of hor-izontal constraints could be partially offset by the posi-tive effect of vertical accountability, resulting in thisinsignificance. When other ingredients of democracythat are positively connected to hostage-taking are con-sidered in the model, as shown in Model 2, the variableexecutive constraints turns statistically significant becauseonly the variance that is able to account for hostage-taking terrorism is left.

In Model 6, I include the variable time to election totest how the executive is constrained by the re-electionconsideration. The coefficient for time to election is neg-ative and statistically significant, indicating that hostage-taking terrorism is more likely to occur when electiontime nears. Other things being equal, a reduction of oneyear in the time to the next chief executive election leadsto a 6% increase in hostage-incidents. This result, alongwith the above findings, suggests that the chief executiveis the key actor in a hostage situation and his/her politicalsurvival concern substantially determines the finaldecision.11

In addition to the main findings, Table II shows thateconomic growth is positively associated with hostage-taking, suggesting that a state experiencing an economicboom is more likely to be targeted, probably because of

10 A bothersome issue regarding press freedom is the potentialunderreporting problem. In general, non-democratic governmentsput more restrictions on media, which makes terrorist events lesslikely to be reported. The ITERATE dataset, particularly, relies onmedia as the main source and is thus highly likely to be plagued bythis problem (Sandler, 1995). As Drakos & Gofas (2006) point out,press freedom may hence carry two effects – an underreporting effectand a publicity effect – and it is difficult to distinguish between them.So far, researchers on terrorism have not developed a sound strategyto gauge or to deal with the underreporting issue. Here, nevertheless,I believe that underreporting may not be a problem for the studies onhostage-taking events because the main goal of hostage-takers is infact to get publicity, which helps them negotiate with governments.In other words, the publicity effect outweighs the underreportingeffect. If this were not the case, the positive effect of press freedomdiscovered in the analysis would mean that hostage-taking events aremuch better reported in countries with a higher level of press free-dom. This could have been true, but underreporting should be atleast as common in other types of terrorist incidents as in hostage-taking incidents, so a positive effect of press freedom should also existin the analyses on other types or all forms of terrorist events. How-ever, in other quantitative studies on terrorism that include press free-dom as an explanatory variable, press freedom is actually found tohave no or little effect (Li, 2005; Savun & Phillips, 2009; Cheno-weth, 2010). Thus, the positive effect of press freedom in my statis-tical analysis must come from the substantial effects of the media,such as to publicize the incidents or to trigger the public emotion,rather than merely more reporting of actual incidents.

11 As one reviewer correctly pointed out, the theory also implies thatthe type of executive may matter. For instance, executives inparliamentary systems may be more afraid of a failed rescue becausethey can suffer a no-confidence vote quickly. I test this implicationby including a variable indicating a parliamentary system and a vari-able indicating a PR system in two separate models. Data for bothvariables are from the DPI data. The results (not shown here) indicateno effect of executive type or electoral systems on hostage-taking.This finding makes sense because while executives in parliamentarysystems may be more sensitive to electoral concerns, they have lessdiscretionary power than their counterparts in presidential systemsand thus are less likely to concede during a hostage situation. So, thepotential positive effect of a parliamentary system on hostage-takingmay be offset by a negative effect due to the executive’s restrictedpower.

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the greater probability to pay ransom or to fulfill otherdemands. The population size is positively correlatedto hostage-taking, and this relationship is robust acrossall models. This is straightforward to explain because,no matter what goals hostage-takers attempt to achieve,larger countries provide a larger pool of candidate vic-tims. They also tend to be more active and moreinvolved in foreign affairs, which may trigger grievancesor discontent overseas and motivate hostage-taking

activities. This point is born out by the finding thatUS allies (and the USA) are also more likely to be the tar-gets of hostage-takers.

Finally, Middle Eastern countries have a higher prob-ability than countries in other regions of facing hostage-taking events, as well as other forms of terrorist events. Interms of the temporal pattern, the number of hostage-taking events has substantially declined after 11 Septem-ber 2011, possibly indicating the success of counter-

Table II. Effects of democracy and its components on hostage-taking events

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6

Democracy .020(.011)

Civil liberty .153 .121(.065)* (.048)*

Press freedom .269 .287(.122)* (.099)**

Executive constraints –.133 –.038(.040)*** (–.033)

Time to election –.062(.032)*

ln(GDP) –.094 –.120 –.126 –.115 –.042 –.068(–.066) (.070) (.070) (.067) (–.068) (.064)

Growth .016 .018 .015 .017 .016 .016(.008)* (.008)* (.008) (.008)* (.008)* (.008)*

Crisis –.151 –.160 –.144 –.155 –.158 –.152(–.112) (–.112) (–.112) (–.112) (–.112) (.112)

US ally .307 .222 .257 .244 .398 .364(.171) (–.175) (–.173) (–.174) (.174)* (.171)*

National capability 4.433 5.485 4.485 5.053 3.277 3.646(–3.402) (–3.466) (–3.416) (–3.45) (–3.444) (3.412)

Regime durability –.003 –.003 –.003 –.003 –.003 –.003(–.003) (–.003) (–.003) (–.003) (–.003) (.003)

ln(Population) .264 .317 .303 .286 .256 .269(.108)* (.111)** (.111)** (.110)** (.111)* (.111)*

ln(Land area) –.025 –.019 –.013 –.016 –.05 –.041(–.069) (–.071) (–.070) (–.071) (–.072)

Middle East .949 1.000 1.017 1.011 .766 .844(.263)*** (.271)*** (.267)*** (.267)*** (.272)** (.261)**

Post-Cold War –.174 –.018 –.115 –.093 –.123 –.140(.093) (–.096) (–.092) (–.093) (–.092) (.091)

Post-9/11 –.798 –.640 –.760 –.686 –.743 –.768(.161)*** (.165)*** (.160)*** (.163)*** (.161)*** (.160)***

Hostage history .415 .398 .418 .393 .388 .386(.082)*** (.081)*** (.081)*** (.082)*** (.082)*** (.082)***

No. of observations 2,664 2,664 2,664 2,664 2,664 2,664No. of countries 98 98 98 98 98 98Log likelihood –1005 –996 –1003 –1002 –1006 –1004Deviance 2010 1992 2006 2004 2012 2008AIC 2040 2026 2036 2034 2042 2038

Standard errors are in parentheses; *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001.




terrorism activities after 9/11; the end of the Cold War,nevertheless, was not followed by a drastic decrease inhostage-taking incidents.

To illustrate the effects of democracy and its disaggre-gated attributes, Figure 1 presents the parameter estima-tions of hostage-taking incidents estimated from Model2.12 In both panels, the horizontal axes denote the levelof civil liberties and the vertical axes denote the estimatednumber of hostage-taking incidents. As can be seen, asthe level of civil liberties increases, the likelihood that acountry suffers from hostage-taking terrorism increases.The number of hostage-taking incidents, moreover, isaffected by the level of press freedom and the degree towhich the executive is constrained. The left panel showsthat, given the level of civil liberties, countries havingpartly free media are more likely to suffer fromhostage-taking events than countries that restrict mediafreedom; countries that allow free media are even morevulnerable than the other two types. The right panel tellsthe story that, given the level of civil liberties, countriesin which the executive is highly constrained are less likelyto be the targets of hostage-takers than countries inwhich the executive is only weakly constrained. Notethat the estimated numbers in two panels are less than1, indicating the rareness of hostage-taking incidents.

Model checking and robustnessThe statistical results are well supportive of my argu-ments, but how do the models fit the data? A useful wayto assess the model fit is to perform posterior predictivesimulations, which is to simulate parameters from thefitted model, to replicate datasets from these simulatedparameters, and to compare the replicated data with theactual data. In so doing, the uncertainty of parameterestimation can be considered (Gelman & Hill, 2007).I simulate 1,000 sets of parameters from the result ofModel 1 in Table II. Then I obtain 1,000 sets of fittedvalues. Using these fitted values as the means of the Pois-son distribution, I generate 1,000 datasets. On average,these 1,000 datasets successfully replicate 74% of theactual values. In the actual data, the zeros account for84.3% of the total; in the replicated datasets, the averagepercentage of zeros is 84.4%, suggesting a great modelfit. Moreover, the average percentages of ones and twosin the replicated data are 13.7% and 1.7% respectively;the percentages of ones and twos in the actual data are11.4% and 2.6% respectively. This indicates that themodel fits the data reasonably well (see online appendixfor details).

In addition, I conduct a number of diagnostics andalternative robustness analyses. First, I test for autocorre-lation that may appear in TSCS data and the overdisper-sion problem that may plague a Poisson model. Thediagnostics results indicate no serial correlations or over-dispersion. Second, since the USA is the biggest target ofhostage-taking terrorists as well as a stable democracy,

Figure 1. The parameter estimations of hostage-taking events.

12 I set all variables at the mean, the US ally equal to 1, the region asnon-Middle East, and the period as prior-Cold War. In the executiveconstraints index, most of the countries have scores 3 or 7. So I com-pare the predicted values for countries at these two levels.

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the result may be driven by this extreme case. I excludethe USA from the data and perform the same analysis,and the result is robust in the absence of this potentialoutlier country. Third, I employ an alternative measureof civil liberties – the government’s respect for civil andpolitical rights, which is taken from the CIRI HumanRights Data Project (Cingranelli & Richards, 2010). Theresult shows that the CIRI measure of civil rights pro-duces a similar effect to the Freedom House measureof civil liberties. Lastly, I perform multilevel negativebinomial models and zero inflated negative binomialmodels, both of which generate similar results to thePoisson model. In short, this article’s findings are robustto the exclusion of an outlier country, an alternative mea-sure of civil liberties, and alternative estimators. All thediagnostics and additional robustness analyses can beseen in the online appendix.

Conclusion

In the empirical literature on terrorism, there is littleexamination of the relationship between country charac-teristics and hostage-taking terrorism. This study fills thisvoid by providing a quantitative analysis of hostage-taking terrorism at the country level, discussing whattypes of governments are more likely to be the targetsof hostage-takers. Specifically, it argues that democracygenerates different effects dependent on the type of ter-rorism. While democracy leads to more terrorist attacksbecause of a higher level of executive constraints, a higherdegree of democratic competition, and more active for-eign policies, its correlation to hostage-taking terrorismis driven by different attributes.

The results show that democracy produces competingeffects on hostage-taking terrorism. A high level of civilliberties and a high degree of press freedom make dem-ocratic countries more at risk of experiencing hostage-taking incidents. Institutional constraints, by contrast,have a negative influence on hostage-taking terrorism,implying that horizontal accountability not only limitsgovernment leaders’ leeway to choose a flexible meansof resolving crises but also consolidates the commitmentto a non-concession principle. The re-election concernalso compels the leader to concede to hostage-takerswhen election time gets close, which is demonstratedby the negative relationship between the time to the nextelection and hostage-taking.

While this article considers free media as one compo-nent of democracy, it is very likely that countries havingmore competitive media systems are more likely to betargeted by hostage-takers because competing media

tend to increase sensationalistic coverage to attract a massaudience (Zaller, 1999). Future research may want toexplore this relationship between media competition andhostage-taking terrorism.13

This study highlights the important implications ofinstitutional arrangements on governments seeking toreduce the risk of hostage-taking terrorism. A democraticgovernment is more likely to become the target ofhostage-takers, but the risk can be reduced by imposinglarger constraints on the executive. A formal rule thatregulates the executive’s power in the negotiation withhostage-takers can be useful. While dealing with ahostage-taking crisis, the government may be bettersuited to take a strong stand and not to reveal or signalthe intent to compromise. Once terrorists think of a gov-ernment as a target that is difficult to negotiate with,hostage-taking incidents may become less attractive.

Replication dataAll the statistical results are derived in R version 2.13.2.The replication data, R code, and online appendix areavailable at www.prio.no/jpr/datasets.

AcknowledgementsI would like to thank the JPR editors, three anonymousreviewers, Jeff Gill, Andrew Martin, Guillermo Rosas,Jamie Monogan, Santiago Olivella, Noel Johnston, andTsung-han Tsai for their valuable comments and sugges-tions on this article. Special thanks to Nate Jensen for hishelpful advice and comments during the writing process.

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lee democracy civil liberties hostage taking terrorism

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