Examining the Causes and Effects of Terrorism

Abstract

Terrorism, Elections, and Democracy: Political Campaigns In The United States, Great Britain, And Russia. By Sarah Oates, Lynda Lee Kaid, Mike Berry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 260 pp. $95.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-230-61357-7). Terrorism, Instability, and Democracy in Africa and Asia. By Dan G. Cox, John Falconer, Brian Stackhouse. Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press, 2009. 244 pp. $60.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-1-555-53705-7). Before 2001, the circle of people studying terrorism and counterterrorism was a fairly small one being led by people like Martha Crenshaw, Bruce Hoffman, Walter Enders, Todd Sandler, and Brian Jenkins and could be found in a small set of journals. The circle studying these topics using quantitative methods was smaller still (Lum, Kennedy, and Sherley's 2006 review of the literature found only 3% of articles were empirically based), with much of it being done by a small number of scholars such as Enders, Sandler, Leonard Weinberg and their collaborators (Silke 2004; Lum et al. 2006). For terrorism research as a whole, this changed radically after 9/11. Lum, Kennedy, and Sherley, surveying more than 14000 articles about terrorism written between 1971 and 2003 for a Campbell Collaboration literature review, found that more than half of these articles were written after the attacks (2006, p. 7). The amount of this research that is quantitatively based in whole or in part, while growing, is still a very small part of this growth (Lum et al. 2006). The two books reviewed here are part of this growing trend but focus on very different parts of the world and on a very different research questions. Terrorism , Elections , and Democracy: Political Campaigns In The United States , Great Britain , And Russia by Sarah Oates, Lynda Lee Kaid, and Mike Berry looks at how the fear of a terrorist threat has impacted recent elections in the United States, Great Britain, and Russia. The authors use coded data of newscasts and advertisements as well as focus groups in all three countries to examine how the issue of terrorism was framed by the candidates and the news media and how this framing was seen by a sample of potential voters. One of the key …