How much and why do political parties talk about terrorism?: evidence from the Basque Parliament (1980–2011)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article is focused on the weight that the issue of terrorism had among the discourse of the political parties sitting in the Basque Parliament between 1980 and 2011. In order to explore this question, transcripts of the most generalistic parliamentary debates were hand-coded and transformed into a quantitative variable. Results show that, from 1995 onward, when ETA began to attack politicians and other representatives of civil society, the Basque political elite started to pay more attention to the problem of terrorism in its discourse. Beyond this descriptive result, this study explores which other independent variables have mediated in the time that Basque MPs spent talking about terrorism. Thus, this article contributes to the study of how terrorist tactics influence the performance of the political elite.