Abstract
Organizations that have a clear focus acquire greater reputational legitimacy, which raises their capacity for mobilization. Using data on terrorist organizations, this paper explores two empirical implications of this claim: A terrorist organization’s survival and lethality will be threatened to the extent that it has an ambiguous identity. Analyses using panel data from the Extended Data on Terrorist Groups (EDTG) test these arguments for nearly 500 terrorist organizations observed over 1970-2016. The key empirical predictions are that ambiguity inhibits lethality and curtails survival. Moreover, ambiguity curtails a TO’s longevity most during the very early years of its operation, consistent with the liability of newness argument. This paper finds support for these claims, controlling for competition from rivals and allies, ethno-nationalist or Islamic ideological orientation, tactical diversity, size, international operations, and other measures of organizational capacity.
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