The Politics of Counterterrorism Provision: Terrorist Threats, Transparency and Electoral Accountability

Abstract

The prevention of terrorist attacks is an important policy concern for many governments. In democracies, officials also fear the electoral consequences of successful attacks. As a result, counterterrorism policy-making and electoral concerns are tightly intertwined. To understand the implications of this link, I develop a game-theoretic model and show that left-wing incumbents respond to terror threats more aggressively than their right-wing counterparts in order to convince voters that they can be trusted in the fight against terrorism. Terrorist attacks improve right-wing incumbents' reputation, while they worsen the reputation of left-wing incumbents. When the future terror threat is likely to be high, voters ignore right-wing incumbents’ reputation, reelecting them independently of their performance. This bail out effect of a high threat is likely to drive the mixed empirical results on the electoral consequences of terrorist attacks, and explains right-wing incumbents' effort to maintain a climate of fear within the public.