The prediction of conflict constitutes a challenge to social scientists. This article explores whether the incorporation of geography can help us make our forecasts of political violence more accurate. The authors describe a spatially and temporally autoregressive discrete regression model,...

This article presents a signaling model of terrorist attacks, where the target government faces a trade-off from its counterterrorism responses and the backlash (counterreaction) that such responses incite. An endogenous characterization of terrorist spectaculars is specified, given a...

This article aims to improve scholars’ understanding of how transnational terrorist organizations emerge, survive, thrive, and eventually die.The authors use a data set that catalogues terrorist organizations and their attacks over time (the ITERATE database of thousands of terrorist...

The question of whether democratic institutions facilitate terrorist activities is a controversial one in current scientific studies of terrorism. Although the ‘‘rule of law’’ is an essential institutional pillar of any mature democracy, its direct effect on domestic...

Tsebelis’ veto players theory predicts that legislative veto players constrain the executive’s political decisions because their approval is needed to implement policy change. This study extends the veto players argument into international conflict literature, specifically in...

This article utilizes Bayesian Poisson changepoint regression models to demonstrate how transnational terrorists adjusted their target choices in response to target hardening. In addition, changes in the collective tastes of terrorists and their sponsorship have played a role in target selection...

Selectorate theory posits that leader accountability increases with the size of the winning coalition. Recent research contends that capitalism also increases leader accountability because leaders are more dependent on the public for revenue in more capitalist economies. The authors argue that...

Truth telling has come to play a pivotal role in postconflict reconciliation processes around the world. A common claim is that truth telling is healing and will lead to reconciliation. The present study applies recent psychological research to this issue by examining whether witnessing in the...

Isolationism has long been seen as a reaction against domestic economic conditions or a threatening international environment, but domestic politics could equally spur such a reaction. Disagreement with current foreign policy or opposition to political parties directing foreign policy may...

This study presents an analytical model of budget allocation into military and civilian expenditures within an arms race between two rival countries and compares the consequences of shortsighted (period-by-period) planning versus forward-looking (long-term) planning. The authors show that...