Terrorism Prevention and Electoral Accountability
36 Pages Posted: 8 Dec 2009
Date Written: December 2009
Abstract
How does electoral accountability affect the effectiveness of terrorism prevention in a democracy? We analyze the connection between electoral accountability and policy effectiveness in the context of terrorism prevention. We develop a formal model of an interaction between a government, a minority community, and a representative voter. All actors share the objective of terrorism prevention and have symmetric information. We show that electoral pressures to be successful in terrorism prevention create a commitment problem for the government and this can lead to less security. If the representative voter cares more about terrorism prevention, the government intensifies anti-terrorism activities that are under its direct control, but cooperation by the minority community weakens, and, as a result, security may decrease. We also show that commitment to ex-post suboptimal antiterrorism activity is desirable for the government, but such commitment is difficult to achieve without explicit institutional constraints such as an effective judicial review on government’s antiterrorism actions.
Keywords: terrorism, elections, accountability
JEL Classification: D70
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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