Torture and Terrorism: The Statistical Relationship

[ChinoCoug]

http://backchannels.blogspot.com/200...rror-nope.html

I re-estimated the three models described in the paper that use the MIPT measure of terrorism as the dependent variable. This counts the number of terrorist attacks in each country from 1998 to 2004 committed by domestic and transnational groups, and also combines these into a measure of all terrorism. I used a negative binomial regression with robust standard errors clustered on countries and the same independent variables as those reported in the paper (political participation, constraints in the executive, regime durability, international war, civil war, and the logs of population and GDP per capita). I replaced the independent variable measuring human rights with two new variables. The first is a measure of torture from the CIRI project. The second is the measure of human rights used in the paper minus torture. This is meant to capture the possibility that torture and other human rights abuses are substitutes for each other; a regime might not torture, say, but could still have a bad record of respecting other rights.

Torture has a negative and statistically significant relationship to terrorism in all three models. In other words, countries that engage in more torture (and thus have a lower score on the torture variable) consistenly experience more, not less, of both domestic and transnational terrorism.

The actual paper.
http://www.politicalscience.uncc.edu/jwalsh/cps3.pdf

[MikeWaters]

without reading the paper yet, I am guessing the major criticism is that it is just an association, and not causal.

[Tex]

Thank goodness we don't practice torture.

[ChinoCoug]

Originally Posted by MikeWaters

without reading the paper yet, I am guessing the major criticism is that it is just an association, and not causal.

The author claims it is causal. He allows for a one-period lag in terrorism to do that. I think he would have been better off using two-stage least squares to deal with the issue.

[MikeWaters]

Do political science journals not have an embargo policy?

[ChinoCoug]

apparently not, I see working papers posted online all the time.