why do terrorists claim credit? - princeton university

Why Do Terrorists Claim Credit?

Austin L. Wright

Parker D. Handy Prize Fellow in Public AffairsPrinceton University

November 10, 2011

Austin L. Wright Parker D. Handy Prize Fellow in Public Affairs Princeton University


What’s the motivating puzzle?

1800s: “Propaganda of the deed”

1970s: roughly 61 percent of all attacks claimed

Fast forward: 1998 - 2004, only 14.5 percent of all attacksclaimed



Visualizing trends within recent data0

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Figure: Credit-taking trends, 1998-2004



Why should we care?

Credit-taking is critical to terrorist signaling during violentcampaigns

Hoffman (2010): terrorists face an ‘information problem’

Rapoport (1997): academics and policy-makers dismissedcredit-taking trends, distorting our picture of the universe ofterrorism (and terrorist actors)



Who studies credit-taking?

Four articles published in 1997 (B. Hoffman, Pluchinsky,Rapoport)

Hoffman begins study of Israel (2008); publishes piece in JPR(generalizable?)

Scattered references; little direct attention

No studies testing cross-national data



Where to find theory? Grafted explanations

Signaling strength: terrorists claim attacks that are credibleproxies for resource wealth and risk acceptance

Democratic constraints: legal constraints on retaliation,reduced uncertainty, protections of free media

Competition: inter-group competition creates ‘rivalries’among groups, increases the ‘information problem’

Religious motivations: propaganda before the eyes of god



Signaling Strength: Magnitude

Overgaard (1994): governments face information deficitsabout terrorist capabilities, particularly intangible assets

Terrorists claim credit for large-scale attacks to signal theirresource wealth

Element of riskiness: magnificent attacks can induceexistential threats to perpetrators or supporter backlash(Rapoport)



Signaling with Suicide: Illuminating the ‘blackbox’

Salience of the Cause: signals the appeal of the cause;particularly important for secular groups (no otherworldlyaspirations)

Risk acceptance: risky tactic (backlash, target response),signaling zealotry

Suicide as Sacrificial Gift: communicating motives fordeath, claims as internal signaling (solidarity)



Democratic Constraints, Autocratic Silence

Democratic Constraints

Legal constraints on retaliation (micro- and macro-levels)

Protections for media: claims with a sounding board

Protections for civil liberties of suspects if caught (varyingdegrees)

Reduced strategic uncertainty: costs and benefits



Democratic Constraints, Autocratic Silence

Autocratic Silence

Less restrained responses; increased likelihood of existentialthreats

Mixed media access (at best)

Civil liberties?

Greater uncertainty regarding state responses



How do Democratic Constraints effect Signals of Strength?

Amplification: democratic constraints may reduce theperceived costs from retaliation and raise the signalingpotential of large-scale attacks.

Chilling effect: autocratic institutions might increase thecosts from retaliation, raising the specter annihilation, whilecutting off the use of media sounding boards.



Inter-group Competition

Crenshaw (1985): competition drives group decision-making

Pedahzur and Perliger (2006): groups compete over scarceresources

Gurr (1988): controlling the “political culture of communaland political minorities”

But where does credit-taking fit in?



Competition generates Information Problems

A. Hoffman (2010): groups need to ‘tag’ their responsibilityfor attacks, driven keep their ‘constituency’ apprised

Groups create noise in the strategic environment, causing abreakdown in actor communication with invested audiences

Terrorists claim credit to overcome information dilemmas (orto deny rivals access to certain goods (NS/J))



What does Hoffman find?

Data: Israel, 1968 to 2004

Strong support for the competition thesis using ‘group count’variable

organizations, which is consistent with the idea that left-wingand ethno-nationalist groups care more deeply about startingpolitical movements than religious organizations.

The relationship between military responses to terrorismand the probability of credit-taking is significant in Models3 (b ¼ .00005, p < .05) and 4 (b ¼ .00005, p < .05) whenentered as a squared term, but credit-taking appears unaffectedby the simple frequency of militarized counter-terrorismresponses. Substantively, this implies that there is a U-shapedrelationship between military responses and credit-taking: theprobability of credit-taking is highest at the highest and lowestlevels of military activity, as expected. Credit-taking is less likelyin themiddle range. In other words, credit-taking ismost attrac-tive either when it is easy to do because counter-strikes are rareor when counter-strikes are severe and generate tremendousanger against those responsible for counter-terrorism responses.

The results associated with Israel’s military activity, how-ever, are heavily dependent on IDF actions during the secondintifada. When I re-ran the models without the 50 most influ-ential observations (all had Cook’s Influence Statistics greaterthan 1), the relationship between militarized activity andcredit-taking disappears. The other results were unaffected.Counter-terrorism policies do not appear to influence the calcu-lus of credit-taking under normal circumstances. Only intenseperiods of military repression seem to influence the willingnessof groups to take credit for acts of terror. This is consistent withthe hypothesis, but it also means that in many situations mili-tarized counter-terrorism efforts are unrelated to credit-taking.

The logged growth of the settler population reduced theprobability of credit-taking in Models 2 (b ¼ –.0824, p <.01) and 3 (b ¼ –.0659, p < .05), but showed no relationshipto credit-taking in Model 4. Some collinearity among the vari-ables seems to be the culprit. Substantively, the results suggestthat frustration in Palestinian communities made anonymousterrorism more likely, perhaps because it increased the

probability of terrorism by so-called ‘lone-wolves’. I foundsupport for this interpretation by examining the pattern of ter-rorism during the first and second intifadas, when frustrationwas high in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. First, the propor-tion of attacks with unknown perpetrators (i.e. those with noclaim of responsibility and no attribution of responsibility byauthorities) rose during the intifadas relative to other periods.Second, the attacks during the intifadas were more likely to becarried out by a single perpetrator than attacks in other peri-ods. This evidence is consistent with a turn to more disorga-nized ‘expressive’ terrorism that helps explain the observednegative relationship between the size of the settler populationand the probability of credit-taking.

The percentage of state sponsored organizations showed norelationship to the probability of credit-taking in any of themodels. The difficulty of observing how states actually assist ter-rorist organizations is an obvious limitation for assessing theconsequences of state sponsorship on credit-taking. Anotherpossibility, based on theUS StateDepartment analyses (seePat-terns of International Terrorism, 1980: 8), is that only certainkinds of sponsored attacks – assassination attempts against gov-ernment officials – are unlikely to be claimed. Indeed, attacksaimed at government facilities, which can be construed asefforts to kill government officials, were claimed 14% of thetime, much less than other attacks. However, there is little addi-tional evidence tying these attacks to groups with ties to foreigngovernments, making it difficult to conclude that state sponsor-ship influences credit-taking behavior in the Israeli theater.

Finally, suicide bombings are strongly and consistentlyassociated with increased credit-taking. On average, using thecoefficients from Model 3 (b ¼ 2.635, p < .01), claims ofresponsibility were 13 times more likely to be announced aftera suicide attack than non-suicidal forms of terrorism. Morespecifically, only six of the 69 suicide attacks included in thisanalysis were committed anonymously, despite the fact thatmost were conducted during the height of Israel’s militarycrackdown during the second intifada.

Conclusion

The analysis presented above lends a measure of support toexisting explanations of the conditions under which claims

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Figure 1. Influence of competitive context on the predictedprobability of credit-takingVertical lines represent the 95% confidence interval.

Table II. Probability of credit-taking when independent variables arechanged from their minimum to their maximum values, holding theothers constant

Variable Coefficients

Competitive context .514**Ideology .574**Militarized responses ".494Militarized responses2 .454**Settler population ".607**State sponsorship .071Suicide attacks .443***

Hoffman 623

at Bobst Library, New York University on October 31, 2011jpr.sagepub.comDownloaded from



Where does religion fit?

M. Juergensmeyer: religiously motivated, dramatic attacks areintended to impress their symbolic significance, not strategicutility

B. Hoffman: unconstrained by traditional strategic constraints

An omniscient audience? Will commission of the act suffice?

NOTE: terrorists groups must balance multiple objectives,introducing some constraints on behavior



Hypotheses

H1: If an attack has a large magnitude or employs a dramatictechnique, the likelihood of credit-taking increase.

H2: As the level of democracy within the targeted stateincreases, the likelihood of a perpetration claim increases.

H3: If an attack occurs within a competitive environment, theprobability of credit taking should increase.

H4: If an attack is religiously motivated, the likelihood ofcredit taking should decrease.



Data Sources and Estimation Methods

Attack Data (GTD 2): intentional (coercive) use of violenceby a non-state actor (goal-oriented)

CINC Data: Correlates of War Project (Version 4.0)

Polity2 Data: traction on level of democracy

Method: logistic regression



Operationalizing the Hypotheses

DV: claims of responsibility communicated by a group(through letters, phone calls, website posts, etc.)

Competition: strong test of the null hypothesis

Magnitude and Suicide Tactics: combining bloodiness,assessing intentionality

Attack Types: coded by target

CINC scores held constant (with a lag)

Polity2 scores held constant if shifts in scores were less thanthree, coded by year otherwise; reconstructed data values



Results

Trouble for the Competition’s Competitiveness

Competition does not drive credit-taking

Testing Hoffman’s case: competition still fails

After running over 113 distinct variations of the models (evenseparating by region), the null hypothesis can never berejected

NOTE: Competition also does not amplify the willingness toclaim dramatic attacks (Drop of 11 percent Suicide; Bloom2004)



Results

Signaling Strength: Models 2 and 3

Magnitude and Suicide Tactics are very strong predictors(robust for almost all variations of the models)

Attacks on military and police institutions convey oppositeeffects

Explanations: Signaling potential, interacting with CINC(avoid claiming ‘weaker’ attacks?); mixed results



Results

Religiously Motivated Attacks

Strong results, but theoretical mechanism supports a strongerrelationship

Evidence of strategic interference, groups balancing multipleobjectives

Testing the North American case, very robust results



Results

CINC and Democratic Constraints

CINC effect goes away after controlling for regime type

Democratic constraints incentivize credit-taking, robust overtime (after Sept. 11, 2001)

Democratic constraints amplify the effect of strength signals(roughly 7 percent increase in likelihood of claim)

Interaction yields very robust results: terrorists claim credit forattacks on monied democracies



What do these findings really tell us?

Table: Probability of credit-taking given maximum values of explanatoryvariables

Variable Probability Anticipated Effect?Magnitude of Attack .869 Yes

Suicide Attack .2914 Yes

Military Attack .026 Yes

Police Attack -.067 No

Religious Attack -.065 Yes

Polity2 Score .155 Yes



Extensions: Part I

Results were checked for temporal dependence and spatialdependence using a series of methods



Why check for spatial dependence?

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Why check for spatial dependence?

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(.3333333,1]No data

No data

No dataCumulative Rate of Credit-Taking by CountryCumulative Rate of Credit-Taking by Country

Cumulative Rate of Credit-Taking by Country



Methods and Results

(Method 1) Temporal and regional dummy variables

(Method 2) Conditional (Fixed-Effects) Logistic estimations

(Method 3) Spatially lagged y model (Ward and Gleditsch)

RESULTS: (Methods 1 and 2) models become more precise(AIC), but estimations are almost identical; (Method 3)lagged DV yields insignificant results



Extensions: Part II

Given graphics noted earlier, a second series of regionalmodels were estimated

Suicide tactics: wide variation in effect by region (WesternEurope vs. Russia and NIS)

North American puzzles: democratic and military dynamics(depressant)

Material Capabilities: Middle East and South America (verystrong depressant)

Democracy in South Asia: retaliation in India and Pakistan



Extensions: Part III

Trouble with Democratic Constraints0

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Counterfactual: No Anarchy

Slight increase in impact of democracy, strong findings

Reject the ‘competition’ null hypothesis: competitive contextsdo not drive credit-taking during terrorist campaigns



Future Research

Explanations for regional variation

Exploration of lying and deception in terrorist signaling (falseclaims)

Further exploration of Democratic Constraints: interrogatethe counterfactual further



Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Penny Green, Kenneth Greene, Tse-minLin, Robert Woodberry and Joseph Young for insightfulcomments on previous drafts of this paper. The Audre andBernard Rapoport Foundation supported this projectfinancially through a 2007-8 Rapoport-King Fellowship andthe Inter-University Consortium for Political and SocialResearch (ICPSR) offered further financial assistance for therefinement of this text.

Any problems in the paper and presentation remain myresponsibility. For correspondence, please contact the authorby email: [email protected]



why do terrorists claim credit? - princeton university

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