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Cited by 428

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 29 of the 29 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The Quality of Terror

De Mesquita, Ethan Bueno·2005·American Journal of Political Science

Abstract

I present a model of the interaction between a government, a terrorist organization, and potential terrorist volunteers in which, as a result of an endogenous choice, individuals with low ability or little education are most likely to volunteer to join the terrorist organization. However, the terrorist organization screens the volunteers for quality. Consequently, the model is consistent with two seemingly contradictory empirical findings. Actual terrorist operatives are not poor or lacking in education. And yet lack of economic opportunity and recessionary economies are positively correlated with terrorism. The model also endogenizes the effect of government counterterrorism on mobilization. Government crackdowns have competing effects on mobilization: they decrease the ability of terrorists to carry out effective attacks (making mobilization less attractive), and they foment ideological opposition to the government and impose negative economic externalities (making mobilization more attractive). This provides conditions under which government crackdowns increase or decrease mobilization.

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Crossref · 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2005.00139.x

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Metadata

Authors
De Mesquita, E. B.
Venue
American Journal of Political Science
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2005-05-18
Volume
49
Issue
3
Pages
515-530
ISSN
  • 0092-5853 (ISSN-L)
  • 1540-5907
OpenAlex
W1973532774
Cited by
428
References
29
FWCI
65.37
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Quality of Terror. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2005.00139.x
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De Mesquita, E. B. (2005). The Quality of Terror. American Journal of Political Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2005.00139.x

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.