Political Legitimacy and Worldwide Terrorist Attacks, 1970-2017

The classic work by Max Weber argued for the impact of political legitimacy on reducing conflict and violence within states. Based on Weber and more recent theorists we argue that governments whose legitimacy is undermined are more vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Using data on worldwide terrorist attacks from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and measures of good governance from the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem), we find considerable (but not total) support for the impact of legitimacy on terrorist attacks. We perform fixed-effects negative binomial regressions of domestic terrorist attacks covering 131 countries from 1970-2017 to test the impact of four political legitimacy measures: accountability, efficiency, procedural and distributive fairness. Controlling for common economic, political and demographic measures, we find that from all legitimacy measures, accountability has the most robust influence: rates of domestic terrorist attacks are highest when governments are transitioning from highly unaccountable to highly accountable systems.