Edward Crenshaw Craig Jenkins Ohio State University
SES-0854256 Kristopher Robison Northern Illinois University
Civil terrorism is a form of "political theater" in the sense that civilian groups use violent spectacle to intimidate specific targets and appeal to potential supporters. As "propaganda by deed," terrorism is essentially a form of psychological warfare, and is therefore heavily reliant on the modern mass media to convey its symbolic messages. Unfortunately, little comparative or cross-national research has explored the nexus between terrorism, the mass media, and democracy, and what exists has suffered from theoretical anemia, definitional ambiguities over the different types of political violence, and concerns about how data on political violence are collected.
This project introduces innovations to help correct these problems. Specifically, nesting social movements and diffusion theories within a social ecology framework, we draw hypotheses concerning the media's role in various forms of political violence. At the same time, we introduce a refined typology of political violence as well as new media variables to partially correct some of the problems plaguing current research. In terms of methodology, we will use pooled time-series analysis on the ITERATE database as well as other data sources that provide appropriate information for most of the world?s nations. Some preliminary results using ITERATE suggest that 1) net of media effects, democracy has very little influence on political violence; 2) democracy interacts with the presence of the Western press to encourage transnational terrorism; but 3) this is not the case when violent actors target government (i.e., guerilla war).
This research will contribute to our understanding of political violence in three ways. First, it will provide a new theoretical framework for understanding political violence that suggests fresher, more nuanced hypotheses (e.g., the mass media should encourage terrorism but discourage ongoing guerilla/civil/international warfare). Second, it will demonstrate how refined definitions of various forms of political violence (such as strictly defining ?terrorism? as attacks on civilians) can have a major impact on research findings. Third, as most data on political violence are taken from media accounts, there is a natural (or artifactual) correlation between media reportage and political violence. To correct this, the project introduces a relatively simple technique for disentangling media artifacts from the true influence of media on political violence.
While many scholars and policy-makers suspect that the mass media and democratization are central to the staging of terrorism and other forms of violence, there is no agreement on their distinctive or combined effects. The research innovations introduced by this project will improve on past research and, as these relationships become clearer, finally answer questions about how democracy and the mass media invite or discourage political violence, moving us beyond heated debate. More broadly, Shakespeare has proven prescient when he said that "all the world's a stage." The modern mass media have made it so, but the influence of media on other sociological, political and economic phenomena is not well-understood. This project will demonstrate at least one way to study media effects on a global scale, and the framework can accommodate the investigation of many other media-driven phenomena such as global business cycles, waves of democratization, transnational protest/mobilization, the spread (and occasional contraction) of so-called "world polity", and many other forms of transnational social change.
