Civil society and exposure to domestic terrorist attacks: Evidence from a cross-national quantitative analysis, 1970–2010

This article examines the connection between a nation’s level of civil society organizational openness and the number of domestic terrorist attacks across 167 countries from 1970 to 2010. Following the contentious politics approach, we conceptualize terrorist organizations as engaged in high-risk movement activity and sensitive to organizational opportunities that make contention more likely. Panel fixed-effects negative binomial regression models support our hypothesis that a nation’s level of civil society openness increases exposure to domestic terrorist attacks. This work connects social movement theory with the cross-disciplinary literature working to understand terrorism by offering an explanation for terrorist attacks that are rooted in the organizational opportunity paradigm. It provides us a useful tool for future work on cross-national social movements in a cross-national perspective, as well as further work on terrorist organizations.