Democracy, Regime Durability and Terrorism in Africa

This study investigated the causal linkages among democracy, regime durability and terrorism for a panel of 53 African countries over the period 1980-2012. Due to the count nature of terrorism data, the study employs a negative binomial regression estimator. The empirical analysis is based on four terrorism types namely: domestic, transnational, uncertain and total terrorism respectively. The following are the key findings: First, with the exception of the specification relating to uncertain terrorism, the unconditional effect of democracy was found to be negative on the other three dimensions of terrorism. Second, the unconditional impact of regime durability was also positive on terrorism with the exception of uncertain terrorism but in a rather inconsistent manner. Third, the interactions between democracy and regime durability are found to have positive marginal effects on all the terrorism types except uncertain terrorism. Fourth, the net effects of interaction between democracy and regime durability are positive across various models of these terrorism measures. Lastly, the theoretical priors of other covariates are equally validated across different measures of terrorism. On the policy arena, mitigating terrorism would require embracing democratic regime and mainstreaming the concomitant doctrines into the politico-institutional architecture but not without moderation in regime elongation..