Extremism & Terrorism: A Political Issue or An Economic One?

Endogenous institutions and political extremism

The election of extreme political leaders is often associated with changes in political institutions. This paper studies these phenomena through a model in which the median voter elects a leader anticipating that he will impose institutional constraints— such as constitutional amendments, judicial appointments, or the implicit threat of a coup— that in‡uence the behavior of future political cha...

Vicious Cycles: Endogenous Political Extremism and Political Violence

Why do terrorists terrorize? In this paper, we advance an explanation for terrorist (and anti-terrorist) behavior in societies with deep cleavages that might promote terrorism—for example, in Northern Ireland, Israel, Sri Lanka, the Middle East, and the Balkans. In particular we develop a model of strategic interaction between groups in society as a way of examining the political conditions und...

Political extremism is supported by an illusion of understanding.

People often hold extreme political attitudes about complex policies. We hypothesized that people typically know less about such policies than they think they do (the illusion of explanatory depth) and that polarized attitudes are enabled by simplistic causal models. Asking people to explain policies in detail both undermined the illusion of explanatory depth and led to attitudes that were more...

The Broadening Remit of UK Counter-Terrorism - from Terrorism to ‘Radicalization’ to ‘Extremism’: C-T Imperative or Loss of Focus?

This article argues that the discourses of radicalization and, more lately, of extremism have served to confuse the remit of counter-terrorism. Indeed, it appears that ‘terrorism’, ‘radicalization’ and ‘extremism’ have increasingly become merged into a single discursive framework, one consequence of which has been to blur the important distinction between ‘extremism’ of thought and ‘extremism’ ...

Risk Assessment Decisions for Violent Political Extremism