Does Democracy Really Fuel Terrorism in Africa?

This article complements the extant literature on terrorism by paying particular attention to the influence of democracy on a panel of 49 African countries, over the period 1980–2012. For this broad objective to be achieved, terrorism is decomposed into four main categories, namely domestic, transnational, uncertain and total. Due to the count nature of terrorism data, the study employs a negative binomial regression estimator, in which the following key findings are established: (i) there is a mitigating role of democracy on measures of terrorism, with the exemption of transnational terrorism; (ii) there is existence of threshold values of democracy which must be attained in order to ascertain its mitigating role on terrorism; (iii) the importance of other covariates such as conflicts, population, surface areas and physical integrity rights are no less significant across the model specifications. These results have important policy implications. We also offer suggestions for future research.