As Europe enters a significant phase of re-integration of East and West, it faces an increasing problem with the rise of far-right political parties. Cas Mudde offers the first comprehensive and truly pan-European study of populist radical right parties in Europe. He focuses on the parties themselves, discussing them both as dependent and independent variables. Based upon a wealth of primary and secondary literature, this book offers critical and original insights into three major aspects of European populist radical right parties: concepts and classifications; themes and issues; and explanations for electoral failures and successes. It concludes with a discussion of the impact of radical right parties on European democracies, and vice versa, and offers suggestions for future research.

/pdf/populist-radical-right-parties-in-europe-14f3tjtdrt.pdf

Populist radical right parties in Europe

The Internet is frequently used as a medium for exchange of information and opinions, as well as propaganda dissemination. In this study the use of sentiment analysis methodologies is proposed for classification of Web forum opinions in multiple languages. The utility of stylistic and syntactic features is evaluated for sentiment classification of English and Arabic content. Specific feature extraction components are integrated to account for the linguistic characteristics of Arabic. The entropy weighted genetic algorithm (EWGA) is also developed, which is a hybridized genetic algorithm that incorporates the information-gain heuristic for feature selection. EWGA is designed to improve performance and get a better assessment of key features. The proposed features and techniques are evaluated on a benchmark movie review dataset and U.S. and Middle Eastern Web forum postings. The experimental results using EWGA with SVM indicate high performance levels, with accuracies of over 91p on the benchmark dataset as well as the U.S. and Middle Eastern forums. Stylistic features significantly enhanced performance across all testbeds while EWGA also outperformed other feature selection methods, indicating the utility of these features and techniques for document-level classification of sentiments.

Sentiment analysis in multiple languages: Feature selection for opinion classification in Web forums

The Political Economy of Terrorism presents a widely accessible political economy approach to the study of terrorism. It applies economic methodology – theoretical and empirical – combined with political analysis and realities to the study of domestic and transnational terrorism. In so doing, the book provides both a qualitative and quantitative investigation of terrorism in a balanced up-to-date presentation that informs students, policy makers, researchers and the general reader of the current state of knowledge. Included are historical aspects, a discussion of watershed events, the rise of modern-day terrorism, examination of current trends, the dilemma of liberal democracies, evaluation of counterterrorism, analysis of hostage incidents and much more. The new edition expands coverage of every chapter, adds a new chapter on terrorist network structures and organization, accounts for changes in the Department of Homeland Security and the USA Patriot Act and insurance against terrorism. Rational-actor models of terrorist and government behavior and game-theoretic analysis are presented for readers with no prior theoretical training. Where relevant, the authors display graphs using data from International Terrorism: Attributes of Terrorist Events (ITERATE), the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), and other public-access data sets.

/pdf/the-political-economy-of-terrorism-3fasro8h94.pdf

The Political Economy of Terrorism

Where once were dispersions, there now is diaspora. It may seem anachronistic to say so, since the Greek “diaspora” is the older term, and in its restrictive usage has been applied from Antiquity t...

Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment

This article studies the various mechanisms by which democracy affects transnational terrorism. New theoretical mechanisms are identified that either complement or encompass existing arguments. Different effects of democracy on transnational terrorism are assessed for a sample of about 119 countries from 1975 to 1997. Results show that democratic participation reduces transnational terrorist incidents in a country, while government constraints increase the number of those incidents, subsuming the effect of press freedom. The proportional representation system experiences fewer transnational terrorist incidents than either the majoritarian or the mixed system.

http://people.tamu.edu/~quanli/papers/JCR_2005_terrorism.pdf

Does Democracy Promote or Reduce Transnational Terrorist Incidents

The question of the linkage of democratic forms of government with the incidence of terrorist violence is explored. Distinguishing between the presence of terrorist groups in a nation and violent terrorist events, and using multiple indicators of democratic development, evidence is presented clearly linking democracy with the presence of terrorist groups. Terrorist groups are less likely to be found in non‐democratic settings than in democratic ones.

Does democracy encourage terrorism

This analysis begins by exploring various reasons that the concept of terrorism has evaded a widely agreed upon definition for so long despite the efforts of so many writers. Emphasis is placed on the difficulties associated with all “essentially contested concepts.” In addition, the investigation calls attention to such problems as conceptual “stretching” and “traveling.” In an effort to solve the difficulties, the inquiry attempts to determine a consensus definition of terrorism by turning to an empirical analysis of how the term has been employed by academics over the years. Specifically, the well-known definition developed by Alex Schmid, based upon responses to a questionnaire he circulated in 1985, is compared with the way the concept has been employed by contributors to the major journals in the field: Terrorism, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, and Terrorism and Political Violence. The 22 “definitional elements” of which Schmid's definition is composed are compared to the frequency with which th...

The Challenges of Conceptualizing Terrorism

Most observers believe that the 'democratic rules of the game' provide a peaceful means for resolving political conflicts. This may be true but not all groups or even single individuals in democratic societies need play by these rules. This analysis uses two data sets: one that classifies most countries of the world based on how they were ruled in the mid-1980s, and the other on the frequency with which their nationals either perpetrated or were victimized by terrorists attacks, to investigate the relationship between terrorism and democracy. The findings suggest that stable democracy and terrorism go together. An analysis of the data reveal that terrorist attacks occur most often in the world's most stable democracies, and that, further, both the perpetrators and victims of those attacks are citizens of the same democracies.

Terrorism and Democracy: Perpetrators and Victims

This paper is the second in a series of analyses which explore relationships between terrorism and democracy. In this instance, the authors use the Rand‐St Andrews Chronology of International Terrorism for 1994, as well as the US State Department's Patterns of Global Terrorism collection of events for 1995. The authors use these data sets to determine if there is a linkage between the occurrence of terrorist attacks and the type of incumbent political regime in the countries where they are perpetrated. The two classifications of political regimes were drawn from Robert Wesson's 1987 study Democracy: a Worldwide Survey and the Freedom House Publication Freedom in the World for 1984–85 and 1994–95, in order to evaluate the impact of regime change on the incidence of terrorist events. Our principal finding, consistent with earlier work, is that terrorist events are substantially more likely to occur in free and democratic settings than in any of the alternatives. We do discover, though, that change in and of...

Terrorism and democracy: What recent events disclose

Over the last decade, the suicide method became one of the most prevalent tactics of Palestinian Terrorism in Israel. Who are these people, willing to sacrifice their lives in such an act, and what drives them to do such things? In our present analysis, we answer these questions, while relying on the concepts of altruistic and fatalistic suicide from Durkheim's typology of suicide behavior. Based on a newly established database compiled for this purpose m which includes information based on suicide, as well as non-suicide--Palestinian suicide terrorists from 1993 until the beginning of 2002, fit the "altruistic" type as well as some elements from the "fatalistic" and represent a combination of both types; thus they can be labeled under a new category of "fatalistic altruistic" suicide.

Leonard Weinberg

Papers

Does democracy encourage terrorism

The Challenges of Conceptualizing Terrorism

Terrorism and Democracy: Perpetrators and Victims

Terrorism and democracy: What recent events disclose

altruism and fatalism: the characteristics of palestinian suicide terrorists