Suchergebnisse

Despite substantial progress in the applied study of terrorism, one important methodological issue has remained underdeveloped. Multiple warnings have urged for caution as the validity of extant findings may have been distorted from the well-known "devil" of underreporting bias. Yet, extant research has fallen short from addressing the issue in a systematic fashion. This article discusses a way for assessing whether underreporting is present by using the widely studied relationship between terrorism and regime type as its laboratory. After formally presenting a setup for the accommodation of underreporting bias, the authors discuss how it relates to press freedom. According to their results, underreporting is indeed present, implying that the used databases for terrorism represent an understatement of the true number of terrorist incidents.

Despite the proliferation of ideational accounts in the last decade or so, the debate over the role of ideas remains caught up in a series of disputes over the ontological foundations, epistemological status and practical pay-off of the (re)turn to ideational explanations. It is thus unsurprising that there is still little clarity about just what sort of an approach an ideational approach is and about what it would take to establish the kind of fully-fledged ideational research programme many seem to assume has already been developed. The contributors in this volume address these dilemmas in diverse but engagingly complementary ways. They argue that what plagues most attempts to accord ideas an explanatory role is the persistence of the perennial dualities in political analysis. In aspiring to eschew the current vogue for dualistic polemic, the present volume reveals elements of dualistic thinking in the ideational turn and assesses the impact of the persistence of these perennial dualisms in the attempt to accord ideas an explanatory role.