Text

theses

Research on the relationship between economic discrimination and terrorism has been inconclusive; theory and empirics support claims of both a positive and a negative relationship. This research attempts to further clarify the relationship by admitting that the relationship is conditional and, therefore, affected by other variables, one of which is group concentration. I argue that group concentration has an effect on the experience of discrimination in terms of the access to and cost of knowledge of the ``other" group: the lower the group concentration, the lower the cost of information pertaining to the ``other" group and, therefore, the easier it is to make more reliable comparisons. In these scenarios, the experience of discrimination becomes more salient and more likely to precipitate calls for domestic terrorism. Conversely, where group concentration is high, the cost of information in regards to the ``other" group is also high, distorting the experience of discrimination, and subsequently muffling any calls for domestic terrorism. I use data from the Global Terrorism Database and the Minorities at Risk project to create a series of interaction terms to test the conditionality of the relationship of certain discriminatory policies and group concentration on domestic terrorism incidences. This research finds that when discrimination is high and group concentration is low, domestic terrorism does, indeed, increase. Robustness checks are run with alternate measures of discrimination from both the Ethnic Power Relations Dataset and the Cingranelli-Richards Human Rights Data Project.

ETD_6604

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Caitlin Roxanne Scuderi

doi:10.7282/T3542QK3

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.