An exciting paper at ISA’s 55th Annual Convention in Toronto tackles the challenge to find alternative operationalizations of terrorism using replication data. Join the disussion on Thursday, March 27, 2014 (10.30am).
The paper “What is Terrorism” by Joseph Young (American University) and Michael Findley (University of Texas, Austin) gives an interesting answer to the “deluge of definitions” of terrorism in the literature. It provides an alternative operationalization of the term beyond simply counting terrorist attacks. How? It first gives a broad overview of common operationalizations of terrorism, and then replicates previous quantitative work using alternative measurements. It thereby builds a new research agenda that should be interesting for anyone working on terrorism from both the qualitative and quantitative perspective.
How replication supports their argument
To examine how different operationalizations impact statistical inference, the authors
replicate James Piazza’s (2011) Journal of Peace Research paper, “Poverty, Minority
Economic Discrimination, and Domestic Terrorism.” Piazza examines effects of minority economic discrimination on domestic terrorism.
The authors first replicate Piazza’s original model. They then add variations on Piazza’s original operationalization of terrorism, and introduce alternative ways to capture the concept (e.g. terrorism as fatalities, number of groups, or suicide attacks) to show how that impacts the results.
The paper will be presented at the ISA panel “TB14: Presidential Panel: New Frontiers in Quantitative Terrorism” on Thursday, March 27, 2014, at 10.30am.
Replication at ISA in Toronto
Thursday, March 27
10:30 AM – 12:15 PM
TB14: Presidential Panel: New Frontiers in Quantitative Terrorism
Paper using replication: What is Terrorism?
Joseph Young (American University)
Friday, March 28
8:15 AM – 10:00 AM
FA10: Replication in International Relations: How Journal Data Policies and Replication in Teaching Can Improve Reproducibility Standards
Willow Centre, Sheraton Centre Toronto
Immediately followed by:
10:30 AM – 12:15 PM
FB10: Replication in International Relations: Successes and Failures in Practice
Political Science Replication 