In the APSA Public Scholarship Program, graduate students in political science produce summaries of new research in the American Political Science Review. This piece, written by Sienna Nordquist, covers the new article by Daniel Meierrieks and Daniel Auer, “Bribes and Bombs: The Effect of Corruption on Terrorism.”
The World Economic Forum estimates that developing countries lose $1.26 trillion a year, and that the EU alone suffers economic losses of $132 billion per year from corruption. But in their recent APSR article, Meierrieks and Auer demonstrate that corruption is not only costly, but also deadly. Corruption—by depriving citizens of public goods and hampering counterterrorism efforts—leads to more instances of terrorism. When policymakers attempt to improve peace or address poor political accountability worldwide, they must therefore consider corruption and terrorism together.
Corruption is known to harm economic growth, public trust, and the fabric of society. But might it also be dangerous for a country’s security? Meierrieks and Auer answer this question by testing how corruption causes terrorism. They argue that corruption increases terror attacks for several reasons. First, corruption prioritizes public spending on private goods for advantaged groups instead of public goods which all can access. Second, corruption lowers trust in government and politicians, which harms political satisfaction and can make terrorism more attractive. Third, corruption reduces the amount of money which can be spent on defense and counterterrorism, which makes terrorism easier and less costly. And finally, more widespread corruption can increase the monetary gains of joining terror groups, which gives them more power and resources to commit attacks.
Meierrieks and Auer first develop a game-theoretical model of how decisions by the government and citizens result in a causal channel between corruption and terrorism. They then use real-world data to show that corruption causes terrorism. Using global datasets on corruption and terror attacks (such as the Varieties of Democracy and Global Terrorism Dataset), they assess the connection between these two factors, also accounting for each country’s exposure to regional corruption. This type of analysis allows them to avoid some common problems with measuring corruption at individual country level.
“The article also makes the argument that foreign aid scholars should consider the link between corruption and terrorism in their own studies. For if foreign aid can reduce corruption (as some other work has suggested), then perhaps it could be a useful tool for combating terrorism too.”The study shows that corruption increases the number of terror attacks in the next year, sometimes by as much as 8 or 9 terror attacks per year. The authors do not stop their analysis after demonstrating a connection between corruption and terrorism. Instead, they then investigate how the mechanisms they propose in the theory—public goods, political dissatisfaction, and counterterrorism capacity—are related to corruption and the link between corruption and terrorism.
Meierrieks and Auer discover that corruption reduces public services and counterterrorism capacity, which in turn creates the pathway between corruption and terrorism. However, the authors do not find evidence that political dissatisfaction—as measured by political accountability and protest—is related to corruption. A lack of public goods, such as decent schools and healthcare access, and counterterrorism capabilities should therefore be the focus of future work which examines the relationship between corruption and terrorism.
By showing that corruption causes terrorism, the authors prove that corruption affects countries’ security situations. This suggests that defense and national security officials should worry about corruption in government, not just officials in public accountability. The article also makes the argument that foreign aid scholars should consider the link between corruption and terrorism in their own studies. For if foreign aid can reduce corruption (as some other work has suggested), then perhaps it could be a useful tool for combating terrorism too. Meierrieks and Auer show that corruption is not a means of buying peace, but instead is a way of waking up dormant terror.
- Sienna Nordquist is a 3rd year PhD Student in Social and Political Science at Bocconi University, Italy. She is also a visiting researcher at the WZB’s Transformations of Democracy Unit in Berlin, Germany. Originally from the US, Sienna was a Robert W. Woodruff Scholar at Emory University, received her Master’s degree from the LSE’s European Institute, and has been a Fellow at the Atlantic Council.
- MEIERRIEKS, DANIEL, and DANIEL AUER. 2024. “Bribes and Bombs: The Effect of Corruption on Terrorism.” . American Political Science Review, 1–17.
- About the APSA Public Scholarship Program.