Keywords

Terrorism, leadership, psychology, quantitative methodology

Abstract

This thesis seeks to address a theoretical and empirical gap within terrorism studies, and more specially the study of terrorist-group lethality. This research updates a model of terrorist-group lethality by including terrorist-leader psychology as an individual-level variable in predicting terrorist-group lethality. Terrorist-leader statements were analyzed by using two novel coding schemes called Operational Code and Leadership Trait Analysis to create quantified measurements of leader cognitive beliefs and personality traits. The empirical portion of this study utilizes pooled cross-sectional time-series data within the framework of fixed effects and multi-level estimation models. The results find that terrorist-leader psychology, and more specifically Instrumental (Strategic) Beliefs and Distrust, are significant predictors of subsequent group-lethality.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2014

Semester

Spring

Advisor

Schafer, Mark

Degree

Master of Arts (M.A.)

College

College of Sciences

Department

Political Science

Degree Program

Political Science; International Studies

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0005132

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0005132

Language

English

Release Date

May 2014

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Masters Thesis (Open Access)

Subjects

Dissertations, Academic -- Sciences; Sciences -- Dissertations, Academic

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