Repercussions of terrorist assassinations: A post-assassination institutional analysis, 1970-2012

Political assassinations receive minimal scholarly attention and to improve our understanding of political violence, it is important to examine assassinations and the consequences of this method of violence. Missing from the existing literature is a theoretical framework to guide development and enrich our understanding of these events and thus, an important contribution of this project is in providing such a framework. This dissertation delineates assassination types and frames a discussion of leader assassination, terrorist assassination and state-sponsored assassination with empirical analyses of post-terrorist assassination outcomes. Utilizing survival analyses to examine the likelihood of political institutional change in the aftermath of terrorist assassinations, differences in institutional changes are examined by regime type, by levels of repression and between target types. Authoritarian, mixed and tumultuous regimes are measured against democracies, and findings suggest that there are differences in post-terrorist assassination institutional outcomes, but the changes are long-term and in need of further scrutiny. The examination of the likelihood of post-terrorist assassination institutional change in repressive regimes finds differences in outcomes between non-repressive and repressive regimes. Results suggest that repressive states are more likely to experience changes in political institutions than non-repressive states, and as the intensity of the repression increases, so too does the likelihood of institutional change. As with the regime type analyses, the changes in repressive regimes are also long term and in need of additional empirical examination. The analyses also suggest that target types matter across regimes and outcomes do vary between certain types of targets-namely religious figures, diplomats and United Nations personnel. The assassination typology framework and the empirical analyses of post-terrorist assassination outcomes enhance insight into political assassination and provide a foundation upon which to build a better understanding of political violence.