Introducing Government Actions in Terror Environments (GATE) Dataset

Much effort has been exerted to develop terrorist incident databases that capture details of terrorist attacks across the globe. With these data, scholars and policy experts can observe patterns of attacks across regions, by specific terrorist organizations, and over time. Further, such data allow us to assess the relationship between possible causal factors, such as political climate and economy on the inception and rise of terrorist violence. These databases also allow us to assess the effectiveness of government interventions on reducing terrorism. Consequently, quantitative analysis of terrorism has grown substantially over recent years. Yet, when we raise the question of what does and does not work to reduce terrorist violence, we are limited to only those interventions that are explicitly publicized as counterterrorism. Missing from analysis are government actions that fall outside the purview of counterterrorism, yet plausibly affect terrorist violence either directly through the organizations or indirectly through their constituencies. This paper introduces a new way to collect data on what governments do and presents descriptive accounts of conciliatory and repressive actions by governments relative to terrorist attacks in several countries. We also present an overview of findings that assesses the effects of conciliatory and repressive actions that are targeted both discriminately and indiscriminately on terrorist violence.