Terrorism & Democracy in Burkina-Faso
P Carmel Marie Zagre
TL;DR
The paper asks how chronic terrorism in Burkina Faso shapes citizens' political preferences, testing whether successful attacks push support away from democracy toward authoritarian alternatives. It applies a stacked Difference-in-Differences approach to geocoded terrorism data and six Afrobarometer rounds, identifying causal effects of successful attacks on attitudes toward democracy and military rule. The main findings show that a successful attack increases support for military rule by about $1.00$ percentage point and decreases support for democracy by about $0.91$ percentage point, with effects emerging after one year and persisting for up to two years before fading; robustness checks and spillover analyses support causal interpretation. Mechanisms include a security–freedom trade-off, erosion of trust in democratic institutions, and worsening local economic conditions, highlighting how terrorism can induce a short-term authoritarian drift even in fragile democracies, while underscoring the need to bolster security without compromising democratic resilience.
Abstract
This article examines the political consequences of terrorism in Burkina Faso. Using a dataset combining geolocated terrorist events from ACLED (from 2015 to 2024) with public opinion data from Afrobarometer, I compare the effect of successful terrorist attacks on public support for democracy and authoritarian alternatives. The results reveal that successful terrorist attacks significantly increase support for military regimes, one man regimes, and one party systems, while decreasing support for democratic governance. These changes are most pronounced immediately after the attacks and persist over time. This suggests that terrorism has triggered a trade-off in public preferences between security and freedom. The study also reveals that terrorism erodes perceptions of key democratic values, particularly civil liberties and freedom of movement. Robustness tests confirm that weak institutions or a lack of political knowledge are not driving the results. The article highlights how terrorism in fragile democracies can undermine democratic resilience and accelerate authoritarian drift.