Replication Data for: Extremism and Terrorism: Rebel Goals and Tactics in Civil Wars

Extremism and terrorism are thought to go hand-in-hand in civil wars. Do they? Are rebel groups with more extreme goals more likely than moderate ones to employ terrorism? Understanding the relationship between what groups want and how they try to achieve it has obvious theoretical and policy implications. A common assumption is that extremist groups are more likely than moderate ones to engage in terrorism. Yet arguments linking extremism to terrorism are often circular: groups are tagged as extremist because they do extreme things. Our article addresses this problem by articulating a novel conceptualization of extremism as the distance of group goals from the status quo. We theorize mechanisms that might connect extremist goals to terrorism, and use new data on rebel group aims in civil wars from 1970 to 2013 to examine the empirical relationship between extremism and terrorism in a non-tautological way. The results show that some extremist goals are associated with terrorism, but not others. Groups whose goals involve changing the political ideology of the state or transforming political power across identity groups are more likely to use terrorism or to use more of it. Secessionist groups, however, are no more likely to produce terrorism than are those with less extreme territorial aims such as autonomy.