International Criminal Justice

Arrests and convictions but not sentence length deter terrorism in 28 European Union member states

Abstract

While countries differ in how they handle terrorism, criminal justice systems in Europe and elsewhere treat terrorism similar to other crime, with police, prosecutors, judges, courts and penal systems carrying out similar functions of investigations, apprehension, charging, convicting and overseeing punishments, respectively. We address a dearth of research on potential deterrent effects against terrorism by analysing data on terrorism offending, arrests, charges, convictions and sentencing over 16 years in 28 European Union member states. Applying both count and dynamic panel data models across multiple specifications, we find that increased probability of apprehension and punishment demonstrate an inverse relationship with terrorism offending, while the rate of charged individuals is associated with a small increase in terrorism. The results for sentence length are less clear but also indicate potential backlash effects. These findings unveil overlaps between crime and terrorism in terms of deterrent effects and have implications for both the research agenda and policy discussion.

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Fig. 1: Raw number of incidents per country (2007–2021).
Fig. 2: IHS-transformed variables.
Fig. 3: Heat map of the total number of incidents reported (2007–2021).
Fig. 4: Effects of deterrence variables on terrorism incident rates.

Data availability

The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8196717.

Code availability

The syntax used to produce the analysis during the current study is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8196717.

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Acknowledgements

We received partial funding through a research contract from the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security, and Society and the Institute for Futures Studies, Sweden, provided to M.W. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Michael Wolfowicz

  2. Department of Security and Crime Science, University College London, London, UK

    Michael Wolfowicz, Amber Seaward & Paul Gill

  3. Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Gian Maria Campedelli

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Contributions

M.W. and P.G. developed the concept and design of the studies. A.S. contributed to data collection, processing and performing the initial analyses. M.W. and G.M.C. carried out the analyses, produced all tables and figures, and prepared the manuscript. The development and editing of the manuscript were overseen by P.G.

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Michael Wolfowicz.

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Nature Human Behaviour thanks Gary LaFree and James Piazza for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

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Extended data

Extended Data Table 1 GMM models specified with contemporaneous measures of control variables
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Extended Data Table 2 Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood Models with contemporaneous measures of control variables – dependent variable is count of attacks
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Extended Data Table 3 GMM models specified with exclusion of explanatory variables
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Extended Data Table 4 Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood models specified with exclusion of explanatory variables
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Extended Data Table 5 GMM models specified with additional control variables
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Extended Data Table 6 Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood Models specified with additional controls
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Extended Data Table 7 Zero-inflated Poisson regression models with fixed effects dummies
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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Fig. 1 and Tables 1–3.

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Peer Review File

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Wolfowicz, M., Campedelli, G.M., Seaward, A. et al. Arrests and convictions but not sentence length deter terrorism in 28 European Union member states.
Nat Hum Behav (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01695-6

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