Abstract
Abstract. Since the attacks of September 11th, national security concerns have in many respects been centered on the prevention of terrorist attacks. This thesis addresses the claim that the decision to join the "war on terror" puts a country at increased risk of terrorist attack. Considered in this analysis are the wealth, political structure, religion, and economic and political liberty of 44 countries, 22 member nations of the "coalition of the willing," and 22 which are not. Data are gathered from the International Terrorism: Attributes of Terrorist Events dataset. The decision to join the coalition is modeled as a binary choice variable and estimated with a logistical model. Subsequent models estimate continuous
variables measuring the number of attacks and fatalities using both Poisson and negative binomial regression models. We find no relationship between the decision to join the coalition and either the risk of attack, or the number of attacks or fatalities.