Terrorism, interest-group politics, and public policy: curtailing criminal modes of political speech.

• Author: Congleton, Roger D.
• Position: Statistical Data Included

Terrorist incidents have occurred in the United States and around the world for centuries. Tax revolters, anarchists, war protesters, and other critics of government policy have often used violence to send messages to the policymakers controlling the issues of interest. The attacks of September 11, 2001, for example, have been widely interpreted as a comment on U.S. policy toward the Islamic world, especially U.S. policy in the Middle East. Indeed, terrorist attacks might be defined as violence for the purpose of sending a political message with the aim of influencing policy or at least of voicing disapproval. In this sense, terrorism is one possible method of "political dialogue."

Even when political analysts do not share the goals of terrorist groups, they may defend the use of violence as a method of sending messages because of the political nature of the message sent. After all, political messages and popular protests receive special protection in all liberal democracies, and civil disobedience has often generated improvements in government policies. The conjunction of the "political message" explanation of terrorist actions and a "free speech" justification of those actions clearly resonates with some proponents of popular resistance, but it is nonetheless a bit puzzling for most proponents of free speech. Those who advocate the former explanation might argue that the United States brought the recent attacks on itself by various foreign-policy mistakes made over the years. Most proponents of free speech will reject this conclusion as a justification for terrorism, but they have not yet found a clear line of argument with which to respond to it.

If terrorism is the organized use of violence to transmit "political messages," then a good deal about terrorist networks and activities can be understood by using the same models used to explain the existence and behavior of ordinary policy-advocacy groups. The basic mathematics of ordinary interest-group and terrorist "contests" are similar to those of ordinary competitive contests or rent-seeking games. Both terrorist networks and ordinary political-interest groups attempt to exert disproportionate influence on controversial public policies. The likelihood and the degree of success of their efforts increase as the resources devoted to exerting "influence" expand and decline with opponents' efforts to resist their aims, other things being equal. To the extent that participants are rational, institutional arrangements that change the probability of success among alternative methods of influence affect the level and allocation of group efforts across those methods. Terrorism is simply another method that groups may use to influence government decisions--another form of interest-group politics.

Moreover, terrorism and ordinary interest-group politics have normative similarities. In both cases, the direct participants in the conflict over the public policy bear costs. All politically active groups employ scarce resources in order to induce or avoid certain changes in public policy. To the extent that the resources used by opposing interest groups largely offset each group's efforts, each side might have reduced its efforts in a manner that would have left the policy outcome the same but would have freed resources for other, more productive uses. The more resources invested by those involved in such political conflict, the larger are such avoidable losses (what public-choice scholars call the deadweight loss or rent-seeking losses). The same reasoning applies to both ordinary interest-group politics and terrorism.

In the first half of the article, I explore why governments always treat terrorism differently from ordinary interest-group politics in spite of their similarities. Although the political aims of terrorism (and other forms of policy-motivated resistance) clearly resemble those of ordinary interest groups in their efforts to draw attention to specific policy issues, the two methods of political action differ significantly in their normative properties.

In the second half of the article, I consider the extent to which these differences justify substantially different public policies toward interest groups that use terror to promote their political and social agendas. The desire to transmit a policy message cannot justify the use of any and all methods for attracting widespread attention to that political message. However, the differences are not so large as to justify any policy that might potentially reduce future terrorism. Indeed, my analysis suggests that we have grossly overreacted to the current terrorist threat by focusing too much attention on worst-case scenarios and by paying insufficient attention to the historical record of terrorist attacks in the United States and around the world.

My purpose is to provide clearer logical and economic foundations for many of our moral intuitions regarding terrorism as a method of political speech and hence to explain why terrorism should be, as it is, an illegal mode of political speech in all civilized countries. Appropriate efforts to reduce terrorist acts depend in part on the nature of the damages from those acts and in part on the threat of damages that might be caused by terrorist groups in the future. In addition, the appropriate level of resources devoted to antiterrorism depends on the probability and the extent of those damages relative to the probability and extent of other kinds of damages that might be affected by public policy. Benefit-cost analysis suggests that the antiterrorism policies now being implemented are excessive, given the risks that we face.

I employ ideas and models from the public-choice, crime-control, and risk-management literatures to carry out my positive analysis. I apply the economist's stock in trade, cost-benefit analysis, to develop the normative analysis. In using cost-benefit analysis, I do not mean to imply that all relevant costs or all benefits can be monetized, measured, or even imagined. I employ these familiar tools because no others so effectively clarify one's thoughts, provide such a transparent and systematic analysis, or allow such sharp and plausible policy conclusions.

Some Forms of Political Competition Are Better Than Others

Competition and conflict take many forms. Most games of conflict generate avoidable losses for the participants because they consume too much time, energy, and material. The logic is straightforward. As the efforts of other participants in a game of conflict increase, each player's own probability of winning the prize of interest declines--whether that prize be money, status, or new public policies. In most games of conflict, competitive efforts largely offset each other, insofar as winning the contest depends on relative rather than absolute effort. Consequently, a small reduction in each player's effort will not materially affect the outcome of the game. Reduced conflict frees resources for other uses; thus, most games of conflict generate avoidable losses for all participants. Unfortunately, the competitive nature of the conflict also makes it impossible for any single competitor to realize those savings unilaterally without reducing the chance of winning. Once started, the overinvestment of resources in competitive games of conflict can continue indefinitely.

Fortunately, not all competitive contests generate net losses for all parties. As several authors, including me, have emphasized, the social losses differ in different forms of competition. (1) This difference arises not because the nature of the contests differs significantly for the players, but rather because different forms of conflict impose different costs and benefits ("externalities") on others largely outside the game.

For example, a modern sporting event calls forth enormous effort from a handful of competitors, who may devote most of their waking hours to perfecting skills that have little or no value in themselves. Although the relative positions of the competitors are in large part the result of extraordinary efforts to perfect certain skills, approximately the same relative positions will result if each of the competitors reduces his training by half. Nonetheless, many families and governments around the world encourage extraordinary investments in most of these sports because millions of spectators thoroughly enjoy the amazing performances of these "overly" skilled athletes as they watch the games in which those skills are demonstrated.

Within the political sphere, many forms of competition are also productive on the whole. Most participants in the great political games played in every nation make lifetime investments in glad-handing, grooming, public speaking, policy spouting, and networking, and, as in sporting events, competition among highly trained opponents in public forums provides entertainment for millions. Besides the entertainment value, policy contests among political candidates or interest-group advocates often provide voters and other spectators with a good deal of useful information about policy alternatives, political parties, and candidates--not all of which is spoken by those actively engaged in the policy forums or in competition for elective office. Electoral competition allows voters to reward and punish those who have made convincing or facile arguments--a system that generally leads to better public policies than do noncompetitive methods of choosing policies.

The informational component of political conflict is important; indeed, it is so important that liberal political constitutions generally include special provisions, such as the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, to protect the dissemination of policy-relevant information. Political speech is privileged because among an educated electorate the most persuasive arguments normally rest on sound analysis and good information: solid common sense, scientific or...