Should I Pay, Or Should I Quash? The Role of Governments’ Ideology in Ransom Payment

ABSTRACT

Does governments’ ideology influence the likelihood of ransom payment? Despite a steady interest in hostage-taking events, this question remains unanswered. In this article, I argue that ideology contributes to explaining governments’ decisions to pay or not pay ransoms: guided by individualising moral foundations, left-leaning governments are more likely to concede to terrorists to save lives. I test the theoretical argument through a quantitative analysis of abductions between 1970 and 2020 whose victims are citizens of OECD member states. Two results stand out. The presence of leftist governments increases the likelihood of ransom payment, but the abduction of statesmen mitigates its impact. This work contributes to hostage-taking and Foreign Policy Analysis literature by covering an apparent gap in these fields. It also fosters studies on the role of ideology in security issues and moral dilemmas by focusing on a peculiar event that scholars have largely overlooked.

KEYWORDS:

• Hostage-taking incidents
• terrorism
• foreign policy analysis
• moral dilemma
• ransom payment

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D74
• D81
• D72

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10242694.2024.2352674.

Notes

1. According to Plescia and De Sio (2019), the Five Star Movement can be considered a left-populist party.

2. https://www.corriere.it/cronache/20_maggio_09/silvia-romano-libera-retroscena-dell-operazione-servizi-intelligence-italiani-48b71f8a-9214-11ea-9f60-1b8d14bed082.shtml; https://www.avvenire.it/mondo/pagine/riscatto-e-conversione-ecco-le-realt-di-scelte-con-un-valore-anche-politico

3. https://www.corriere.it/cronache/20_maggio_10/destra-attacca-riscatto-polemiche-sull-abito-94d4a5c4-92f8-11ea-88e1-10b8fb89502c.shtml

4. Event 197,710,310,001 in GTD.

5. attacktype = 6 in GTD dataset. All the kidnappings reported in the GTD, whose perpetrators are known, are present in the dataset.

6. The countries’ selection follows the sample provided by Loertscher and Milton (2018). The differences are due to data availability, especially for countries with very few observations, such as Hungary, Iceland the Slovak Republic, on which data on the perpetrators or on the length of the captivities are missing.

7. Variable ransompaid in GTD dataset.

8. I rescaled it from − 10 to 10.

9. A further robustness check has been conducted by using a dichotomous variable. The model is in the supplementary (RB3).

10. The descriptive statistics of the variables used for the robustness checks and the robustness checks are in the supplementary.