Public Support and Terrorism: The Putin Paradox

ABSTRACT

The increase in the number of terrorist attacks in Russia suggests that anti-terrorist policies have failed to solve the Chechen terrorist problem. The Putin paradox, named after Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, is the capacity of the incumbent government to maintain or even increase its popular support while suffering increasing terrorist attacks. This paper presents a dynamic model where government’s public support is related to terrorist attacks and counter-terrorism activities, and it shows that the Putin paradox is one of the possible steady state solutions of the model. In the Putin paradox case the equilibrium level of government’s public support is positively impacted by the equilibrium number of terrorist attacks.