The sense of nations for cooperation. How threat perception and ideology influence counterterrorism cooperation between EU members

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhich factors influence bilateral counterterrorism (CT) cooperation between EU Member States? Although scholars have studied European CT, the question still needs to be answered. This paper addresses the issue by introducing a new theoretical framework that combines CT and Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) literature. As citizens’ threat perception increases, governments are pressed to act. Overall, centrist cabinets tend to rely more on cooperation agreements; likewise, pushed by threat perception, left-wing executives also recourse to international cooperation. I tested this framework on a newly collected dataset, which comprehends bilateral CT agreements signed among EU Members from 2002 to 2017. As such, this paper fosters studies on EU CT, focusing on a less debated issue: bilateral cooperation between EU Member States. The results support the initial hypotheses, disclosing a robust influence of threat perception and cabinet ideology on the number of bilateral CT agreements signed. Furthermore, they show that the perception of the threat is more influential on cooperation than the actual impact of terrorism.KEYWORDS: CounterterrorismcooperationForeign Policy AnalysisEuropean Union Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. https://www.osce.org/resources/documents2. First, I conducted different pre-estimation tests. I tested the DV for overdispersion and an excessive number of zeros. Both were absent. Then, I tested the independent variables. Threat perception and GDP have been transformed in logarithms to avoid skewness problems (Balžekienė Citation2019). Secondly, I tested the independent variables for unit-root. The government’s ideology, military and police expenditure and GDP showed signs of unit-root; thus, its first difference has been taken. A deeper explanation of these tests is in the appendix.3. These models are in the appendix.