Public Support and Terrorism: The Putin Paradox

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.