ON MEASURING POLITICAL VIOLENCE - NORTHERN-IRELAND, 1969 TO 1980

Results of research on the causes of political violence are questionable owing to poor reliability of data and the tendency to combine violence perpetrated by several different actors in a general measure of ''political violence.'' Dynamic models and a focus on the context of violence allow examination of these issues. I compare an overall count of political deaths from The New York Times Index with a comparable count from a more complete database. The statistical inferences generated using the two measures are virtually identical. More important, disaggregating political deaths by the agency responsible for the deaths shows that anti-state violence, pro-state vigilante counterviolence, and state violence follow separate, distinctive dynamics. Although standard newspaper sources may provide reliable measures of political violence, they do not guarantee a complete examination of its complex dynamics.