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

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