Seminar Series - Rhian Dixon-Yearby, 2026 Edward A. Kolodziej Fellow

This seminar will focus on the summer research of Rhian Dixon-Yearby, one of the 2026 Edward A. Kolodziej Fellowship Awardee's.

Sentencing, Convictions, and Accession: An Empirical Analysis of Terrorism Court Outcomes Across the European Union, 2011-2021

Abstract:

Despite the substantial growth of the counterterrorism field in the last thirty years, there has been little empirical research on the court outcomes following terrorism-related arrests in the European Union. This paper investigates whether a European Union country’s average sentence length predicts its conviction rate, using data from 18 EU member states over the span of a decade (2011-2021). It also examines the effect EU accession era has on each variable. Using country-year data from Europol’s European Union Terrorism Situation and Trend Report (EU TE-SAT), a simple bivariate regression found a weak, negative, and insignificant relationship between sentence length and conviction rate (β = -0.0052, p = 0.096, and R² = 0.020). However, two one-way ANOVAs revealed that each variable differs across EU accession eras. Countries that are a part of the Founders and First Enlargement cohort reported significantly higher average conviction rates, and countries that are a part of the Second to Fourth Enlargement cohort reported significantly higher sentence lengths. These findings suggest that sentence length and conviction rate are governed by different processes and that EU accession era might be a more meaningful predictor of both.