This book presents and discusses the logic and method of social science research adapted mainly for instruction at Arab universities and for research in Arab countries, but with applicability beyond ...the region. It illustrates major concepts and methods pertaining to research with examples of previous studies carried out in the Arab world and with exercises using Arab Barometer and other datasets. The book situates itself between a regular methods textbook and an annotated list of major concepts and methods, and includes an introduction, three chapters, and four appendices.
Some of the most pressing questions in the Middle East and North Africa today revolve around the proper place of Islamic institutions and authorities in governance and political affairs. Drawing on ...data from 42 surveys carried out in fifteen countries between 1988 and 2011, representing the opinions of more than 60,000 men and women, this study investigates the reasons that some individuals support a central role for Islam in government while others favor a separation of religion and politics. Utilizing his newly constructed Carnegie Middle East Governance and Islam Dataset, which has been placed in the public domain for use by other researchers, Mark Tessler formulates and tests hypotheses about the views held by ordinary citizens, offering insights into the individual and country-level factors that shape attitudes toward political Islam.
What prolonged implications does conflict escalation have on voting behavior? The literature focuses primarily on the immediate effect of violent events on voting in nearby elections, leaving open ...questions about longer-term consequences. This article examines this question by studying Israel, where violent escalation in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in the early 2000s was followed by an unexpected electoral outcome: the emergence and consolidation of a new centrist bloc that transformed a longstanding Left-Right partisan divide into a three-bloc system. Using two decades of survey data, it is argued that this shift is best explained by a long-term attitudinal change toward the conflict by many Israelis after the escalation. Rather than a strictly hawkish shift, many voters have become ‘Doubtful Doves’: supportive of territorial compromise in principle, but skeptical about reaching an agreement with the Palestinians in practice. This underdiscussed attitudinal structure, dovish but doubtful, has formed a new electoral base for centrist parties, breaking the traditional Left-Right dichotomy. These findings illustrate that violent periods in conflicts can cause non-trivial long-term changes in popular attitude structures and voting patterns, which, under the right conditions, can trigger electoral re-equilibration.
A large body of research by political scientists, psychologists and
historians suggests that “existential security”—the
feeling that survival can be taken for granted—is conducive to
tolerance of ...foreigners, openness to social change and a pro-democratic
political culture. Conversely, existential insecurity leads to 1)
xenophobia and 2) strong in-group solidarity. This article tests these
hypotheses against evidence from a recent survey of Iraq—a society
where one would expect to find exceptionally high levels of insecurity. We
find that the Iraqi public today shows the highest level of xenophobia
found in any of the 85 societies for which data are
available—together with extremely high levels of solidarity with
one's own ethnic group.Ronald
Inglehart is Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan
(rfi@umich.edu), Mansoor Moaddel is Professor of Sociology at Eastern
Michigan University (mmoaddel@emich.edu), and Mark Tessler is Professor of
Political Science at University of Michigan
(tessler@umich.edu).
This article explores the impact of religious orientations on attitudes toward democracy through public opinion data collected in Morocco, Algeria, Palestine (West Bank and Gaza), and Egypt. Personal ...piety is not related to prodemocracy attitudes among men in any country or among women in Morocco, Gaza, and Egypt in 1992 but is inversely related to such attitudes among women in Algeria, the West Bank, and Egypt in 1988. Support for Islamist movements and platforms is in all cases unrelated to prodemocracy attitudes. These findings are relevant to arguments about democracy and Islam in the Arab world, democratic transitions more generally, and research in western countries on the influence of religion on political attitudes.
In an effort to contribute to the dialogue between gender studies and international studies, this report presents findings from an empirical investigation based on the integrated secondary analysis ...of survey data from Israel, Egypt, Palestine, and Kuwait. The goal is to assess the utility of both gender and attitudes pertaining to the circumstances of women in accounting for variance in views about war and peace, and thereafter to examine the degree to which political system attributes constitute conditionalities associated with important variable relationships. Major findings include the absence of gender-linked differences in attitudes toward international conflict in all four of the societies studied and a significant relationship in each of these societies between attitudes toward gender equality and attitudes toward international conflict. Based on data from the Arab world and Israel, with attitudes about a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict treated as the dependent variable, the research also aspires to shed light on more practical considerations pertaining to the international relations of the Middle East.
For the first time in an Arab country, this article examines attitudes toward public opinion surveys and their effects on survey-taking behavior. The study uses original survey data from Qatar, the ...diverse population of which permits comparisons across cultural–geographical groupings within a single, non-democratic polity. The authors find that Qatari and expatriate Arabs hold positive views of surveys, both in absolute terms and relative to individuals from non-Arab countries. Factor analysis reveals that the underlying dimensions of survey attitudes in Qatar mostly mirror those identified in Western settings, but a new dimension is discovered that captures the perceived intentions of surveys. Two embedded experiments assess the impact of survey attitudes. The results show that generalized attitudes toward surveys affect respondents’ willingness to participate both alone and in combination with surveys' objective attributes. The study also finds that negative views about survey reliability and intentions increase motivated under-reporting among Arab respondents, whereas non-Arabs are sensitive only to perceived cognitive and time costs. These findings have direct implications for consumers and producers of Arab survey data.
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