Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Lebanon and Yemen.

This dissertation presents three essays with the theme of ethnicity and institutions, utilizing insights and data from Lebanon and Yemen, two Arab societies within which ethnicity (sect, tribe, region) is salient politically, but which use different institutions to channel these cleavages through the political system. The first essay uses a methodological innovation to study illiterate voting rights in Lebanon, which has normative, sectarian, and distributional consequences. It first addresses the difficulties of studying sensitive topics with surveys, in which systematic response bias limits the reliability of self-reported data. I present an augmented version of the list experiment and a new statistical estimator called listit to mitigate incentives for respondents to misrepresent themselves. I show that responses to a direct question on illiterate voting rights produce sectarian answers: community membership drives attitudes, whereas material conditions do not. The opposite obtains when the question is asked indirectly via the list experiment: community membership has no influence on attitudes, which instead are driven strongly by material conditions. The second essay studies institutional preferences in Lebanon. Given the salience of sectarianism in Lebanon, it argues that preferences should vary by community membership. Although religion provides the nominal boundaries between the sectarian communities, the Lebanese are also able to invoke shared religious ideals to imagine a larger community beyond the sect: religion unites as well as divides. I show that religiosity reduces favorable assessments of autocratic institutions in all sects, suggesting that religious individuals conceive of the polity in more inclusive terms than do sectarian individuals. The third essay compares Lebanon and Yemen, arguing that the descent principle makes ethnic constituencies captive audiences to their own elites, reducing the cost of political support. The price of votes depends on the institutionally-influenced intraethnic competitive environment: oligopsony, in which elites compete for their coethnics' votes, or monopsony, in which a single vote-buyer dominates and constituents compete for patronage. I provide evidence that constituents in monopsonized communities (Lebanese Sunnis and Yemeni Shiites) make overt displays of political support for leaders with patronage considerations in mind, a dynamic unseen in the more internally competitive communities in either country.Ph.D.Political ScienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/58397/1/dancorst_1.pd

Replication Data for National and Subnational Identification in the Syrian Civil War

Replication data for "National and Subnational Identification in the Syrian Civil War." Includes raw data, questionnaire, and replication code in R

Replication Data for "The Syrian Conflict and Public Opinion Among Syrians in Lebanon"

Who do ordinary Syrians support in their civil war? After decades of repression, the Syrian uprising unleashed an outpouring of political expression. Yet the study of Syrian public opinion is in its infancy. This paper presents survey evidence from a large, diverse sample of Syrian refugees in neighboring Lebanon, one of the first of its kind, and examines their support for the different factions fighting in the civil war. In so doing, it demonstrates that many conventional narratives of the conflict are oversimplifications of a more complex reality. The survey shows that the majority of Syrian refugees support one faction or another of the opposition, but a large minority sympathizes with the government. In line with existing accounts of the war, the government draws its popular support base from wealthier and less religious Syrians, as well as minorities. Nonetheless, large numbers of Sunni Arabs also side with the government, belying sectarian narratives of the war. The survey also finds that supporters of the opposition Islamists and non-Islamists are similar in many regards, including religiosity. The main distinction is that the non-Islamist support base is far more politically attentive than are Islamist sympathizers, in contrast to existing narratives of the war

Replication Data for: Anti-American Behavior in the Middle East

Replications materials for "Anti-American Behavior in the Middle East," which includes the core Lebanese experiment/survey data and the supplementary BBC data

Replication Data for: Sectarian Framing in the Syrian Civil War

How do civilians respond to civil war narratives? Do they react to ethnic frames more strongly than to alternatives? Governments and rebels battle for hearts and minds as well as strategic terrain, and winning the narrative war can shift legitimacy, popular support, and material resources to the sympathetically framed side. We examine the effect of one-sided and competing war discourses on ordinary people's understandings of the Syrian civil war -- a conflict with multiple narratives, but which has become more communal over time. We conduct a framing experiment with a representative sample of Syrian refugees in Lebanon in which we vary the narrative that describes the reasons for the conflict. We find that sectarian explanations, framed in isolation, strongly increase the importance government supporters place on fighting. When counterframed against competing narratives, however, the rallying effect of sectarianism drops and vanishes

Hypotheses

Experiment #1 On average, we expect people with more favorable views of the vaccine’s country of origin to be more accepting of that vaccine: H: People with favorable views of the country of origin are more likely to accept a vaccine from that country. We expect that different facets of the country of origin will affect people’s acceptance of their vaccines. Positive assessments of those facets more directly related to the quality of the vaccine, such as the healthcare system, and to a lesser extent, the educational system, should be particularly influential in vaccine acceptance: H: People with favorable views of the healthcare and educational systems of the country of origin are more likely to accept a vaccine from that country. We expect that distrust of the country of origin’s foreign policy extends to distrust of its vaccines: H: People with unfavorable views of the foreign policy of the country of origin are less likely to accept a vaccine from that country. Experiments #2 and #3 On average, we expect that people will “do the right thing” by prioritizing vaccines and antibiotics for at-risk populations who need them most: the sick and the elderly. H: People are more likely to prioritize vaccine/antibiotics access for at-risk populations: those that are sicker and older. We expect to observe ingroup favoritism in the prioritization of vaccines and antibiotics, but only under specific circumstances. We begin with a straw man hypothesis: H: People are more likely to prioritize vaccine/antibiotics access for coreligionists. However, we do not expect that people favor their ingroup under all conditions. Instead, we expect them to favor their ingroup only for members who are on the margin of need, i.e., those for whom a case could be made, but are not obviously the neediest: H: People are more likely to prioritize vaccine/antibiotics access for coreligionists at moderate levels of risk: the moderately sick and moderately old. We expect the dynamics of allocating vaccines and antibiotics to vary according to whether people are vaccine acceptant or vaccine hesitant. The former should treat the need for vaccines and antibiotics as interchangeable, while the latter should treat antibiotics as needed and vaccines as not: H: Vaccine-acceptant people treat the need for vaccines and antibiotics in the same way. H: Vaccine-hesitant people respond systematically to the need for antibiotics only, and not for vaccines. Experiment #4 In general, we expect that vaccine endorsements from trusted sources increase people’s perceptions of vaccine safety and efficacy. We expect systematic variation in the degree to which sources are trusted by the population: H: Endorsements by doctors and religious leaders increase perceptions of vaccine safety and efficacy, while endorsements by politicians do not. In general, we expect that people with greater trust in particular authority figures will respond positively to endorsements by those authority figures (e.g., those who trust the healthcare system and doctors will respond positively to endorsements by doctors). In this regard, we expect that the subgroup who say they trust politicians will behave differently from the rest of the sample and will be receptive to endorsements by politicians. H: People with higher levels of trust in authority figures and institutions will respond positively to endorsements by those authority figures and representatives of those institutions. Although we expect higher degrees of trust in doctors and religious leaders than in politicians, the former two types of authority figures differ in their degree of domain expertise, with doctors professionally competent to comment on vaccines, unlike religious leaders. We expect more educated people to recognize this difference in domain expertise and distinguish between the two types, favoring doctors’ endorsements, while less educated people will not distinguish between them: H: People with higher levels of education respond to endorsements by doctors but not religious leaders. H: People with lower levels of education respond similarly to endorsements by doctors and religious leaders. We expect that higher degrees of religiosity and/or attachment to their religious communities make people more receptive to endorsements by religious leaders, but only insofar as these attributes makes people more trusting of those leaders: H: People with higher degrees of religiosity and/or higher attachment to their religious communities respond positively to endorsements by religious leaders due to greater trust in those leaders