Survey Research in the Middle East and North Africa

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel examines new and innovative uses of population surveys in the Middle East and North Africa. Individual papers explores the impacts of daily religious practices on sectarian attitudes, variation in social understandings of state responsibility for economic and social rights, rising anxieties about AIDS and anti-migrant sentiment, and popular perceptions of the military after the Arab Spring. Bringing together junior and senior scholars and bridging the fields of international relations and comparative politics, this panel forces new thinking on people’s views on salient political issues in a region in transition. Authors employ a diversity of approaches and data sources, including natural experiments, list experiments, traditional population surveys, and original data data. Exploiting a natural experiment Pew’s survey of over 30,000 Muslims across 26 countries, one paper finds evidence that ordinary religious practice, namely the obligatory Friday prayer, reinforces communal solidarity, which in turn heightens sectarian attitudes. Drawing on a new, original 2700 respondent nationally representative survey from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, another paper seeks to investigate the variables that drive native citizens’ opposition to foreign migrants, especially sub-Saharan Africans. In addition to traditional economic and cultural variables that motivate anti-migrant sentiment, the paper highlights how fear of AIDS transmission also contributes to these attitudes. A third paper uses a list experiment to explore the sources for social desirability bias among Tunisians’ perceptions of the military. Using an original nationally-representative survey, the fourth paper unpacks Tunisians’ perceptions of the relative importance of four different types of economic insecurity in encouraging popular mobilization during the 2010 uprising: food insecurity, insufficient health care, unemployment, and access to education.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 57: Middle East and North Africa Politics

Individual Presentations

• AIDS Anxieties: Anti-Migrant Attitudes in the Middle East and North Africa - Matt J. Buehler, University of Tennessee; Kristin E. Fabbe, Harvard Business School; Kyung Joon Han, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• Everyday Sectarianism: Experimental Evidence From the Muslim World - Steven Brooke, University of Wisconsin- Madison; Michael Thomas Hoffman, University of Notre Dame; Youssef Chouhoud, Christopher Newport University

• Social Sources of Support for the Military: Experimental Evidence from Tunisia - Holger Albrecht, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa; Sharan Grewal, College of William & Mary; Kevin Koehler, University of Leiden

• Economic and Social Rights and the Arab Spring: Popular Mobilization in Tunisia - Dina Bishara, Cornell University; Michelle Jurkovich, University of Massachusetts Boston; Chantal Berman, Princeton University

Chair

• Amaney Jamal Princeton University

Discussants

• Ellen M. Lust University of Gothenburg

• Ian M. Hartshorn University of Nevada, Reno