Violence or Information: What Causes Long-term Change in Conflict Attitudes?

• In Event: Non-Violent Resistance and Protests

Abstract

In the past few decades, a vast literature has examined the factors that shape public attitudes on violent conflicts and their resolution. Recent work has paid particular attention to the effect that different levels of violence have on public attitudes and perceptions concerning the conflict’s future. Greater violence, it is argued, activates emotional reactions such as fear, anxiety, and stress that increase people’s hawkishness and lower their willingness to compromise. Yet, beyond their immediate effects, do greater levels of violence indeed lead to a long-term change in public attitudes toward conflict resolution? In our paper, we argue that longer-term changes may be driven by factors other than emotional responses. Specifically, we contend that non-violent political events can constitute meaningful informational cues that update people’s long-term beliefs about the adversary’s future intentions, possibly more so than violent episodes.
To examine these questions, we use a fine-grained time series comprised of representative monthly surveys conducted in Israel over two decades (2001-2019) regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The monthly structure of the data allows us to consider how public opinion on the conflict reacts to different types of events, including different levels of violence and key developments in the conflict, as well as the temporal structure of these effects. Our analysis finds that greater levels of violence did not have a long-run effect on popular support for peace negotiations in principle or on public expectations that peace is achievable in practice. By contrast, we do find a lasting long-term change in Israelis’ skepticism about the future prospects of peace. Yet, rather than violent episodes, this change follows a major non-violent political event in the Palestinian side: the 2006 electoral victory of Hamas, an extremist organization that has been involved in terror attacks and rocket shootings. We show that the election was followed by an international campaign against Hamas and by the organization’s public refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist, and, as such, provided a salient informational cue on the seeming popular preferences of the Palestinians. These results indicate that structural, long-term changes in public attitudes on conflicts are shaped equally, if not more, by appraisals of the other side’s intentions.

Authors

• Alon Yakter, Tel Aviv University

• Liran Harsgor, University of Haifa