+ Iran Social Survey
The Iran Social Survey (ISS) is a multi-year, telephone survey research project focused on the political behavior and socio-economic relations of residents of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The ISS intends to collect data from a nationally-representative probability sample of Iranians every four years, following Majles (Parliament) elections. The ISS is designed to create a novel and methodologically sound mapping of the country’s complex social and political life that will generate useful knowledge about Iran and produce information comparable with other rapidly changing developing countries. No such project has existed in Iran for several decades. The ISS is an interdisciplinary collaborative project between Kevan Harris, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California-Los Angeles, and Daniel Tavana, a PhD Candidate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University.
Fieldwork: November 6 to December 29, 2016
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The Iran Social Survey is supported by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond) and the Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University.
+ Lebanon Governance and Elections Survey
Fieldwork: October 1-18, 2019; November 12-29, 2019
+ Political Socialization in New Democracies
Family socialization is a key mechanism for the transmission of political attitudes and behaviors. Work in developed democracies highlights the role of family socialization in the stability of partisanship across generations. But what of family socialization in new democracies? In this paper, we develop a framework for understanding how experiences with state repression and the process of family socialization influence new democracies after transition from authoritarian rule. In doing so, we combine findings from established literature on processes of family socialization with political psychological work on how repression crystallizes political identities. We examine how individual-level experiences of state repression shape political participation and partisanship in Tunisia, an important and rare contemporary case of successful (and still ongoing) democratic transition. Drawing on a nationally representative survey conducted in 2017, we find evidence that Tunisian citizens whose family and community members who were arrested are more likely to vote in subsequent democratic elections and to vote against the old regime. While individuals who were arrested under the previous authoritarian regime are less likely to turn out to vote, in line with research on the demobilizing effects of repression, those that do vote are strong partisans and are more likely to vote for the former opposition and anti-old regime parties. This paper lays out a broader project on how the different socialization processes in authoritarian regimes affect political attitudes and behaviors after democratization.
Fieldwork: December 20, 2021 to January 11, 2022
+ Implicit Attitudes Towards an Authoritarian Regime (SISI-SCIAT)
It is difficult to reliably assess public opinion in authoritarian regimes. While many dictators enjoy high levels of regime support on surveys, citizens living in these systems may be altering their responses out of fear or other social desirability biases. In the authoritarian politics field, this phenomenon is known as “preference falsification." Social scientists have developed a number of indirect question techniques to reduce these desirability biases, including list experiments, randomized response techniques, and endorsement experiments. These techniques are promising avenues for public opinion research on authoritarianism, but we believe existing work misses an opportunity to probe deeper into attitude formation. Psychologists make a distinction between explicit attitudes, of which a person is consciously aware, and implicit attitudes, which may be subconscious. Neither should be considered more “valid” than the other.
Effectively all research to date on attitudes under authoritarianism has focused on the explicit half of cognition. Yet in psychology, implicit attitudes are often viewed as foundational, the basis for explicit attitudes and behavior itself. Affective, subconscious responses to stimuli occur well before more deliberative thinking and often influence that deliberation and subsequent decision making. For this reason, we think it valuable to “bring implicit attitudes in” to the study of public opinion under authoritarianism. Building on the rich implicit attitude measurement literature in psychology, we develop a Single Category Implicit Association Test (SCIAT) that measures attitudes toward Egyptian President Fattah El-Sisi using variance in reaction time to a categorization task. Existing survey evidence suggests Egyptian citizens have high levels of support for Sisi, but it is unclear whether this support is authentic or a product of falsification.
This basic protocol was implemented online with a sample of 810 Egyptian citizens in October 2016. The survey also included several explicit questions on regime support used in existing research on Egyptian public opinion. Combined, these measures allow us to assess (a) implicit attitudes toward Sisi, (b) the relationship between expressed explicit/implicit attitudes, and (c) the nature and determinants of attitude dissociation. The SISI-SCIAT was administered online via Project Implicit’s Online Platform. About 1,000 Egyptian citizens completed the survey in October 2016 after receiving an e-mail solicitation from a local marketing research firm. Within this group, 810 respondents had valid IAT scores.
Fieldwork: October 7, 2016 to October 12, 2016
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+ The Role of Political Parties in University Socialization (AUB-CONJOINT)
This project assesses how a key contextual feature of political life in non-democracies mediates the effect of education on political attitudes. National political parties intervene directly in student politics on university campuses across the Middle East, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and elsewhere. These parties host partisan events, disseminate information, distribute material resources, and recruit future elites into their ranks. These activities become especially common and contentious during student elections, which reflect national partisan divisions in many countries. Yet the involvement of national parties on university campuses is rarely evaluated as a pathway by which higher education blunts pro-democratic attitudes and behaviors.
To test this argument, we investigate the causal effect of participation in a student election at the American University of Beirut using an original panel survey conducted shortly before and after one such election in 2017. At AUB and other Lebanese universities, the country’s main national ethnosectarian parties are heavily involved in student politics and elections. A central component of our survey is a choice-based conjoint experiment that measures student support for hypothetical candidates running in the 2018 Lebanese Parliamentary elections. While conjoint experiments often assess the causal effect of certain attributes or policy positions on respondent preferences, cross-sectional experiments cannot measure shifts in preferences in response to real-world events. To mitigate this issue, we use a difference-in- differences approach to compare results from pre- and post-election conjoint waves, thereby measuring changes in support for co-ethnic and co-partisan candidates in a hypothetical national election. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time such a methodological approach has been employed.
Our survey was distributed to a sample of students at AUB before and after their annual student elections in October 2017. After several months of in-depth fieldwork at AUB, we designed a survey to examine the impact of participation in the student elections on preferences for co-ethnic (sectarian) politicians and politicians from mainstream political parties. In order to understand the effect of these elections on students’ political preferences, we developed a pre- and post-election panel survey. AUB-CONJOINT was administered online via Qualtrics to students enrolled in PSYC-201, an introductory-level psychology course in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In addition to the conjoint experiment administered across both waves, the first wave of the survey asked respondents to complete a battery of demographic questions. The second wave of the survey asked respondents several questions about their participation in the student election, including vote choice and participation in election-related activities. Both waves measured attitudes towards democracy and identity on multiple dimensions. The core of our analysis is derived from a series of choice-based conjoint experimental tasks administered at the conclusion of each wave of AUB-CONJOINT.
Fieldwork: September 27 to October 18, 2017
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