Survey data

This project brings implicit attitudes into the study of public opinion under authoritarianism. Building on the implicit attitude measurement literature in psychology, we develop a Single Category Implicit Association Test (SCIAT) that measures attitudes toward Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi using variance in reaction time to a categorization task. The protocol was administered online via Project Implicit's platform; of roughly 1,000 Egyptian respondents, 810 had valid IAT scores.

Publications:

1. Rory Truex and Daniel L. Tavana. 2019. "Implicit Attitudes toward an Authoritarian Regime." Journal of Politics 81(3): 1014-1027. [DOI] [PDF]

Links:

• Data and replication files
• Survey instrument

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 collects data from a nationally representative probability sample of Iranians following Majles (Parliament) elections, creating a methodologically sound mapping of the country's social and political life — a project that had not existed in Iran for several decades. The ISS is a collaborative project between Kevan Harris (Department of Sociology, UCLA) and Daniel Tavana. The ISS 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.

Publications:

1. Daniel L. Tavana, Kevan Harris, Amir Farmanesh, and Chi Shun (Gary) Fong. "Who Overreports? Regime Support and Preference Falsification in Iran." Under review.
2. Daniel L. Tavana. "Ideology, Constraint, and Support for Authoritarian Rule: The Iranian Belief Network." Revise & resubmit.
3. Kevan Harris and Daniel L. Tavana. 2019. Polling an Islamic Republic: The Iran Social Survey. Middle East and North Africa Politics Section Newsletter, American Political Science Association. [Link] [PDF]
4. Kevan Harris and Daniel L. Tavana. 2017. رفتار انتخاباتی و بسيج سياسی در ايران: نتايج پيمايش اجتماعی ايران (Voter Behavior and Political Mobilization in Iran: Findings from the Iran Social Survey [Farsi]). European Middle East Research Group (EMERG). [Link] [PDF]
5. Kevan Harris and Daniel L. Tavana. 2017. Voter Behavior and Political Mobilization in Iran: Findings from the Iran Social Survey. European Middle East Research Group (EMERG). [Link] [PDF]

Links:

• Survey instrument (Wave 1)
• Survey instrument (Wave 2)

This project examines preference falsification and regime support in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Drawing on a pre-registered, nationally representative telephone survey of 1,999 Iranian adults that embeds a double list experiment, the survey estimates the gap between direct and indirect measures of trust in the authorities of the Islamic Republic.

Publications:

1. Daniel L. Tavana, Kevan Harris, Amir Farmanesh, and Chi Shun (Gary) Fong. "Who Overreports? Regime Support and Preference Falsification in Iran." Under review.

Links:

• Data and replication files

The Lebanon Governance and Elections Survey is a nationally representative survey of Lebanese adults examining local government, political attitudes, and participation in elections. Conducted through face-to-face, tablet-assisted interviews using a multi-stage probability sample, the survey completed 2,192 interviews with respondents aged 22 and older across Lebanon's districts, with additional interviews in Saida and Tripoli. Fieldwork was interrupted by the nationwide protests and road closures of Lebanon's October 2019 uprising, and a post-demonstration version of the questionnaire added several items, allowing the survey to capture public opinion immediately before and after the uprising.

Publications:

1. Daniel L. Tavana, Christiana Parreira, and Lindsay Walsh. "From Protest to Parliament: Lebanon's October Revolution and the Rise of Movement Parties." Revise & resubmit.

This project assesses how national political parties' involvement in university student politics shapes political attitudes in non-democracies. Using an original two-wave panel survey conducted around the 2017 student elections at the American University of Beirut — including a choice-based conjoint experiment measuring support for hypothetical candidates in the 2018 Lebanese parliamentary elections — we use a difference-in-differences design to measure shifts in support for co-ethnic and co-partisan candidates.

Publications:

1. Christiana Parreira, Daniel L. Tavana, and Charles Harb. 2024. "Ethnic Political Socialization and University Elections." Party Politics 30(3): 550-569. [DOI] [PDF]

Links:

• Survey instrument

This original, nationally representative survey of 1,200 Tunisian adults, fielded by One-to-One Research and Polling, examines how exposure to state repression shapes political participation. It measures respondents' direct experiences of repression under the Bourguiba and Ben Ali dictatorships (1956–2011), as well as indirect exposure through family, friends, and community members, alongside measures of political behavior, including voter turnout and protest participation, and the frequency of political discussion within these networks. To isolate the effects of non-kin socialization from family-level influences, the primary sample is supplemented by a targeted secondary sample of 175 sibling pairs drawn from the primary respondents.

Publications:

1. Alexandra Domike Blackman, Nicholas J. Lotito, Elizabeth R. Nugent, and Daniel L. Tavana. 2026. "The Social Legacies of Repression: Family, Friends, and Political Participation." Forthcoming, Journal of Conflict Resolution. [DOI] [PDF]

Links:

• Data and replication files