Democratic values and the microfoundations of Arab support for peace with Israel

Abstract

Israel. These findings demonstrate that contrary to the claims of skeptics, democratization and peace can reinforce each other in the Arab world.

Shared values or shared interests? Arab publics and intervention in Syria

“…An impressive earlier body of research, which focused on Western public opinion on international intervention (Clements, 2012(Clements, , 2014Davies and Johns, 2016;Falomir-Pichastor et al, 2012;Reifler et al, 2014), has already shown how attitudinal profiles can explain support for various types of foreign interventions. In the context of the burgeoning research on pro-democracy attitudes among Arab publics (Berger, 2019a;Tessler et al, 2012), there are only few examinations of how and whether this might correlate with views on international politics (Berger, 2019b;Ciftci and Tezcür, 2016;Spierings, 2014;Tessler and Nachtwey, 1998). We are thus left with looking at published opinion and (social) media discourses as a first gauge of how views of democracy might affect support for different forms of intervention in Syria.…”

“…In order to test hypothesis 1, we use a question that explicitly asks about the preference for democracy over authoritarian rule (Table 3). Such comparison between democracy and authoritarian alternatives has increasingly been employed in research seeking to examine the link between pro-democracy attitudes and foreign policy attitudes in the Middle East (Berger, 2019b; Ciftci and Tezcür, 2016; Köse et al, 2016). We thus compare respondents who preferred a ‘strong leader’ (‘1’) with those who thought that democracy was the best way to solve their country’s problems (‘0’).…”