Elite Competition, Religiosity, and Anti-Americanism in the Islamic World

Abstract

T he battle for public opinion in the Islamic world is an ongoing priority for U.S. diplomacy. The current debate over why many Muslims hold anti-American views revolves around whether they dislike fundamental aspects of American culture and government, or what Americans do in international affairs. We argue, instead, that Muslim anti-Americanism is predominantly a domestic, eliteled phenomenon that intensifies when there is greater competition between Islamist and secular-nationalist political factions within a country. Although more observant Muslims tend to be more anti-American, paradoxically the most anti-American countries are those in which Muslim populations are less religious overall, and thus more divided on the religious-secular issue dimension. We provide case study evidence consistent with this explanation, as well as a multilevel statistical analysis of public opinion data from nearly 13,000 Muslim respondents in 21 countries.

Islamism and gender relations in the Muslim world as reflected in recent World Values Survey data

“…Leading studies in this field are now beginning to be received in the larger literature on Muslim societies, and it is worthwhile to evaluate and develop this research tradition in the present essay (Adamczyk, 2013;Alemán and Woods, 2015;Blaydes and Linzer, 2012).…”

Social Background and Intra-party Attitudes in Ireland

“…In order to keep the interpretation of statistical coefficients consistent across all of the items with the tables, all items were rescaled so that the midpoint lies at zero and items on a seven-point or five-point scale were normalised to range between 25 and + 5. This is similar to the approach taken by Blaydes and Linzer (2012), who rescaled items so that all values lie between 0 and 1. This modification simply makes the table coefficients, particularly the party intercept terms, more easily interpretable.…”

Who Is Anti-American in the European Union?

“…Such a definition is value neutral and operational. Blaydes and Linzer (2012) empiricalize this by averaging the normalized responses to seven questions relating to whether people had favorable views of the United States and Americans, attitudes to the spread of American customs, American ideas about democracy, ways of doing business culture, and scientific advances. Chiozza (2009a) also defines anti-Americanism as an attitude and a political belief that can be measured through the answers individuals give to survey questions.…”

“…Finally, he shows that anti-Americanism, except perhaps in some Islamic countries, is not an entrenched philosophy around the world. Blaydes and Linzer (2012) in their study of anti-Americanism in the Islamic world link anti-Americanism to both individual socioeconomic characteristics and country-level variables. Haas (1961) argues that European co-operation would lead, through a "spillover" mechanism, to unintended consequences that would eventually lead to firms, governments, political parties, and citizens to orient their expectations and political behavior toward the EU.…”