How Cross-Cutting Discussion Shapes Support for Ethnic Politics: Evidence from an Experiment in Lebanon

Paler, Laura; Marshall, Lorna; Atallah, Sami

doi:10.1561/100.00018188

Cited by 5 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…One-shot public goods games are common in the literature, see, for instance, Ledyard (1995); Fischbacher, Gächter, and Fehr (2001); Chaudhuri (2016). This script refers to engaging in a discussion because the public goods game was played as part of the baseline data collection for the discussion experiment studied in Paler, Marshall, and Atallah (2020). We note that we had the moderator reveal the group composition because traits like sect and class are not necessarily readily apparent in Lebanon such that participants otherwise might have only inferred their group type with substantial noise.…”

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confidence: 99%

Class, Ethnicity, and Cooperation Among Women: Evidence from a Public Goods Experiment in Lebanon

Marshall

Paler

2020

J Exp Polit Sci

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While recent evidence suggests that women exhibit a high capacity to cooperate in all-women groups, existing research focuses on how women cooperate among themselves versus in mixed-gender situations. We still know little, however, about how social differences among women affect their collective action capacity. We examine this by implementing a public goods experiment in Lebanon in which 713 women and men were randomly assigned to play in same-gender groups that were either homogeneous or heterogeneous in their class and sectarian compositions. We show that women contribute significantly less in mixed-class groups while men contribute more, reinforcing that this pattern is unique to women. We also demonstrate that class differences can undermine women’s cooperation more than sectarian differences. These findings highlight how social differences – and class differences in particular – can impede women’s collective action capacity, revealing the potential barriers to building broad, gender-based coalitions to advance women’s rights and interests.

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confidence: 99%

Class, Ethnicity, and Cooperation Among Women: Evidence from a Public Goods Experiment in Lebanon

Marshall

Paler

2020

J Exp Polit Sci

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“…One of the major questions emerging from this literature is whether these interventions shift knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, or all three. Some prior research finds changes in behaviors but not attitudes ( 10 , 12 ), while other research finds changes in knowledge but not behaviors ( 11 ). One difference between these interventions is whether the peacebuilding elements of the program were explicit or implicit.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Contact-based interventions in the lab and in the field generally change attitudes and/or behaviors of individuals who directly participate in contact interventions ( 7 , 8 ), even among groups with deep-seated conflicts ( 9 – 12 ). Yet it is unclear whether and how these interventions affect the wider community involved in conflict.…”

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confidence: 99%

How contact can promote societal change amid conflict: An intergroup contact field experiment in Nigeria

Grady,

Wolfe,

Dawop

et al. 2023

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Intergroup contact, originally designed as a tool for prejudice reduction, offers a promising means to resolve intergroup conflict. Evidence for contact-based interventions to improve intergroup relations is sparse, however, with most studies focusing only on the individuals who directly engage in contact. We test the ability of a contact-based intervention to promote peace between conflicting groups with a field experiment in Nigeria, where farmer and pastoralist communities are embroiled in a deadly conflict over land use. We examine the effectiveness of the contact intervention on the wider population—not just those directly engaged in contact—using surveys, direct observation of behavior in markets and social events, and a behavioral game. We find those who lived in the communities that received the intervention had more positive intergroup attitudes and feelings of physical security, as well as were more likely to engage in voluntary intergroup contact measured through self-reports and observed behavior in markets. Exploratory analyses show that those who directly participated in the program and those who were exposed to it by living in the communities where activities were taking place changed similarly with regard to attitudes and perceptions of security, but not with regard to behaviors, indicating the spread to the wider community was likely due to norm change. These results suggest that contact interventions can have wider societal change and reduce the barriers to peace between conflicting groups.

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“…The intervention of ethnic political parties in social and political life facilitates ethnic political socialization. These explanations underscore the importance of ethnic political party intervention in the development of stable partisan and political attitudes and the public displays of loyalty they engender (Paler et al, 2018(Paler et al, , 2020. But to date, empirical research has not fully uncovered the way in which these interventions are complements or substitutes for existing "agents" of political socialization.…”

Section: Ethnic Political Socializationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethnic political socialization and university elections

2023

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Foundational studies of political behavior find that university education facilitates the development of political attitudes and shapes socialization outcomes. But in unconsolidated democracies where identity is politically salient and ethnic political parties dominate, education may play a different role in shaping mass politics. In this paper, we develop a framework for understanding the consequences of political party intervention in annual university elections, a common feature of university life in the Middle East and the Global South. We draw on pre- and post-election surveys at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon to argue that ethnic political parties rely on partisan students to act as “party agents” who mobilize unaffiliated students through intensive peer-to-peer contact. Using a conjoint experiment embedded in both survey waves, we show that the university elections increase support in hypothetical national elections for in-group political elites and, to a lesser extent, ethnic political parties. By locating the university as an understudied site of competitive and contentious politics, our findings contribute new insights regarding the role of education in shaping political attitudes. We show that the persistence of ethnic political power can be attributed in part to party activity in less obviously political arenas that have not been systematically studied.

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How Cross-Cutting Discussion Shapes Support for Ethnic Politics: Evidence from an Experiment in Lebanon

Cited by 5 publications

References 16 publications

Class, Ethnicity, and Cooperation Among Women: Evidence from a Public Goods Experiment in Lebanon

Class, Ethnicity, and Cooperation Among Women: Evidence from a Public Goods Experiment in Lebanon

How contact can promote societal change amid conflict: An intergroup contact field experiment in Nigeria

Ethnic political socialization and university elections

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