Daniel Corstange

VOTE TRAFFICKING IN LEBANON

Vote buying and vote selling are prominent features of electoral politics in Lebanon. This article investigates how vote trafficking works in Lebanese elections and examines how electoral rules and practices contribute to wide and lively vote markets. Using original survey data from the 2009 parliamentary elections, it studies vote selling with a list experiment, a question technique designed to elicit truthful answers to sensitive questions. The data show that over half of the Lebanese sold their votes in 2009. Moreover, once we come to grips with the sensitivity of the topic, the data show that members of all sectarian communities and political alliances sold their votes at similar rates.

Anti-American Behavior in the Middle East: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Lebanon

Based on public opinion data, anti-Americanism of one form or another is endemic in the Middle East. This paper examines the extent to which hostility generalizes beyond opposition to American foreign policy but is unique to the United States. It conducts a field experiment in Lebanon that manipulates the putative sponsor of a survey and draws on a simple behavioral outcome: do people refuse to be interviewed based on who they think is asking the questions? Results show that academic sponsors do not affect participation rates but that refusals spike under government sponsorship of multiple nationalities—behavioral patterns which replicate in communities that vary widely in their a priori levels of hostility to the United States. Ironically, systematic opt-outs by political opponents make people in the government conditions appear more rather than less supportive of US-favored policies compared to their peers in the other treatment groups.

Drawing Dissent: Political Cartoons in Yemen

Does the fallout from the now infamous Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad reflect inherent mass radicalism or irrationality on the part of Muslim societies? Judging from the news coverage broadcast to Western audiences, one would think so. Most media images focused on bearded men or veiled women demonstrating and burning flags reinforced by dramatic sound bites, as when the usually sober BBC ( 2006 ) cited one protester as saying: “They want to test our feelings. They want to know whether Muslims are extremists or not. Death to them and their newspapers.” These reactions seemed disproportionate, if not irrational, because of the medium: they were, after all, just drawings.

Clientelism in Competitive and Uncompetitive Elections

This article examines how parties use clientelism in competitive and uncompetitive electoral environments. It argues that parties enjoy wide discretion to target clientelistic payoffs to inexpensive voters in their strongholds, but that head-to-head competition compels them to bid for more expensive voters. Empirically, it uses a list experiment embedded in a postelection survey to study electoral clientelism in Lebanon, a country with a mix of competitive and uncompetitive electoral districts. It finds respondents underreport clientelistic transactions by a factor of two. Proxies for the cost of a vote explain payoff targeting decisions in party strongholds, but lose their explanatory power in the competitive districts.

The Syrian conflict and public opinion among Syrians in Lebanon

Abstract Whom do ordinary Syrians support in their civil war? After decades of repression, the Syrian uprising unleashed an outpouring of political expression. Yet the study of Syrian public opinion is in its infancy. This article presents survey evidence from a large, diverse sample of Syrian refugees in neighbouring Lebanon, one of the first of its kind, and examines their support for the different factions fighting in the civil war. In so doing, it demonstrates that many conventional narratives of the conflict are oversimplifications of a more complex reality. The survey shows that the majority of Syrian refugees support one faction or another of the opposition, but a large minority sympathizes with the government. In line with existing accounts of the war, the government draws its popular support base from wealthier and less religious Syrians, as well as minorities. Nonetheless, large numbers of Sunni Arabs also side with the government, belying sectarian narratives of the war. The survey also finds that supporters of the opposition Islamists and non-Islamists are similar in many regards, including religiosity. The main distinction is that the non-Islamist support base is far more politically attentive than are Islamist sympathizers, in contrast to existing narratives of the war.