Thomas Zeitzoff
Biographic Data
| ID | 1123384 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas Zeitzoff |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas |
| FAMILY NAME | Zeitzoff |
| SIGNATURE | ZEITZOFF T |
| AFFILIATIONS | American University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4889-7198 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 759 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Where’s the Sabotage? Repression, Recruitment, and Tactical Evolution in the U.S. Radical Environmental Movement
Red lines versus negotiables: How exposure to wartime violence influences support for peace settlements in Ukraine
What shapes attitudes toward wartime negotiation? Does exposure to violence lead citizens to take a hard-line approach to any peace settlements? Or does it make them more open to peace to make the violence stop? To answer these questions, we conducted a series of surveys and survey experiments in Ukraine in July 2022 and May 2023. First, using a series of survey experiments, we show that Ukrainians are flexible on certain issues, but others are c…
How the relationship between education and antisemitism varies between countries
We investigate the relationship between education and antisemitism using unique individual-level survey data on antisemitism from more than 100 countries. Our findings show that education is associated with greater favorability toward Jews, but the relationship between education and endorsement of antisemitic stereotypes and conspiracy theories varies between countries. In countries that actively supported recent statements condemning Holocaust d…
Moral reasoning and support for punitive violence after crime
In contexts marked by high violence and widespread impunity, how do citizens articulate and justify their preferences about crime and punishment? What kind of moral logic and reasoning do they employ when discussing punishments? Does support for punitive punishment derive from moralistic and deontological concerns that perpetrators need to be punished because it is right and proper? Or do people support punitive punishments because they feel they…
Cyber and contentious politics: Evidence from the US radical environmental movement
Much of the focus of cyber conflict has been on interstate conflict. This article focuses on two interrelated questions in the important but neglected area of cyber contentious politics. First, how does the public feel about the use of different eco tactics including cyber-based tactics carried out by activists involved in the radical environmental movement, a movement that uses protest and sabotage in service of environmental causes? Second, how…
Anger and support for retribution in Mexico's drug war
How does exposure to criminal violence shape attitudes towards justice and the rule of law? Citizens care about crime prevention and procedural legality, yet they also value punishing perpetrators for the harm they have done. We argue that anger induced by exposure to criminal violence increases the demand for retribution and harsh punishments, even at the expense of the rule of law. We test this theory using one observational and two experimenta…
Distract and Divert: How World Leaders Use Social Media During Contentious Politics
How do leaders communicate during domestic crises? We provide the first global analysis of world leader communication on social media during social unrest. We develop a theory of leaders’ digital communication strategies, building on the diversionary theory of foreign policy, as well as research on the role of democratic institutions in explaining elite responsiveness. To test our theory, we construct a new dataset that characterizes leader commu…
Are voters too afraid to tackle corruption? Survey and experimental evidence from Mexico
Are individuals in violent contexts reluctant to tackle corruption for fear of future violence? Or does violence mobilize them to fight corruption? We investigate these questions looking at the effects of fear and violence stemming from the Mexican Drug War on attitudes toward corruption. We conducted two surveys before the 2012 Mexican presidential election. First, as part of a nationally representative survey, we find a positive correlation bet…
Motives Don't Matter? Motive Attribution and Counterterrorism Policy
Across three studies, two experiments, and two different countries (Israel and the United States), we examine how perceptions among members of the public regarding the motives of terrorists' influence support for counterterrorist policy. We find that while perceptions that terrorists are motivated by “hatred” (rather than by a “lack of opportunity”—economic or otherwise) strongly correlate with support for harsher counter‐tactics, and that these …
In the Shadow of Conflict: How Emotions, Threat Perceptions and Victimization Influence Foreign Policy Attitudes
We investigate how emotions, threat perceptions and past violence influence foreign policy attitudes via a survey experiment in Georgia. Using a stratified sample across areas with differential exposure to the conflict and the presence of internally displaced persons, we randomly assign respondents to receive emotional primes about Russian aggression in the region. We find that exposure to violence, as well as simply being primed about past Russi…
More Than Just Hurdles: How Fieldwork Difficulties Provide Insights into Conflict
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The allure of distant war drums: Refugees, geography, and foreign policy preferences in Turkey
Conspiracy and Misperception Belief in the Middle East and North Africa
Misperceptions and conspiracy theories about foreign powers and religious and ethnic groups can inflame intergroup conflict and distort public opinion, especially in divided and contentious regions like the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Why do people acquire and maintain these false or unsupported beliefs? This study reports the results of a novel survey experiment examining conspiracy beliefs in the MENA region. We find that belief in con…
Fighting the Past: Perceptions of Control, Historical Misperceptions, and Corrective Information in the Israeli‐Palestinian Conflict
What makes people deny wrongdoing that their group has inflicted on others? Prior research argues that refusing to acknowledge past misbehavior contributes to intergroup conflict, making historical misinformation important to understand and address. In particular, feeling a lack of control may make people more vulnerable to these misperceptions—a claim we test in a preregistered survey experiment examining beliefs about the Palestinian exodus dur…
Does Social Media Influence Conflict? Evidence from the 2012 Gaza Conflict
How does international public support via social media influence conflict dynamics? To answer this question, I construct a unique, extremely disaggregated data set drawn from social media sources to examine the behavior of Israel and Hamas during the 2012 Gaza Conflict. The data set contains conflict actions and international audience behavior at the hourly level for the full 179 hours of the conflict. Notably, I also include popular support for …
The New Public Address System: Why Do World Leaders Adopt Social Media
The growth of social media—and, in particular, Twitter and Facebook—has led scholars to study its effects on mass behavior and protest. But leaders are also active on social media. They use their accounts to communicate with domestic and international audiences. By the end of 2014, more than 76 percent of world leaders had an active presence on social media. What explains variation in their adoption and use of social media? We look at several dif…
Refugees, xenophobia, and domestic conflict: Evidence from a survey experiment in Turkey
What factors influence attitudes towards refugees? Do negative attitudes towards refugees also influence attitudes towards conflict in the host countries? Previous studies suggest that an influx of refugees, and locals' reaction to them, may destabilize receiving countries and lead to conflict. In particular, actual or perceived negative effects of refugees' presence, such as increased economic competition with the locals, disruption of ethnic ba…
Addressing Violent Intergroup Conflict from the Bottom Up
How might interventions that engage ordinary citizens in settings of violent conflict affect broader conflict dynamics? Given the volume of resources committed every year to citizen‐oriented programs that attempt to promote peace, this is an important question. We develop a framework to analyze processes through which individual‐level interventions could mitigate violent conflict escalation more broadly. Individual‐level interventions may increas…
How Social Media Is Changing Conflict
Social media increasingly plays a role in conflict and contentious politics. Politicians, leaders, insurgents, and protestors all have used it as a tool for communication. At the same time, scholars have turned to social media as a source of new data on conflict. I provide a framework for understanding social media’s influence on conflict through four interrelated points: (1) social media reduces the costs of communication, (2) it increases the s…
A Bargaining Theory of Conflict with Evolutionary Preferences
Bargaining models play a central role in international relations, particularly in the study of conflict. A common criticism of this approach is that it fails to account for nonmaterial (e.g., psychological) factors that may influence the bargaining process. We augment a standard bargaining model by allowing actors’ preferences over conflict to diverge from the “fitness” payoffs (e.g., resources) typical of such models. Preferences are subject to …
A Bottom‐Up Theory of Public Opinion about Foreign Policy
If public opinion about foreign policy is such an elite‐driven process, why does the public often disagree with what elites have to say? We argue here that elite cue‐taking models in International Relations are both overly pessimistic and unnecessarily restrictive. Members of the public may lack information about the world around them, but they do not lack principles, and information need not only cascade from the top down. We present the results…
Anger, legacies of violence, and group conflict: An experiment in post-riot Acre, Israel
Extant research hypothesizes that anger over past intergroup conflict serves as a catalyst for future conflict. However, few studies have experimentally tested this hypothesis on a representative sample in a high-stakes, field setting. I use a behavioral economics experiment to measure how anger over past conflict influences intergroup relations. Subjects were sampled proportional to population and ethnicity in Acre, Israel, a mixed city of Jews …
Citizen Information, Electoral Incentives, and Provision of Counter-Terrorism: An Experimental Approach
Using social media to measure foreign policy dynamics: An empirical analysis of the Iranian-Israeli confrontation (2012-13)
Does social media reflect meaningful political competition over foreign policy? If so, what relationships can it reveal, and what are the limitations of its usage as data for scholars? These questions are of interest to both scholars and policymakers alike, as social media, and the data derived from it, play an increasingly important role in politics. The current study uses social media data to examine how foreign policy discussions about Israel-…
Anger, Exposure to Violence, and Intragroup Conflict: A “Lab in the Field” Experiment in Southern Israel
I examine how anger stemming from violence in the Israel‐Palestine conflict influences intragroup retaliation. In July 2010 I conducted a series of experiments in two cities in the Southern District of Israel affected to varying degrees (high and low) by rocket fire from the Gaza Strip. For each experiment, subjects were partnered anonymously with a member of their community. They were then exposed to one of two emotional manipulations: one that …
A Bottom‐Up Theory of Public Opinion about Foreign Policy
If public opinion about foreign policy is such an elite‐driven process, why does the public often disagree with what elites have to say? We argue here that elite cue‐taking models in International Relations are both overly pessimistic and unnecessarily restrictive. Members of the public may lack information about the world around them, but they do not lack principles, and information need not only cascade from the top down. We present the results…
Terrorism and Voting: The Effect of Rocket Threat on Voting in Israeli Elections
How does the threat of becoming a victim of terrorism affect voting behavior? Localities in southern Israel have been exposed to rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip since 2001. Relying on variation across time and space in the range of rockets, we identify the effect of this threat on voting in Israeli elections. We first show that the evolution of the rockets' range leads to exogenous variation in the threat of terrorism. We then compare voting i…
How Social Media Is Changing Conflict
Social media increasingly plays a role in conflict and contentious politics. Politicians, leaders, insurgents, and protestors all have used it as a tool for communication. At the same time, scholars have turned to social media as a source of new data on conflict. I provide a framework for understanding social media’s influence on conflict through four interrelated points: (1) social media reduces the costs of communication, (2) it increases the s…
Anger, Exposure to Violence, and Intragroup Conflict: A “Lab in the Field” Experiment in Southern Israel
I examine how anger stemming from violence in the Israel‐Palestine conflict influences intragroup retaliation. In July 2010 I conducted a series of experiments in two cities in the Southern District of Israel affected to varying degrees (high and low) by rocket fire from the Gaza Strip. For each experiment, subjects were partnered anonymously with a member of their community. They were then exposed to one of two emotional manipulations: one that …
Using Social Media to Measure Conflict Dynamics: An Application to the 2008–2009 Gaza Conflict
The lack of temporal disaggregation in conflict data has so far presented a strong obstacle to analyzing the short-term dynamics of military conflict. Using a novel data set of hourly dyadic conflict intensity scores drawn from Twitter and other social media sources during the Gaza Conflict (2008–2009), the author attempts to fill a gap in existing studies. The author employs a vector autoregression (VAR) to measure changes in Israel’s and Hamas’…
Conspiracy and Misperception Belief in the Middle East and North Africa
Misperceptions and conspiracy theories about foreign powers and religious and ethnic groups can inflame intergroup conflict and distort public opinion, especially in divided and contentious regions like the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Why do people acquire and maintain these false or unsupported beliefs? This study reports the results of a novel survey experiment examining conspiracy beliefs in the MENA region. We find that belief in con…
The New Public Address System: Why Do World Leaders Adopt Social Media
The growth of social media—and, in particular, Twitter and Facebook—has led scholars to study its effects on mass behavior and protest. But leaders are also active on social media. They use their accounts to communicate with domestic and international audiences. By the end of 2014, more than 76 percent of world leaders had an active presence on social media. What explains variation in their adoption and use of social media? We look at several dif…
In the Shadow of Conflict: How Emotions, Threat Perceptions and Victimization Influence Foreign Policy Attitudes
We investigate how emotions, threat perceptions and past violence influence foreign policy attitudes via a survey experiment in Georgia. Using a stratified sample across areas with differential exposure to the conflict and the presence of internally displaced persons, we randomly assign respondents to receive emotional primes about Russian aggression in the region. We find that exposure to violence, as well as simply being primed about past Russi…
Refugees, xenophobia, and domestic conflict: Evidence from a survey experiment in Turkey
What factors influence attitudes towards refugees? Do negative attitudes towards refugees also influence attitudes towards conflict in the host countries? Previous studies suggest that an influx of refugees, and locals' reaction to them, may destabilize receiving countries and lead to conflict. In particular, actual or perceived negative effects of refugees' presence, such as increased economic competition with the locals, disruption of ethnic ba…
Anger and support for retribution in Mexico's drug war
How does exposure to criminal violence shape attitudes towards justice and the rule of law? Citizens care about crime prevention and procedural legality, yet they also value punishing perpetrators for the harm they have done. We argue that anger induced by exposure to criminal violence increases the demand for retribution and harsh punishments, even at the expense of the rule of law. We test this theory using one observational and two experimenta…
A Bargaining Theory of Conflict with Evolutionary Preferences
Bargaining models play a central role in international relations, particularly in the study of conflict. A common criticism of this approach is that it fails to account for nonmaterial (e.g., psychological) factors that may influence the bargaining process. We augment a standard bargaining model by allowing actors’ preferences over conflict to diverge from the “fitness” payoffs (e.g., resources) typical of such models. Preferences are subject to …
Anger, legacies of violence, and group conflict: An experiment in post-riot Acre, Israel
Extant research hypothesizes that anger over past intergroup conflict serves as a catalyst for future conflict. However, few studies have experimentally tested this hypothesis on a representative sample in a high-stakes, field setting. I use a behavioral economics experiment to measure how anger over past conflict influences intergroup relations. Subjects were sampled proportional to population and ethnicity in Acre, Israel, a mixed city of Jews …
Using social media to measure foreign policy dynamics: An empirical analysis of the Iranian-Israeli confrontation (2012-13)
Does social media reflect meaningful political competition over foreign policy? If so, what relationships can it reveal, and what are the limitations of its usage as data for scholars? These questions are of interest to both scholars and policymakers alike, as social media, and the data derived from it, play an increasingly important role in politics. The current study uses social media data to examine how foreign policy discussions about Israel-…
Vote-seeking incentives and investment environments: The need for credit claiming and the provision of protectionism
Fighting the Past: Perceptions of Control, Historical Misperceptions, and Corrective Information in the Israeli‐Palestinian Conflict
What makes people deny wrongdoing that their group has inflicted on others? Prior research argues that refusing to acknowledge past misbehavior contributes to intergroup conflict, making historical misinformation important to understand and address. In particular, feeling a lack of control may make people more vulnerable to these misperceptions—a claim we test in a preregistered survey experiment examining beliefs about the Palestinian exodus dur…
Does Social Media Influence Conflict? Evidence from the 2012 Gaza Conflict
How does international public support via social media influence conflict dynamics? To answer this question, I construct a unique, extremely disaggregated data set drawn from social media sources to examine the behavior of Israel and Hamas during the 2012 Gaza Conflict. The data set contains conflict actions and international audience behavior at the hourly level for the full 179 hours of the conflict. Notably, I also include popular support for …
Addressing Violent Intergroup Conflict from the Bottom Up
How might interventions that engage ordinary citizens in settings of violent conflict affect broader conflict dynamics? Given the volume of resources committed every year to citizen‐oriented programs that attempt to promote peace, this is an important question. We develop a framework to analyze processes through which individual‐level interventions could mitigate violent conflict escalation more broadly. Individual‐level interventions may increas…
Are voters too afraid to tackle corruption? Survey and experimental evidence from Mexico
Are individuals in violent contexts reluctant to tackle corruption for fear of future violence? Or does violence mobilize them to fight corruption? We investigate these questions looking at the effects of fear and violence stemming from the Mexican Drug War on attitudes toward corruption. We conducted two surveys before the 2012 Mexican presidential election. First, as part of a nationally representative survey, we find a positive correlation bet…
Warnings, terrorist threats and resilience: A laboratory experiment
One of the main goals of terrorism is to instill fear in a targeted populace. We investigate how information precision about rare, but highly devastating terrorist attacks influences psychological resilience, which we operationalize as the ability to continue to take optimum risks. First, we develop a mathematical model of a citizen’s resilience in the face of a terrorist threat. We then test the model in a laboratory experiment in which individu…
Motives Don't Matter? Motive Attribution and Counterterrorism Policy
Across three studies, two experiments, and two different countries (Israel and the United States), we examine how perceptions among members of the public regarding the motives of terrorists' influence support for counterterrorist policy. We find that while perceptions that terrorists are motivated by “hatred” (rather than by a “lack of opportunity”—economic or otherwise) strongly correlate with support for harsher counter‐tactics, and that these …
Citizen Information, Electoral Incentives, and Provision of Counter-Terrorism: An Experimental Approach
How the relationship between education and antisemitism varies between countries
We investigate the relationship between education and antisemitism using unique individual-level survey data on antisemitism from more than 100 countries. Our findings show that education is associated with greater favorability toward Jews, but the relationship between education and endorsement of antisemitic stereotypes and conspiracy theories varies between countries. In countries that actively supported recent statements condemning Holocaust d…
Cyber and contentious politics: Evidence from the US radical environmental movement
Much of the focus of cyber conflict has been on interstate conflict. This article focuses on two interrelated questions in the important but neglected area of cyber contentious politics. First, how does the public feel about the use of different eco tactics including cyber-based tactics carried out by activists involved in the radical environmental movement, a movement that uses protest and sabotage in service of environmental causes? Second, how…
Distract and Divert: How World Leaders Use Social Media During Contentious Politics
How do leaders communicate during domestic crises? We provide the first global analysis of world leader communication on social media during social unrest. We develop a theory of leaders’ digital communication strategies, building on the diversionary theory of foreign policy, as well as research on the role of democratic institutions in explaining elite responsiveness. To test our theory, we construct a new dataset that characterizes leader commu…
Moral reasoning and support for punitive violence after crime
In contexts marked by high violence and widespread impunity, how do citizens articulate and justify their preferences about crime and punishment? What kind of moral logic and reasoning do they employ when discussing punishments? Does support for punitive punishment derive from moralistic and deontological concerns that perpetrators need to be punished because it is right and proper? Or do people support punitive punishments because they feel they…
Vote-seeking incentives and investment environments: The need for credit claiming and the provision of protectionism
Using Social Media to Measure Conflict Dynamics: An Application to the 2008–2009 Gaza Conflict
The lack of temporal disaggregation in conflict data has so far presented a strong obstacle to analyzing the short-term dynamics of military conflict. Using a novel data set of hourly dyadic conflict intensity scores drawn from Twitter and other social media sources during the Gaza Conflict (2008–2009), the author attempts to fill a gap in existing studies. The author employs a vector autoregression (VAR) to measure changes in Israel’s and Hamas’…
Warnings, terrorist threats and resilience: A laboratory experiment
One of the main goals of terrorism is to instill fear in a targeted populace. We investigate how information precision about rare, but highly devastating terrorist attacks influences psychological resilience, which we operationalize as the ability to continue to take optimum risks. First, we develop a mathematical model of a citizen’s resilience in the face of a terrorist threat. We then test the model in a laboratory experiment in which individu…
Anger, Exposure to Violence, and Intragroup Conflict: A “Lab in the Field” Experiment in Southern Israel
I examine how anger stemming from violence in the Israel‐Palestine conflict influences intragroup retaliation. In July 2010 I conducted a series of experiments in two cities in the Southern District of Israel affected to varying degrees (high and low) by rocket fire from the Gaza Strip. For each experiment, subjects were partnered anonymously with a member of their community. They were then exposed to one of two emotional manipulations: one that …
Terrorism and Voting: The Effect of Rocket Threat on Voting in Israeli Elections
How does the threat of becoming a victim of terrorism affect voting behavior? Localities in southern Israel have been exposed to rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip since 2001. Relying on variation across time and space in the range of rockets, we identify the effect of this threat on voting in Israeli elections. We first show that the evolution of the rockets' range leads to exogenous variation in the threat of terrorism. We then compare voting i…
Citizen Information, Electoral Incentives, and Provision of Counter-Terrorism: An Experimental Approach
Using social media to measure foreign policy dynamics: An empirical analysis of the Iranian-Israeli confrontation (2012-13)
Does social media reflect meaningful political competition over foreign policy? If so, what relationships can it reveal, and what are the limitations of its usage as data for scholars? These questions are of interest to both scholars and policymakers alike, as social media, and the data derived from it, play an increasingly important role in politics. The current study uses social media data to examine how foreign policy discussions about Israel-…
Anger, legacies of violence, and group conflict: An experiment in post-riot Acre, Israel
Extant research hypothesizes that anger over past intergroup conflict serves as a catalyst for future conflict. However, few studies have experimentally tested this hypothesis on a representative sample in a high-stakes, field setting. I use a behavioral economics experiment to measure how anger over past conflict influences intergroup relations. Subjects were sampled proportional to population and ethnicity in Acre, Israel, a mixed city of Jews …
Addressing Violent Intergroup Conflict from the Bottom Up
How might interventions that engage ordinary citizens in settings of violent conflict affect broader conflict dynamics? Given the volume of resources committed every year to citizen‐oriented programs that attempt to promote peace, this is an important question. We develop a framework to analyze processes through which individual‐level interventions could mitigate violent conflict escalation more broadly. Individual‐level interventions may increas…
How Social Media Is Changing Conflict
Social media increasingly plays a role in conflict and contentious politics. Politicians, leaders, insurgents, and protestors all have used it as a tool for communication. At the same time, scholars have turned to social media as a source of new data on conflict. I provide a framework for understanding social media’s influence on conflict through four interrelated points: (1) social media reduces the costs of communication, (2) it increases the s…
A Bargaining Theory of Conflict with Evolutionary Preferences
Bargaining models play a central role in international relations, particularly in the study of conflict. A common criticism of this approach is that it fails to account for nonmaterial (e.g., psychological) factors that may influence the bargaining process. We augment a standard bargaining model by allowing actors’ preferences over conflict to diverge from the “fitness” payoffs (e.g., resources) typical of such models. Preferences are subject to …
A Bottom‐Up Theory of Public Opinion about Foreign Policy
If public opinion about foreign policy is such an elite‐driven process, why does the public often disagree with what elites have to say? We argue here that elite cue‐taking models in International Relations are both overly pessimistic and unnecessarily restrictive. Members of the public may lack information about the world around them, but they do not lack principles, and information need not only cascade from the top down. We present the results…
Conspiracy and Misperception Belief in the Middle East and North Africa
Misperceptions and conspiracy theories about foreign powers and religious and ethnic groups can inflame intergroup conflict and distort public opinion, especially in divided and contentious regions like the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Why do people acquire and maintain these false or unsupported beliefs? This study reports the results of a novel survey experiment examining conspiracy beliefs in the MENA region. We find that belief in con…
Fighting the Past: Perceptions of Control, Historical Misperceptions, and Corrective Information in the Israeli‐Palestinian Conflict
What makes people deny wrongdoing that their group has inflicted on others? Prior research argues that refusing to acknowledge past misbehavior contributes to intergroup conflict, making historical misinformation important to understand and address. In particular, feeling a lack of control may make people more vulnerable to these misperceptions—a claim we test in a preregistered survey experiment examining beliefs about the Palestinian exodus dur…
Does Social Media Influence Conflict? Evidence from the 2012 Gaza Conflict
How does international public support via social media influence conflict dynamics? To answer this question, I construct a unique, extremely disaggregated data set drawn from social media sources to examine the behavior of Israel and Hamas during the 2012 Gaza Conflict. The data set contains conflict actions and international audience behavior at the hourly level for the full 179 hours of the conflict. Notably, I also include popular support for …
The New Public Address System: Why Do World Leaders Adopt Social Media
The growth of social media—and, in particular, Twitter and Facebook—has led scholars to study its effects on mass behavior and protest. But leaders are also active on social media. They use their accounts to communicate with domestic and international audiences. By the end of 2014, more than 76 percent of world leaders had an active presence on social media. What explains variation in their adoption and use of social media? We look at several dif…
Refugees, xenophobia, and domestic conflict: Evidence from a survey experiment in Turkey
What factors influence attitudes towards refugees? Do negative attitudes towards refugees also influence attitudes towards conflict in the host countries? Previous studies suggest that an influx of refugees, and locals' reaction to them, may destabilize receiving countries and lead to conflict. In particular, actual or perceived negative effects of refugees' presence, such as increased economic competition with the locals, disruption of ethnic ba…
More Than Just Hurdles: How Fieldwork Difficulties Provide Insights into Conflict
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The allure of distant war drums: Refugees, geography, and foreign policy preferences in Turkey
Are voters too afraid to tackle corruption? Survey and experimental evidence from Mexico
Are individuals in violent contexts reluctant to tackle corruption for fear of future violence? Or does violence mobilize them to fight corruption? We investigate these questions looking at the effects of fear and violence stemming from the Mexican Drug War on attitudes toward corruption. We conducted two surveys before the 2012 Mexican presidential election. First, as part of a nationally representative survey, we find a positive correlation bet…
Motives Don't Matter? Motive Attribution and Counterterrorism Policy
Across three studies, two experiments, and two different countries (Israel and the United States), we examine how perceptions among members of the public regarding the motives of terrorists' influence support for counterterrorist policy. We find that while perceptions that terrorists are motivated by “hatred” (rather than by a “lack of opportunity”—economic or otherwise) strongly correlate with support for harsher counter‐tactics, and that these …
In the Shadow of Conflict: How Emotions, Threat Perceptions and Victimization Influence Foreign Policy Attitudes
We investigate how emotions, threat perceptions and past violence influence foreign policy attitudes via a survey experiment in Georgia. Using a stratified sample across areas with differential exposure to the conflict and the presence of internally displaced persons, we randomly assign respondents to receive emotional primes about Russian aggression in the region. We find that exposure to violence, as well as simply being primed about past Russi…
Distract and Divert: How World Leaders Use Social Media During Contentious Politics
How do leaders communicate during domestic crises? We provide the first global analysis of world leader communication on social media during social unrest. We develop a theory of leaders’ digital communication strategies, building on the diversionary theory of foreign policy, as well as research on the role of democratic institutions in explaining elite responsiveness. To test our theory, we construct a new dataset that characterizes leader commu…
Anger and support for retribution in Mexico's drug war
How does exposure to criminal violence shape attitudes towards justice and the rule of law? Citizens care about crime prevention and procedural legality, yet they also value punishing perpetrators for the harm they have done. We argue that anger induced by exposure to criminal violence increases the demand for retribution and harsh punishments, even at the expense of the rule of law. We test this theory using one observational and two experimenta…
How the relationship between education and antisemitism varies between countries
We investigate the relationship between education and antisemitism using unique individual-level survey data on antisemitism from more than 100 countries. Our findings show that education is associated with greater favorability toward Jews, but the relationship between education and endorsement of antisemitic stereotypes and conspiracy theories varies between countries. In countries that actively supported recent statements condemning Holocaust d…
Political science (27 works) · Law (20 works) · Politics (17 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Social Psychology (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence (13 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Political economy (10 works) · Social Psychology (10 works)