Department of Politics and Government - Illinois State



Author: Elias ShammasMonmouth CollegeAdvisor: Dr. Farhat HaqMonmouth CollegeMake Syria Great Again?The Hidden Correlate of Support for Donald Trump Among Arab Americans – Research ProposalAbstract: The emergence of Donald Trump as a serious candidate in the 2016 election has prompted a torrent of political science research aimed at identifying the important attitudinal, socioeconomic, and political variables associated with support for the unconventional candidate among the American public. In this paper, I use a two-pronged approach to make the case that one such variable that is potentially correlated with support for Donald Trump – mostly among specific subsets of Arab Americans voters – and that has largely been overlooked by the existent literature is support for the Syrian regime of Bashar Al-Assad. To test this hypothesis, a survey will be administered to a randomly selected sample of Levantine and Iraqi American adults. The survey will include questions designed to capture respondents’ attitudes towards the Syrian regime and its role in the Syrian civil war, voting and voting preferences in the 2016 election, as well as questions that may allow me to control for potentially relevant variables such as respondents’ party affiliation, religious background, and country of origin. This study will constitute the first effort to quantitatively test for a potential relationship between support for the Syrian regime in the ongoing civil war and support for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election among Levantine and Iraqi Americans of a variety of religious backgrounds. It will also look for a potential relationship between support for the Assad regime and current support for President Trump (job approval) within this demographic of voters. I conclude by mapping out the implications of the survey’s results and proposing further research that may help ascertain the specific mechanisms underlying the observed relationships.ProposalDonald Trump’s appeal to multitudes of American voters and his subsequent victory in the 2016 election continue to occupy the center of much of our public discourse and have been the subject of a substantial body of political science research. Academics interested in the factors underlying Trump’s appeal to various segments of the American public have identified several correlates of support for the unconventional candidate, ranging from believing that former President Obama is Muslim (Klinkner, 2016), to level of education (Silver, 2016), to authoritarian inclination (MacWilliams, 2016). Further studies and statistical analyses have tended to follow the identification of such correlations in order to help determine which of the observed relationships are more likely to be truly indicative of factors underlying support for Trump. Examples of such studies include Michael Tesler’s (2016) analysis, which found that the association between education level and intention to vote for Trump disappears upon controlling for racial and immigration resentment, as is illustrated in following figure:Figure 1Graph by Michael Tesler (2016)Mostly along the lines of such research, this project seeks to (1) examine whether a correlation exists between support for Donald Trump and attitudes towards the Syrian regime of Bashar Al-Assad among Levantine and Iraqi Americans, and (2) help set the stage for a more thorough investigation of the sociopolitical and psychological mechanisms that may give rise to such a correlation. The findings of the research herein proposed are likely to have broader implications on our understanding of the ways in which immigrants’ political leanings pertaining to their countries of origin may affect the candidate preferences they form in U.S. elections.ContextOn January 31st of this year, various news outlets featured a story about a Syrian American family whose relatives had been sent back to Syria upon their arrival at the Philadelphia International Airport following President Trump’s January 27th executive order (No. 13, 769, 2017), which barred the citizens of 7 Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. To many observers, part of what made this story especially perplexing was that the adult members of this Syrian American family had voted for then-candidate Donald Trump in the 2016 election – a piece of information that none of the major media outlets that featured this story failed to mention. As a matter of fact, the data available on the Arab American vote in the 2016 election (so far limited to an October 2016 pre-election survey by the Arab American Institute) indicates that approximately 26% of Arab American voters cast their ballots for Donald Trump in November of last year. Many may find this to be a relatively high proportion of Arab American votes for the 2016 Republican nominee, who derives a sizeable amount of his support from the more ethnocentric factions of white Republicans (American National Election Studies, 2016) and has made a host of controversial statements that were viewed by many observers as being hostile towards Muslims and non-Muslims from specific Arab nations. Undoubtedly, there are multiple social, economic, and political factors – some of which have been well documented in the field of American Politics and some yet to be uncovered – that can help explain why a significant subset of Arab Americans are Donald Trump supporters. One potential piece of the puzzle is that the abovementioned 2016 AAI poll found that 26% of Arab Americans continue to self-identify as Republicans, even though they have been generally trending towards the Democratic Party since 1996. Another significant factor borne out by the survey was religious background: Orthodox Christians were significantly more likely to state that they intended to vote for Trump than were Muslims and Catholics of Arab origins. However, there is more to understanding the Arab American vote in the 2016 election than can be conveyed by divisions across party identification and religious background alone. Largely based on my personal familiarity with the everyday sociopolitical dynamics of the group in question, I suspect that another reliable predictor of support for Trump – particularly among Levantine and Iraqi Americans – that has, thus far, gone unnoticed by the relevant research is support for the regime of Bashar AlAssad in the ongoing Syrian civil war. Two main possible mechanisms, which need not be mutually exclusive, may underlie a potential relationship between support for Donald Trump and support for the Syrian regime among this demographic of voters. The first mechanism can be described as the authoritarian appeal. Usually measured by rating responses to certain child rearing questions, authoritarianism is conceptualized by researchers as a, readily and automatically accessible, acquired social attitude with three main characteristics: moral traditionalism, outgroup hostility, and submission to authority (e.g.: Altemeyer, 1981). Those high on authoritarianism tend to prefer “strong” leaders with traditionally masculine traits (McCann, 1997). Data analysis conducted during the 2016 primaries found authoritarianism to be the strongest predictor of Donald Trump support among South Carolina Republican voters, eclipsing gender, income, age, religion and education (MacWilliams, 2016; see figure 2). While no research has been done that may ascertain whether authoritarianism is similarly correlated with Arab support for Assad and the Syrian regime, there is strong evidence to suggest that authoritarianism becomes salient – even in those otherwise low on the trait – in the face of perceived threats to the sociocultural norm of which one is a part and with which one identifies (Hetherington & Suhay, 2011). This gives credence to the possibility that some Arab Americans originating from Syria and, perhaps, the regions most proximate to it, who perceive the relatively longstanding Syrian regime as part of their sociopolitical norm that is currently under threat of annihilation are experiencing above average authoritarian inclinations by virtue of that threat. Figure 2: Graph by Matthew MacWilliams (2016)The second mechanism through which support for Assad and Trump may be related is, simply, the Russian link. For this mechanism to be at play on a large scale, the assumption that must be made is that – irrespective of authoritarianism levels – Levantine and Iraqi Americans who support the Syrian regime understand that it relies on Russia to ensure its military survival in addition to believing that there is a sufficiently large probability of President Trump shifting U.S. posture towards Russia and, subsequently, towards the Syrian regime. Criticism of such an assumption can be based upon a mounting body of evidence pointing against the presence of ideological consistency and issue-based candidate-preference formation in most of the voting public (e.g.: Kalmoe & Kinder, 2008). However, it can also be argued that mass favoritism for Russia in the context of a civil war in which Russia is viewed as a major side need not stand on an issue-related or explicitly ideological basis per se; rather, it can be based on identity salience within a civil war side-preference context (see Miodownic & Bhavnani, 2011). Objectives, Methods Overview, and ImplicationsThe leading purpose of the proposed project is to, for the first time, quantitatively determine whether a correlation exists between support for Donald Trump and support for the Syrian regime in the ongoing Syrian civil war among Levantine and Iraqi Americans. This particular demographic was chosen because of a certain geopolitical similarity underlying the nations of origin by which this demographic is identified. Also, the Levantine and Iraqi community remains a relatively understudied segment of the voting public, despite representing a majority of the Arab American vote and, in turn, a substantial minority of the American electorate. To test for this correlation, I wish to conduct a survey of a (either nationally or state) representative sample of Iraqi and Levantine American voters. The survey will be conducted between June and August of 2017. The survey will include questions designed to capture respondents’ attitudes towards the Syrian regime and its role in the Syrian civil war, voting and voting preferences in the 2016 election, as well as questions that may allow me to control for potentially relevant variables such as respondents’ party affiliation, religious background, and country of origin. Questions that may for the identification of a potential relationship between support for the Assad regime and current support for President Trump (job approval) within this demographic of voters will also be included.Another major focus of this project will be to help set the stage for a more thorough investigation of the mechanisms through which a potential relationship between support Donald Trump and support for the Assad regime may exist among a segment of voters. Further research will have to be done in order to determine the degree to which this relationship is grounded in the authoritarian preference mechanism vs. the Russian link as outlined in the “context” section of this proposal. The final research project will include an in-depth analysis of the plausibility of each of the two pathways, as well as suggestions for how to proceed on another research venture that would help scientifically determine the degree to which each mechanism may have been at play in the correlation potentially observed by the results of the project proposed here. Determining the role potentially played by each of the two pathways would meaningfully further our understanding of the ways in which immigrants’ political leanings pertaining to (and driven by) the sociopolitical goings-on of their countries of origin may affect the candidate preferences they form in U.S. elections. It may also constitute the first political science study to, quantitatively, find a positive effect of the possible ties between Donald Trump and Russia on his share of a significant segment of the Arab American vote in the 2016 campaign – albeit in a somewhat unexpected way. ReferencesAltemeyer, Bob. 1981. Right-Wing Authoritarianism. Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada: University of Manitoba Press.Asi, Maryam and Daniel Beaulieu. 2013. “Arab Households in the United States: 2006–2010.” American Community Survey Briefs. 2006 – 2010. U.S. Census Bureau. 2013. Hetherington, Marc J., and Elizabeth Suhay. 2001. “Authoritarianism, Threat, and Americans' Support for the War on Terror.” American Journal of Political Science 55(July): 546-560.Kalmoe, Nathan P., and Donald R. Kinder. 2008. “The Nature of Ideological Identification in Mass Publics Meaning and Measurement.” Paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. Boston, Massachusetts (August).Klinkner, Philip. 2016. “The easiest way to guess if someone supports Trump? Ask if Obama is a Muslim.” Vox, 2 June 2016.MacWilliams, Matthew. 2016. “The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter.” Politico Magazine, January 17.MacWilliams, Matthew. 2016. “The best predictor of Trump support isn't income, education, or age. It's authoritarianism.” Vox, 23 February 2016.McCann, Stewart J. H. 1997. “Threatening Times, ‘Strong’ Presidential Popular Vote Winners, and the Victory Mar gin, 1824-1964.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 73(1): 160-70.Miodownik, Dan, and Ravi Bhavnani. 2011. “Ethnic Minority Rule and Civil War Onset How Identity Salience, Fiscal Policy, And Natural Resource Profiles Moderate Outcomes.” Conflict Management and Peace Science 28: 438-458.Silver, Nate. 2016. “Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote for Trump.” Five Thirty Eight, 22 November 2016.Tesler, Michael. 2016. “The Education Gap Among Whites This Year Wasn’t About Education. It Was About Race.” Washington Post, 16 November 2016.Trump, Donald. 2017. Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States, Executive Order 13769. Federal Register, vol. 82, no. 13, p. 769.ANES Pilot Study. 2016. Purpose: “To test questions for inclusion on the ANES 2016 Time Series.” American National Election Surveys, initial release: 23 February 2016.“The Arab American Vote.” 2016. (April 3, 2017). ................
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