For the first time in an Arab country, this article examines attitudes toward public opinion surveys and their effects on survey-taking behavior. The study uses original survey data from Qatar, the diverse population of which permits comparisons across cultural–geographical groupings within a single, non-democratic polity. The authors find that Qatari and expatriate Arabs hold positive views of surveys, both in absolute terms and relative to individuals from non-Arab countries. Factor analysis reveals that the underlying dimensions of survey attitudes in Qatar mostly mirror those identified in Western settings, but a new dimension is discovered that captures the perceived intentions of surveys. Two embedded experiments assess the impact of survey attitudes. The results show that generalized attitudes toward surveys affect respondents’ willingness to participate both alone and in combination with surveys' objective attributes. The study also finds that negative views about survey reliability and intentions increase motivated under-reporting among Arab respondents, whereas non-Arabs are sensitive only to perceived cognitive and time costs. These findings have direct implications for consumers and producers of Arab survey data.

Teaching about political conflict requires an understanding of the multiple perspectives and motivations of the parties to the conflict. This is especially true when teaching students who may have strong predispositions, such as in classes on the Arab–Israeli conflict. Various active-learning techniques address this problem but often at a cost of long preparation, substantial class time, and class-size limitations. This article offers both quantitative and qualitative evidence that a short essay asking students to defend a key action taken by one of the actors makes them more understanding and less accusatory of that side—even as it does not change their overall attitude toward the conflict. Adding a small-group discussion and a written reflection further helps students to make more informed and reasoned judgments. Importantly, such an assignment is easy to create, implement, and modify across various class types, sizes, and constraints.

Since 1972 I have been conducting a study of Jews in Tunisia and Morocco and Arabs in Israel. This study included interviews with stratified quota samples of Tunisian and Moroccan Jews from August 1972 to August 1973 and conversations with community leaders during these thirteen months, as well as my participation in the life of the Jewish communities. From May through August 1974 I carried out field work in Israel, surveying a stratified quota sample of Israeli Arabs and meeting regularly with Arabs from all walks of life. After my departure, research assistants completed the survey. Jews in Tunisia and Morocco and Arabs in Israel were selected for study because they are religious minorities in non-secular states. While they bear some resemblance to minorities the world over, there are additional factors defining their position in society which make their circumstances relatively unique. I have elsewhere described them as ‘non-assimilating’ minorities. The purpose of this paper is to examine two questions pertaining to the groups I am studying: (1) What factors account for the unnarrowed cultural distance between the three minorities and their respective host societies? (2) How do the three minorities understand their respective sociocultural identities? In responding to the second of these questions, some findings from the surveys will be presented.

A large body of research by political scientists, psychologists and historians suggests that “existential security”—the feeling that survival can be taken for granted—is conducive to tolerance of foreigners, openness to social change and a pro-democratic political culture. Conversely, existential insecurity leads to 1) xenophobia and 2) strong in-group solidarity. This article tests these hypotheses against evidence from a recent survey of Iraq—a society where one would expect to find exceptionally high levels of insecurity. We find that the Iraqi public today shows the highest level of xenophobia found in any of the 85 societies for which data are available—together with extremely high levels of solidarity with one's own ethnic group.Ronald Inglehart is Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan (rfi@umich.edu), Mansoor Moaddel is Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University (mmoaddel@emich.edu), and Mark Tessler is Professor of Political Science at University of Michigan (tessler@umich.edu).

This essay describes two very different survey projects that investigate the political attitudes, values, and behavior patterns of ordinary men and women in the Arab world. One is the Arab Democracy Barometer, an American-Arab collaborative project being carried out in five countries. The other is a survey in Palestine conducted as part of the fieldwork for a doctoral dissertation. These projects illustrate the emerging opportunities for political attitude research in the Arab world. The essay begins, however, with a brief reflection on the history of political surveys in the Arab world, which is necessary to appreciate the significance of the opportunities now emerging.

Matthew Connelly's thoroughly researched and gracefully written volume adds an important dimension to our understanding of Algeria's struggle for independence. While the Algerian revolution has been the subject of numerous scholarly accounts, relatively little attention has been paid to the nature and context of the diplomatic efforts that played such an important role in the outcome of the conflict. It is here that Connelly makes an important and highly original contribution.

On the afternoon of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, a group of social scientists at the Institute for Social Research (ISR) gathered to consider how they might employ their talents to help the country after the shocking events of that morning. The group included economists, political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, demographers, and survey methodologists. Based upon their previous research experience, each of them proposed hypotheses on aspects of American life and individuals' morale and behavior that were most likely to be affected. While they were relatively confident about expected relationships in the short term, we were uncertain about how temporary or permanent these changes might be or how intertwined and mutually reinforcing they could become.

In an effort to contribute to the dialogue between gender studies and international studies, this report presents findings from an empirical investigation based on the integrated secondary analysis of survey data from Israel, Egypt, Palestine, and Kuwait. The goal is to assess the utility of both gender and attitudes pertaining to the circumstances of women in accounting for variance in views about war and peace, and thereafter to examine the degree to which political system attributes constitute conditionalities associated with important variable relationships. Major findings include the absence of gender-linked differences in attitudes toward international conflict in all four of the societies studied and a significant relationship in each of these societies between attitudes toward gender equality and attitudes toward international conflict. Based on data from the Arab world and Israel, with attitudes about a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict treated as the dependent variable, the research also aspires to shed light on more practical considerations pertaining to the international relations of the Middle East.

The status of women in Arab society, and in other developing areas, is an important subject in which interest is growing. Not only has heightened awareness of feminist issues fostered a general concern for women's emancipation for greater independence and equality with men, but it is also increasingly recognized that the circumstances of women bear a significant relationship to the potential of a society to achieve broader developmental objectives. Relevant considerations include a need for women to enter the salaried labor force, which will increase the productive capacity of the nation; the fact that educated and employed women tend to have fewer children, which is also a major policy objective in many developing countries; and a need to assure that women's critical role in child rearing and early socialization is exercised by individuals who are educated, socially active, and high in self-esteem, which will increase the likelihood of positive personal and civic orientations being inculcated among the young.

This paper describes the political life of Jews in Tunisia and Morocco in the early 1970s. The findings reported are part of a comparative study of Jews in Tunisia and Morocco and Arabs in Israel.

This article uses survey data from Tunisia to examine some of the ways that individual attitudes change in a developing society. At the same time, it is addressed to some inadequacies of modernisation theory, attempting both to understand better the impact of social change on attitudes, and to delineate the nature and consequences of different kinds of modernisation experiences. Modernisation studies usually treat lifestyle variations produced by social change as uni-dimensional so far as their effect on attitudes is concerned. The present study argues that lifestyles do not always change in an integrated fashion, and in particular that acculturation and socio-economic status, two basic dimensions of individual life circumstances in developing societies, often and increasingly vary independently of one another. It then demonstrates with data from Tunisia that measures of acculturation and socio-economic status bear independent and dissimilar relationships to many attitudes known to be associated with social change, and thereafter discusses the implications of these relationships for modernisation and political development. The focus of the analysis is on general theoretical issues.