Islam and Authority in the Middle East — Survey Appendix

Survey Appendix A.Kadir Yildirim, Ph.D. This appendix supplements the country reports associated with the research project “Religious Authority and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East.” It provides detailed information about the public opinion survey. This study is undertaken by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and supported by the Henry Luce Foundation. As part of this study, an online public opinion survey was conducted. The survey included 12 countries with Muslim-majority populations throughout the Middle East and North Africa region: Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey, and United Arab Emirates. Country N Bahrain 177 Egypt 3,013 Iran 2,032 Jordan 778 Kuwait 243 Lebanon 228 Morocco 2,990 Qatar 245 Saudi Arabia 2,010 Tunisia 798 Turkey 1,972 United Arab Emirates 2,011 Total 16,497 These countries comprise half of the Muslim-majority countries in the region. They were selected to allow for the maximization of cross-country variation in key variables such as the nature or the role of religion in government, regime type, the extent of Islamist and Salafi influence, the Sunni-Shia divide, and level of socioeconomic development. The selection of cases enables the project investigators to harness the quantitative data for statistical control in order to explore causal relationships. The pilot study was conducted in September-October 2017 for all countries in the study with the exception of Iran. After revisions, the full survey was conducted in these 11 countries in December 2017. Due to the U.S. sanctions against Iran, the launch of the survey in Iran was delayed in order to obtain a license from the Office of Foreign Assets Control at the U.S. Department of the Treasury authorizing the Baker Institute to conduct a public 1 opinion survey in Iran. The survey pilot in Iran was conducted in December 2018 after the attainment of the government license to conduct the survey. In January-February 2019, the full survey was conducted. The questionnaire is composed of four main parts: 1) Religious Attitudes and Behavior: Respondents were asked a battery of questions about their religious practices, preferences on various religious issues such as religious law, and basic religious knowledge. 2) Political Attitudes: This section of the questionnaire included questions about respondents’ views on democracy, extremism, gender relations, the religion-politics relationship, and U.S. policy in the Middle East. 3) Views on Religious Leaders: In each country, respondents were asked their views on 13 religious leaders; in total, 82 religious leaders from across the region were named in the survey. We assessed views on these religious leaders in two different ways. First, respondents indicated whether they approved or disapproved of each name in the list they were shown. Second, respondents were asked to indicate their level of trust in these 13 religious leaders. 4) Endorsement Experiments: Respondents answered 14 endorsement experiment questions to indicate their level of agreement with a statement. These questions featured statements infused with religious and political language. Each statement was endorsed by a religious leader randomly assigned from the list of country- specific 13 religious leaders or the statement was shown with no endorser as a control. We structured the survey to achieve two related goals. We wanted to quantitatively assess the influence of local religious leaders whose authority is largely confined to their own countries. In each country included in our survey, we identified six prominent religious figures. At the same time, we aimed to capture cross-national trends in religious authority and how religious leaders prominent throughout the region fared. Hence, each country survey included six local names complemented by seven transnational religious figures. This gave us 13 religious leaders in each country whose influence and authority we could gauge. It is important to note that one of the principal motivations for mapping religious authority in the Middle East rests on the assumption that religious authority is diffuse and goes beyond traditional scholars and state-affiliated clerics. Therefore, we tried to cast as wide a net as possible in terms of affiliations and backgrounds of religious leaders in each country. There were three guiding parameters for selecting religious actors in this regard: 1) ideological diversity; 2) religious actors’ popularity; and 3) relationship to the existing political regime. These parameters ensured diversity of the religious actors in the study with respect to religious ideology (moderate vs. conservative vs. traditional vs. Salafist), popular support (large vs. small), and political stance (pro-government vs. oppositional vs. apolitical). As a result, our list of religious leaders includes Islamist politicians, bureaucrats, and royal family members in addition to religious scholars and state religious officials. This strategy 2 of going beyond those religious leaders who underwent traditional religious training offers an opportunity to test the veracity of our moving assumption and get a good sense of how different kinds of religious leaders fared. Overall, this strategy helped us ensure diversity of religious leaders in our survey, while adhering to the principle of cross-national comparability in our selection of religious actors. Our findings in different countries are largely comparable in order for us to identify common characteristics across different contexts. At the same time, contextual differences in regional countries were integrated into our analysis to obtain country-specific insights. Admittedly, it was not always possible to find names for each category of religious leader we were interested in. Where such names were not available in a country, we tried to strike a balance between diversity of names and popularity. One of the concerns was whether respondents would be able to identify different religious leaders by their names alone. Our interest is not purely in the religious leaders themselves; we are likewise interested in what they represent with their institutional affiliation or ideological orientation. Going beyond the names and including institutional affiliation or ideological orientation where the former is not available would ensure that the implications of our analysis can go beyond the names included in our survey. We gauged the question of religious authority from a variety of angles in this survey, both direct and indirect. We asked about approval of each religious leader. Likewise, we asked about trust in each religious leader on a five-point scale. A fundamental problem in studying sensitive political questions such as the religion- politics relationship—including religious ideology and religious extremism—is the challenge of “eliciting truthful answers” (Blair and Imai 2012). Some names can be particularly sensitive to respondents for various reasons. For example, under authoritarian conditions—such as monarchies or repressive regimes—the names that are associated with the ruling elite might garner more favorability than they would otherwise. The names that are deemed oppositional or controversial, by contrast, might suffer from lower approval and favorability for the opposite reason. Such names might potentially include Islamist opposition, Salafis, or violent extremists. Therefore, in addition to direct trust and approval questions, we included a battery of endorsement experiments. With the endorsement questions, we provided respondents with a series of statements endorsed by different religious leaders and asked them to evaluate each statement by using between subject randomization. The goal was to gauge how respondents’ assessment of the statement varied with the religious actor making the statement, taking responses to the no-endorser statements as the baseline. The motivation behind the use of an endorsement experiment—or survey experiment—is the assumption that individuals will display greater agreement with religious statements made by those whom they perceive to be holding legitimate religious authority. Hence, on 3 average, we should observe a higher proportion of agreement with those names that hold greater religious authority among survey respondents, and much less agreement with those who do not. Because the statements are held constant across all respondents but the name associated with the statement varied with random assignment, the variation in responses can be attributed to the variation in the names associated with the statement and their distinct attributes, i.e., state religious official, Salafi, Islamist leader, or Sufi. An endorsement experiment is an effective method to deal with sensitive political questions and has been shown to reduce “social desirability biases” (Bullock, Imai, and Shapiro 2011; Blair, Imai, and Lyall 2014). Due to the subtle and sensitive nature of the notion of religious authority and the different shapes it can take, the embedded experimental design is an effective means to deal with this challenge. The design of endorsement experiments enables us to make a series of religious statements the focus of respondents’ evaluation, rather than the religious leaders themselves. While there is some concern about the external validity of survey experiments, recent research shows that survey experiment effects closely mirror those of real-world natural experiments, albeit with some drop-off in the size of the effect (Barabas and Jerit

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