International recognition and support for violence among nonpartisans

Abstract

What reduces individual support for the use of violence among groups seeking self-determination? This article advances a new explanation for changes in popular support for violence – international recognition – and evaluates this explanation using a survey experiment of Palestinians priming the 2012 UNGA recognition of Palestine. The analysis shows that priming recognition reduces support for violence among a key segment of the population, nonpartisans, who have weaker and more fluid prior beliefs about the use of violence than partisans. The article argues that recognition reduces support for violence among nonpartisans by conveying new information that shifts the expected payoffs of violent and nonviolent strategies. This article deepens the incorporation of party politics into the study of conflict and demonstrates that international diplomatic engagement can reduce popular support for violence in an ongoing conflict. This is important because most previously identified determinants of support for violence are either very difficult to change or change very slowly.

Keywords

international recognition Israeli–Palestinian conflict partisanship public opinion self-determination violence

Introduction

What reduces individual support for the use of violence among groups seeking self-determination? This question matters because militant groups require the support of at least some people in their society. As Mao noted, losing this support compromises militant groups’ ability to carry out violence and even threatens their organizational survival (Mao, 1961). Changes in popular support for the use of violence are also likely to shape militant groups’ strategic behavior. As Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh candidly remarked soon after the group’s first suicide bombings, ‘the scale of the attacks will be determined by the level of popular support for such a strategy’ (Andoni, 1994).

This article advances a new explanation for changes in popular support for violence – international recognition, which is one of the primary political goals of self-determination movements (Coggins, 2011, 2015; Cunningham, 2014; Huang, 2016; Roeder, 2018). Our main argument is that international recognition reduces support for violence among groups seeking self-determination, but that it does so only among nonpartisans – that is, among individuals who do not identify with any political party. We argue that international recognition reduces support for violence because it conveys new information that shifts the expected payoffs of violent and non-violent strategies. Recognition provides groups seeking self-determination with new information about their international political support and bargaining power (Shelef & Zeira, 2017), thereby raising the expected payoffs of nonviolent strategies of diplomacy and negotiation. When recognition results from diplomacy or other nonviolent strategies, it can also provide information about the efficacy of such strategies. Although all group members receive this information, we argue that, where parties are divided over the use of violence, only nonpartisans will reduce their support for violence in response. This is because, consistent with a large body of research in electoral politics, they have weaker and less stable prior beliefs about the use of violence than partisans.

We test our argument using a survey experiment increasing the salience of the United Nations General Assembly’s (UNGA) recognition of Palestine as a ‘non-member observer state’. While only the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) can confer full sovereign recognition, the UNGA resolution upgrading Palestine’s status in the organization explicitly spoke of ‘recognition’ and was widely understood as reflecting member-states’ support for full recognition.¹ While this recognition took place in 2012, the Palestinian Authority (PA) continues to pursue international recognition as its main strategy. For example, in response to the Trump administration’s Middle East plan, the Palestinian leadership doubled down on recognition, calling on European states to recognize Palestine in order to preserve the two-state solution and counter potential Israeli plans to annex parts of the West Bank.

This article makes two main contributions. First, it introduces a novel explanation into the rapidly growing body of scholarship on the determinants of popular support for violence. These determinants include individual characteristics such as gender, socio-economic status, birth cohort, politicized religion, personal history, and prospective attitudes as well as the behavior of the other side in a conflict (see, e.g. Nachtwey & Tessler, 2002; Krueger & Malečková, 2003; Victoroff, 2005; Shamir & Shikaki, 2010; Fair, Malhotra & Shapiro, 2012; Jaeger et al., 2012; Longo, Canetti & Hite-Rubin, 2014). Building on this work, we show that international recognition also shapes mass attitudes towards violence. In doing so, we also extend the growing literature on the causes and consequences of international recognition (e.g. Fabry, 2010; Coggins, 2011; Shelef & Zeira, 2017; Mirilovic & Siroky, 2017; Landau-Wells, 2018; Muro, Vidal & Vlaskamp, 2019; Visoka, Doyle & Newman, 2019) to consider its impact on support for violence. This is important because many factors previously identified as influencing popular support for violence are individual-level variables that are either very difficult or slow to change. In contrast, international recognition provides states with a policy tool that could shape public attitudes during conflict, opening up a potential window for conflict resolution. As we discuss in the conclusion, the long-term durability of such changes in public opinion depends on continued, meaningful progress towards conflict resolution. Additional research is needed to explore such long-term changes within self-determination movements, as well as the determinants of popular support for violence in the states they challenge.

Second, this article deepens the integration of party politics into the study of conflict by examining how partisanship – in the sense of closeness to any political party rather than allegiance to a particular party – affects conflict dynamics. This intervention builds on recent scholarship showing that self-determination movements typically consist of multiple, often competing parties or factions (Shelef, 2010; Pearlman, 2010; Christia, 2012; Staniland, 2012; Pearlman & Cunningham, 2012; Mylonas & Shelef, 2014; Cunningham, 2013; Krause, 2017; Cunningham, Dahl & Frugé, 2017). This literature, however, has been more concerned with understanding the causes and consequences of this factionalization than with the impact of party attachments (or the lack thereof) on conflict dynamics. Similarly, while they usefully ‘bring the government back in’ (Lacina, 2014), party-based explanations in the broader conflict literature primarily focus on how ethnic groups’ representation within, or electoral importance to, political parties affects patterns of violence, rather than on how partisanship itself mediates conflict dynamics (e.g. Wilkinson, 2006; Lacina, 2014; Chandra & Garcia-Ponce, 2019). Finally, new research on public opinion has persuasively shown that political ideology and corresponding party identification both shape and are shaped by conflict dynamics (Jaeger et al., 2012, 2015; Getmansky & Zeitzoff, 2014; Grossman, Manekin & Margalit, 2018), but it too has paid less attention to how partisanship, per se, shapes attitudes towards violence.

Yet, as ‘the central organizing principle of mass politics’ (Brader & Tucker, 2008: 3), partisanship is likely to shape conflict as well. Indeed, as Jaeger et al. (2012, 2015) show in the Palestinian case, individuals unaffiliated with any particular party are a large group with distinct policy preferences that lie between those of partisans of the major parties. Building on this observation and situating it within the broader literature on partisanship, we argue that, in this and other cases where parties are divided over the use of violence, partisanship conditions individuals’ responses to international recognition and consequently their support for violence. While our argument focuses on how partisanship conditions the relationship between recognition and violence, its logic also applies to other events that may shift the payoffs of violent and nonviolent action and other issues over which parties are polarized.

Considering how partisanship affects conflict dynamics matters because nonpartisans are a large segment of the population in many groups seeking self-determination. For example, from 1989 to 2017, an average of 19% of Catholics in Northern Ireland were nonpartisan, supporting neither Sinn Fein, which endorsed ‘physical force Republicanism’, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, which rejected violence, nor any other party (Social and Community Planning Research (SCPR), 2017). Similarly, significant proportions of Kurds in the Kurdish regions of Turkey (33% (2011)), Muslims in Mindanao (62% (2010)), Basque-speakers in Spain’s Basque country and Catalan-speakers in Catalonia (53% (2000) and 23% (2004), respectively), and Russians in Crimea (18% (1998)), also do not feel close to any political party (The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, 2018).² This is also the case among Palestinians, where a significant proportion of the population has not identified with any political party over the last two decades (see Figure A.9 in the Online appendix).

Nonpartisans are likely to play an important role in self-determination conflicts not only because of their size but also because political factions are likely to seek their support. Since self-determination movements are often made up of multiple, competing factions, this competition for dominance shapes their political strategies, including the use of violence (Kydd & Walter, 2002; Pearlman, 2009, 2010; Cunningham, Bakke & Seymour, 2012). Because political factions compete for supporters and because it is often easier to win support from nonpartisans than to sway another party’s core supporters (Stokes, 2005; Nichter, 2008; Golden & Min, 2013), it stands to reason that factions will vie for nonpartisans’ support, and, therefore, that shifts in their preferences are consequential. Research on the dynamics of civil conflict would therefore benefit from more fully incorporating partisanship as a theoretical and empirical category of analysis.

Theoretical framework

We argue that international recognition reduces popular support for violence among nonpartisans. Recognition has this impact because it conveys new information that shifts the expected payoffs of violent and nonviolent strategies within groups seeking self-determination. While this information is conveyed to all group members, we expect nonpartisans to be particularly sensitive to it because they tend to have weaker and less rigid preferences about the use of violence than partisans.

International recognition conveys new information that changes the expected payoffs of using violent and nonviolent strategies to achieve political goals for at least three reasons. First, international recognition conveys information about a group’s international political support. As recent research persuasively argues, bilateral diplomatic recognition, conveys information about international political support (Kinne, 2014; Renshon, 2016). UNGA recognition likewise conveys such information (Shelef & Zeira, 2017). For example, the UNGA’s recognition of Palestine revealed significant support for Palestinian statehood, with 138 states voting in favor and only 9 opposing (41 abstained). As a result, future diplomatic initiatives, such as the Palestinians’ subsequent effort to join other international institutions, should be more likely to succeed, raising the expected payoffs of diplomatic approaches.

Second, international recognition also conveys information about a group’s bargaining power, shifting the expected payoffs associated with a nonviolent strategy of negotiations. As Shelef & Zeira (2017) argued, recognition conveys information about a group’s bargaining power in at least three ways. First, new information about international political support for a group’s cause signals to group members that the state they are challenging is likely to confront greater international pressure to negotiate and make concessions than before. As a result, it provides group members with new information regarding their bargaining power. Second, recognition provides the recognized group with new ‘outside options’ to negotiation, such as accessing international institutions (e.g. the International Criminal Court), which allow them to extract more concessions from the challenged state. Third, when it occurs outside of bilateral negotiations, recognition gives the recognized group ‘something for nothing’; it allows self-determination movements to achieve a cardinal goal without making any concessions in return, increasing their leverage vis-à-vis the challenged state. International recognition thus improves both the actual bargaining power of the recognized group and provides group members with new information about this power.

Finally, when resulting from diplomacy or other nonviolent strategies, recognition may also provide new information about the efficacy of such strategies. Recognition carries this information because it is often the product of ‘rebel diplomacy’, a widespread practice shown to have an impact distinct from violence (Coggins, 2015). While recognition is sometimes the product of battlefield success, especially for center-seeking movements (Landau-Wells, 2018), self-determination movements rarely succeed in winning recognition without a significant, and often dominant, non-violent component (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011; Roeder, 2018; Griffiths & Wasser, 2019). When self-determination movements achieve recognition through diplomacy or other nonviolent means, it shows their publics that nonviolent strategies can work. Since, to some extent, violence and diplomacy are substitutes and are often incompatible, such information about the efficacy of diplomacy may reduce support for violence as a strategy.³

Partisanship and support for violence

We have argued that international recognition provides the recognized group with new information that changes the payoffs of violent and nonviolent strategies. While recognition provides this information to the group as a whole, we expect only nonpartisans to reduce their support for violence in response. Nonpartisans are particularly sensitive to new information from recognition because, consistent with the electoral politics literature, they have weaker and less rigid political beliefs about the use of violence than partisans. As a result, they are more likely to change their minds when receiving new information.

A large literature in electoral politics and political psychology repeatedly shows that nonpartisans typically have weaker and more fluid political preferences than partisans, rendering them more persuadable (Campbell, 1980; Zaller, 1992; Lau & Redlawsk, 2001; Converse, 2006; Druckman, Peterson & Slothuus, 2013; Weghorst & Lindberg, 2013; Bolsen, Druckman & Cook, 2014; Leeper & Slothuus, 2014). This insight also applies to self-determination conflicts because, just as political parties are typically polarized over a variety of domestic policy issues, political parties in these settings are often divided over the use of violence. For example, in 13 of the 22 Middle Eastern cases included in the MAROB dataset, rival political parties disagreed about the use of violence (Asal, Pate & Wilkenfeld, 2008). Similarly, the two main Palestinian parties, Fatah and Hamas, are also divided over the use of violence. In the last two decades, Fatah, while not eschewing violence completely, has been generally associated with nonviolent, diplomatic strategies, including leading the Palestinians’ campaign for international recognition. In contrast, Fatah’s main rival, Hamas, remains committed to using violence to gain statehood.

When political parties are polarized around the use of violence, divisions among the public should also run along partisan lines (Levendusky, 2009; Druckman, Peterson & Slothuus, 2013). Indeed, in the Palestinian context, the public debate over the use of violence mirrors the partisan divide over the issue. As one report put it, ‘the public is still uncertain about the best alternative to [failed] negotiations: two groups support almost equally two options, going to the UN Security Council and waging violent confrontations’ (PSR Survey Research Unit, 2010). In such polarized contexts, supporters of moderate parties will tend to favor nonviolent strategies such as diplomacy and negotiation whereas supporters of more militant parties will prefer those parties’ more violent tactics. In contrast, nonpartisans (who do not identify with any political party) are likely to have weaker beliefs about which strategy to pursue.

Nonpartisans may have weaker beliefs about the use of violence for one of two reasons. First, they may be undecided about the merits of different strategies advocated by different parties and, therefore, choose not to support any party. Alternatively, they may be flexible about the use of violence – supporting violence when it is perceived to be effective but opposing it when it is not – causing them to have fluid party allegiances. Indeed, as described in the Online appendix, many Palestinian nonpartisans appear to back Marwan Barghouti – the imprisoned leader of Fatah’s paramilitary wing and a potential alternative to current party leader Mahmoud Abbas – who has advocated exactly such a pragmatic stance towards violence.

Regardless of why nonpartisans have weaker beliefs, both of the main models of opinion change imply that they should be more likely to change their attitudes as a result (though for slightly different reasons). From a Bayesian perspective, individuals rationally update their beliefs in response to new information when this information differs from their prior beliefs, and when those prior beliefs are weak to begin with (Gerber & Green, 1999; Bartels, 2002). Partisans and nonpartisans are therefore expected to process new information about the expected payoffs of violent and nonviolent strategies derived from international recognition differently. Partisans, who have stronger beliefs about violence (either positive or negative), should be less likely to update their attitudes. Among nonpartisans, who have weaker prior beliefs about the use of violence, however, this information should lead to reduced support for violence.

Motivated reasoning models of opinion change yield the same result, albeit through a different pathway. From a motivated reasoning perspective, because attitudes precede and shape reasoning rather than follow it, individuals confronted with mixed information are expected to prioritize information that is consistent with their prior beliefs (Kunda, 1990; Taber & Lodge, 2006; Druckman & Leeper, 2012; Haidt, 2012; Lodge & Taber, 2013). Here, ‘motivated’ partisans do not necessarily ignore new information. For example, Hamas partisans may still process new information about the efficacy of nonviolent diplomacy in achieving the Palestinian national goals of international recognition and legitimacy. However, they simultaneously call up other information consistent with their existing support for violence (e.g. the efficacy of violence in inducing past Israeli withdrawals), making it harder to change their attitudes towards violence.⁴ Nonpartisans, in contrast, are less likely to call up such countervailing information and are, therefore, more likely to reduce their support for violence in response to new information derived from international recognition.

Palestinian nonpartisans and their preferences

Despite widespread scholarly recognition of popular dissatisfaction with the main Palestinian political parties (e.g. Bligh, 2013; Kuttab, 2014; Brown & Nerenberg, 2016; El Kurd, 2019), there is little research about Palestinian nonpartisans and their attitudes specifically. The work that does exist suggests that they are a relatively coherent group and, therefore, that they should respond similarly to international recognition. For example, Jaeger et al. (2012) show that Palestinian nonpartisans tend to have consistent preferences that lie between those of Hamas and Fatah partisans on several political issues in addition to support for violence, including support for negotiations with Israel and territorial compromise.

While Palestinian nonpartisans’ preferences may lie between those of Fatah and Hamas partisans, they are not indifferent between the two parties. Rather, like nonpartisans in other contexts who tend to lean towards one party or another (Magleby, Nelson & Westlye, 2011; Baker & Renno, 2019), Palestinian nonpartisans lean towards Fatah. In particular, many nonpartisans appear to back the leader of Fatah’s paramilitary arm, Marwan Barghouti, who has taken a more flexible stance towards violence than the current party leadership.⁵ Altogether, this suggests that nonpartisans are a distinct group with weaker and more flexible preferences about the use of violence than partisans.

Consistent with this understanding about nonpartisans, Figure 1 and Table I show that, before recognition, Palestinian nonpartisans supported violence in somewhat greater measure than Fatah partisans and substantially less so than Hamas partisans. Specifically, support for violence among nonpartisans was approximately 6.5 percentage points higher than among Fatah partisans (p = 0.04) and over 20 percentage points lower than among Hamas partisans (p = 0.00).⁶ As Figure A.10 in the Online appendix shows, this partisan divide over the use of violence generally holds for the period between 2002 and 2012. This suggests that popular support for violence is politicized along party lines and, therefore, that nonpartisans should be more likely to change their support for violence in response to new information than partisans.

Given this context and the theoretical expectations developed earlier in this article, nonpartisans should be

Figure 1.

Ex-ante support for violence by party identification; PSR Poll 45, Q51 -1 (Sept. 2012). N = 1,054.

Table I.

Ex-ante support for violence by party identification

	Proportion			Difference		p-value
	Non-partisans	Fatah partisans	Hamas partisans	(1)–(2)	(1)–(3)	(1) vs. (2)	(1) vs. (3)
	(1)	(2)	(3)
Support for violence	33.1	26.8	56.9	6.4	−23.7	0.04*	0.00**
Observations	513	381	160

*p < 0.05, **p < 0.01. Results from difference-in-proportions tests. PSR Poll 45(September 2012), Q51-1; N = 1,054.

more likely to reduce their support for violence in response to new information from international recognition. To evaluate this argument, we test whether:

H1: Increasing the salience of recognition reduces support for violence among nonpartisans.

We also test the proposed informational mechanism by exploring whether:

H2: Priming recognition increases a group’s perceived international political support and bargaining power among its members.

Study design

We assess the impact of international recognition on support for violence using a survey experiment centered around the 2012 UNGA recognition of Palestine as a non-member observer state.⁷ The survey experiment was conducted in 32 localities in the West Bank shortly after the UNGA decision on 29 November 2012. To achieve a representative sample, we used a multistage, stratified random sampling procedure at every stage of sample selection from the governorate to the individual respondent.⁸ The response rate (calculated using AAPOR Response Rate 5) was 75.3%.

The survey experiment was conducted among 226 Palestinian residents of the West Bank.⁹ While relatively small, we are able to show that this sample is similar to, and therefore, representative of, the general Palestinian population on relevant dimensions (see Online appendix Table A.1), and that it does not suffer from the ‘winner’s curse’ of over-inflated effect sizes that sometimes affects studies with small sample sizes (see Figure 5).

The survey experiment sought to assess the impact of international recognition by increasing its salience via priming. While priming experiments commonly manipulate the salience of an event, issue, or identity in lieu of the thing itself, this may be a limitation of our study if the effects of increasing the salience of recognition vary from those of recognition itself (Mutz, 2011: 150). However, since individuals in the real world must learn about recognition in some way in order to be affected by it – for example, through news articles like the ones our treatment was modeled on – we expect the real-world effects of recognition to be similar to those in our experiment.¹⁰ Moreover, while most individuals in our sample were exposed to recognition before receiving our treatment, prior work has demonstrated that priming even well-known and publicized events, facts, and concerns can significantly affect attitudes by making them cognitively accessible when they normally may not be (Kesebir et al., 2013).

To prime recognition, we randomly assigned some respondents to read a news article about the UNGA recognition of Palestine (the ‘treatment’), which was based on actual articles published in the Palestinian and Arabic-language media after recognition. Like these articles, the treatment framed recognition as a success in the ongoing struggle for Palestinian statehood. To assess whether increasing the salience of recognition changes perceptions of international political support or bargaining power, the treatment did not directly mention either. Following standard procedure in survey experiments, the control condition was a non-political article about sports programs for Palestinian youth. Online appendix Figure A.1 provides the English translation of both conditions.

Individuals were assigned to the treatment or control group using blocked randomization, which helps ensure that covariates are balanced across the experimental conditions (Moore, 2010). The treatment and control groups are well balanced with respect to nine key pre-treatment covariates: gender, refugee status, and level of education (i.e. the blocking variables), age, household income, partisanship, party identification, political knowledge, and political interest (see Online appendix Table A.2). Importantly, the treatment and control groups are balanced with respect to partisanship, indicating that the results are not due to pre-existing differences in partisanship across the treatment and control groups. In addition, the treatment and control groups are also well balanced within the nonpartisan subgroup in our sample. This is important because, while the international recognition treatment was randomized, partisanship was not. Thus, within the non-partisan sample, the treatment and control group could potentially differ from each other in ways that could bias the results. However, Online appendix Table A.3 shows that this is not the case.

The following analyses thus report the results of difference-in-proportions comparisons across the treatment and control groups without adjusting for imbalanced covariates. Our main results are robust to conducting an OLS regression analysis controlling for party identification (Online appendix Table A.7), which we control for because we find statistically insignificant but substantively meaningful differences in the proportion of Fatah supporters between the treatment and control groups in the full sample.

We measure support for violence using the following question, which is similar to questions used in the quarterly public opinion surveys conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) in the Palestinian Territories: ‘To what extent would you support or oppose a return to violent resistance to achieve Palestinian rights?’¹¹ To sharpen distinctions on the key outcome of interest, we code responses as a simple binary indicator of support for violence, with respondents choosing ‘completely support’ or ‘somewhat support’

Figure 2.

The effect of international recognition on support for violence by partisanship

coded as supporting violence and all other respondents coded as opposing it. In our main analysis, we drop the ten respondents who chose ‘can’t choose.’ As shown in Online appendix Section A.4 and Table A.5, our results are robust to multiple alternative measures of the outcome variable, including: (1) coding respondents choosing ‘neither support nor oppose’ as supporting violence instead of opposing it; (2) including respondents who answered ‘can’t choose’ in the analysis; and (3) retaining the original Likert scale (ordinal) survey measure. The results are also robust to using other survey questions about support for specific types of violence, as well as combining all relevant measures into a single index of support for violence using both standard factor analysis and polychoric factor analysis for binary variables.¹²

International recognition and support for violence

We now turn to our main argument and examine the effect of increasing the salience of international recognition on popular support for violence. The main independent variable in our analysis is a binary indicator of assignment to treatment (Treatment). The main moderating (i.e. conditioning) variable, partisanship, is also a binary measure of whether or not a respondent identifies with any political party. In our sample, 56% identified with a political party and 44% did not.¹³

Figure 2 presents the results of difference-in-proportions tests comparing support for violence across the treatment and control groups among all respondents, partisans, and nonpartisans, respectively.¹⁴ Supporting our main hypothesis (H1), Figure 2 shows that increasing the salience of international recognition substantially reduces support for violence among nonpartisans. Among nonpartisans, priming recognition decreased support for violence by 27 percentage points – from 65% support in the control group to only 38% in the treatment group – or over half a standard deviation (p = 0.01). In contrast, among partisans, it had a small and non-statistically significant effect. This difference in the treatment effect between partisans and nonpartisans is unlikely to occur by chance, as the interaction term between recognition and partisanship in Table A.7 (Online appendix) is statistically significant.

These results demonstrate that increasing the salience of international recognition reduces popular support for the use of violence among nonpartisans. This effect is robust to controlling for the method of randomization by including strata dummies (Bruhn & McKenzie, 2009), as well as controlling for support for the ruling Fatah party and other potential differences across groups that may have arisen during survey sampling. As mentioned earlier, the results are also consistent when using multiple, alternative measures of support for violence, as well as robust to the use of randomization inference for small sample sizes (see Figure 5).¹⁵

Testing the informational mechanism

We have shown that international recognition reduces support for violence among nonpartisans and proposed that this is because recognition conveys new information that shifts the expected payoffs of nonviolent and violent strategies. This section tests this informational mechanism. We hypothesize that increasing the salience of recognition increases perceived international political support and bargaining power among all group members, but only nonpartisans reduce their support for violence in response. Because priming recognition makes information about international political support and bargaining power more accessible, and because such information is not as politicized as information about violence, this information should affect perceived international political support and bargaining power regardless of partisanship.¹⁶

We measure individual evaluations of international political support using a seven-level ordinal indicator of perceived affinity between the Palestinian national position and that of the international community, where higher values correspond to greater affinity. To measure evaluations of bargaining power, we use an indicator of the expected favorability of a hypothetical negotiated settlement to Palestinian interests. This indicator is coded as a five-level ordinal variable ranging from ‘very unfavorable’ to ‘very favorable.’

Figure 3 suggests that, consistent with our arguments, priming international recognition increases perceived international political support and bargaining power among all respondents. As the left panel shows, priming recognition increases assessments of international political support for the Palestinian cause among all respondents by approximately half a point on our seven-point scale (0.33 SDs, p = 0.01). Similarly, the right panel shows that priming recognition increases assessments of bargaining power among all respondents by a meaningful amount (0.22 SDs), although this effect is statistically weaker (p = 0.10).

We find consistent but statistically weaker results among each subgroup (partisans and nonpartisans). Priming recognition is associated with a large and nearly identical increase in perceived international support among both nonpartisans (0.32 SDs) and partisans (0.34 SDs), although, likely due to less statistical power in the smaller nonpartisan group, the estimated effect among nonpartisans falls just below conventional levels of statistical significance (p = 0.13). Similarly, priming recognition is also associated with greater perceived bargaining power among both partisans (0.28 SDs) and nonpartisans (0.13 SDs). Although the latter effect is not statistically significant, we do not find any evidence of an interaction effect between priming recognition and partisanship, suggesting that the effect of recognition on perceived bargaining power is not conditional on partisanship. In addition, as we discuss in the alternative explanations section and the Online appendix, partisans and nonpartisans held similar initial beliefs about bargaining power – that is, they were not polarized over this issue like they were about violence – suggesting they should be equally responsive to new information about their bargaining power. Taken together, these results suggest that recognition likely increases perceptions of bargaining power among all respondents. At the same time, it is possible that recognition reduces support for violence primarily by signaling greater international political support and/or conveying information about the efficacy of diplomacy.

Alternative explanations

We have argued that international recognition reduces support for violence among nonpartisans in particular, and that this is because nonpartisans have weaker and less stable prior beliefs about the use of violence. One alternative explanation for the differential impact of

Figure 3.

The marginal effect of recognition on perceptions of international support and bargaining power

recognition between partisans and nonpartisans is differences in their prior political knowledge and interest. Previous research shows that nonpartisans tend to be less informed about and interested in politics than partisans, and that information provision typically has a stronger impact among less informed individuals (Zaller, 1992; Converse, 2006; Albright, 2009; Lupu, 2015). Similarly, priming may also have a stronger impact among the less informed (Lenz, 2009).

Consistent with findings in other contexts, we find that Palestinian nonpartisans are significantly less informed about and interested in politics than partisans.¹⁷ If priming international recognition decreases support for violence among nonpartisans because they are less knowledgeable about politics, then it should reduce support for violence among less politically knowledgeable respondents. However, as Figure 4 shows, this is not the case. Likewise, we also do not find evidence that priming recognition significantly reduces support for violence among respondents who are less interested in politics (see Online appendix Figure A.6). Overall, these results suggest that, although nonpartisans are indeed less knowledgeable and interested in politics than partisans, these differences do not explain why they are differentially affected by recognition.

It is also possible that, by mentioning Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, our treatment could have induced nonpartisans to reduce their support for violence by boosting their support for Abbas’ Fatah party and its diplomacy-centered strategy. Although we cannot address this alternative mechanism directly, we think it is unlikely to be at work.¹⁸ If our experimental prompt were reducing support for violence via this party affiliation mechanism, we would have expected a drop in support for violence among Fatah partisans as well as among nonpartisans. However, as Online appendix Figure A.7 shows, this is not the case. Additionally, we do not find evidence that increasing the salience of recognition reduces nonpartisan support for violence by signaling changing norms among the Palestinian leadership about the legitimacy of violence to the mass public, that is, ‘norm diffusion’ (see Online appendix Figure A.8).

Figure 4.

The effect of international recognition on support for violence by political knowledge

A final question regarding our mechanism concerns the finding that international recognition affects support for violence among nonpartisans but shapes perceptions of international support and bargaining power among all groups. That is, if partisans have stronger prior beliefs about violence and are therefore less likely to update their views when recognition is primed, why do they update their views about international support and bargaining power? This may be a particular concern when it comes to bargaining power because, although we find a positive effect of priming recognition on bargaining power among each group, our small sample size does not allow us to estimate this effect precisely.

Although we are unable to completely rule out differences in the impact of priming recognition on perceived bargaining power between partisans and nonpartisans, we address this concern here by examining prior beliefs about bargaining power among all Palestinians, partisans, and nonpartisans. If partisans and nonpartisans are not polarized around their perception of bargaining power, there would be little reason to expect that they would react differently to information about it derived from priming recognition. Indeed, reflecting the sharp power asymmetry in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and in self-determination conflicts more generally, Table A.9 in the Online appendix shows that Palestinian partisans and nonpartisans both perceived their bargaining power as much lower than that of Israel’s before UNGA recognition.¹⁹ This suggests that partisans and nonpartisans should have been similarly receptive to new information about bargaining power.

External validity

This section addresses four possible questions that may arise about the extent to which our findings may hold in the real world and in other contexts. First, recognition will only have an impact on support for violence to the extent that individuals are aware of it. Fortunately, this scope condition is likely to be met more generally because, as we have already noted and as other studies repeatedly demonstrate, recognition is a highly salient issue in self-determination contexts. In our own study, for example, 85% of respondents reported having read or watched a news story about ‘Palestine in the United Nations’ after the UNGA’s recognition. Second, although recognition frequently results from nonviolence as in the Palestinian context, where it does not, it may not reduce support for violence to the same degree. Third, recognition will only reduce support for violence among nonpartisans where political parties are divided over the use of violence. As we noted earlier, however, this is the case in most self-determination conflicts.

Finally, while UNGA recognition infrequently occurs without full UNSC recognition, other types of recognition that fall short of full UNSC recognition are quite common. Most prominently, bilateral recognition of self-determination movements by regional or global powers (e.g. as in Kosovo, South Ossetia, and Croatia) frequently results from these movements’ diplomatic initiatives. Indeed, Griffiths (2021) shows that self-determination movements commonly seek to circumvent the ‘home state’ to gain recognition. Like the UNGA recognition of Palestine, such instances of recognition also often occur in the middle, rather than the end of the conflict (e.g. Huang, 2016; Roeder, 2018). To be sure, as we noted earlier, the long-term impact of recognition is contingent on further developments. For example, when recognition results in full statehood, the conflict may be resolved (as in Timor-Lesthe) or transformed into an interstate one.

These different types of recognition are likely to reduce support for violence to different degrees. Full sovereign recognition by the UNSC is the strongest form of international recognition. It provides the strongest signal of international support and increases actual and perceived bargaining power by the greatest amount. As such, it is likely to have the greatest short-term impact on support for violence. Other kinds of multilateral recognition, including recognition by the UNGA and bilateral recognition by global or regional powers, may provide relatively weaker signals of international support and bargaining power, but they nonetheless convey important information about international support and confer benefits (e.g. resources, access to other international institutions) to groups seeking self-determination. As a result, they too should reduce support for violence in the short run.

If anything, the weakness of UNGA recognition relative to UNSC recognition suggests that our findings may fall along the lower bound of the impact of recognition on support for violence: we would expect stronger forms of recognition to more strongly affect nonpartisan attitudes towards violence in the short run. The fact that our experiment happened to be fielded following a period of intense fighting between Israel and Hamas also suggests that the true impact of recognition may be larger, since this fighting likely raised the overall level of support for violence, making this a hard context in which to detect any mitigating influence of recognition.

A final concern about the external validity of our findings may arise from our relatively small sample size. When studies with relatively small sample sizes detect statistically significant effects, they may do so because, due to the chance of random assignment within any

Figure 5.

Results of randomization inference

particular experiment, they find an effect that happens to be large (the so-called ‘winner’s curse’). For example, if the true effect size is small – and therefore requires a large study with high statistical power to detect it – only those small studies that by chance overestimate the magnitude of this effect will find a statistically significant effect (Gerber & Green, 2012; Keele, McConnaughy & White, 2012; Button et al., 2013).

Figure 5 addresses this challenge using randomization inference.²⁰ Randomization inference simulates all possible random assignments of the data into treatment and control groups (i.e. dividing the sample into every possible combination of treatment and control groups) and calculates the treatment effect for all simulated random assignments. In other words, it simulates conducting the experiment many times on the same sample (Gerber & Green, 2012). By comparing the results from this procedure with our original results, we are able to assess the certainty with which our results are due to the treatment (i.e. international recognition) or to chance (i.e. the particular random assignment of the data in our particular experiment) (Keele, McConnaughy & White, 2012). Figure 5 shows that over 95% of simulated random assignments produced a negative and statistically significant treatment effect of international recognition among nonpartisans. Across all simulated random assignments, the average treatment effect (ATE) among nonpartisans was −0.27 (p < 0.05) – virtually identical to our original estimate. Thus, the effect of international recognition does not appear to be inflated due to the relatively small sample size of the study.

Conclusion

This article shows that an underexamined explanatory variable – international recognition – can shape popular support for the use of violence among groups seeking self-determination. Drawing on a unique survey experiment conducted in the wake of the UNGA’s recognition of Palestine, we demonstrate that increasing the salience of international recognition reduces support for violence among nonpartisans by nearly half of a standard deviation – more than the effects of gender, education, and political generation found in recent studies. This effect is important not only because of its size but because, unlike many factors previously found to shape support for violence, international recognition is the prerogative of states. As such, it gives states a potential policy tool that they can use to reduce support for violence, opening a window for conflict resolution.

We argue that international recognition reduces support for violence by conveying new information about the expected payoffs of violent and nonviolent strategies, and that nonpartisans are more sensitive to this information than partisans because they have weaker and less stable preferences over the use of violence. This finding deepens the integration of party politics into the literature on conflict by examining how a key variable – partisanship – mediates conflict dynamics. While our study focuses on how partisanship conditions public opinion towards the use of violence in particular, this extension is also likely to apply to other issues over which political parties are polarized and, as a result, nonpartisans have weaker preferences than partisans.

Of course, popular support for violence among groups seeking self-determination is only one obstacle to conflict resolution in many settings, including in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: the actions of the challenged state and support for violence among its population also matter. Nonetheless, our finding that priming recognition reduces nonpartisans’ support for violence in groups seeking self-determination is important because nonpartisans’ attitudes are likely to affect leaders’ strategic choices and their willingness to negotiate. In electoral contests, nonpartisans matter because they can sway the outcome of elections or function as the keystone that holds up winning coalitions. Nonpartisans may play a similar role in conflict situations. Since factions within self-determination movements compete for popular support and may strive to win favor with ‘unaffiliated’ individuals, swaying nonpartisans away from supporting violent strategies can help to build a domestic coalition in favor of negotiation and conflict resolution. Such shifts in opinion among nonpartisans could be particularly consequential because, as we showed earlier, nonpartisans are often a substantial proportion of groups seeking self-determination.

At the same time, the ultimate impact of recognition on support for violence is contingent on continued developments on the ground. While recognition reduces support for violence among nonpartisans in the short term, its long-term impact depends on continued progress towards the self-determination movement’s goals. As we have argued, recognition reduces support for violence because it conveys information that shifts the expected payoffs of violent and nonviolent strategies. If nonviolent strategies fail to deliver results, however, this reduced support for violence is unlikely to persist. In other words, recognition widens the window for conflict resolution – but that window may close if it is not accompanied by real and meaningful progress.

Footnotes

Replication data

The dataset, codebook, and do-files for the empirical analysis in this article, along with the online appendix, are available at https://www.prio.org/jpr/datasets/ and . All analyses were conducted using Stata except as noted above.

Acknowledgments

We have profited from helpful comments provided by the anonymous referees, the editor of JPR, as well as Miles Armaly, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Sarah Bush, Melani Cammett, Dan Corstange, Conor Dowling, Charles Franklin, Guy Grossman, Rich Nielsen, Jon Pevehouse, Ken Schultz, and Julie Wronski. The project also benefited from the feedback of participants at meetings of the American Political Science Association, the Midwest Political Science Association and the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS), as well as participants in seminars at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Memphis, and the University of Mississippi.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: We gratefully acknowledge support from the Lubar Institute for the Study of the Abrahamic Religions at the University of Wisconsin, the Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) at George Washington University, and the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation.

ORCID iD

Nadav G Shelef

Notes

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