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Analysis of Palestinian Public Opinion on Politics
Popular Trust and Distrust
in Palestinian Politicians and Factions
(Published by: JMCC Written by: Gil Friedman, pp. 76 August 2000)


Contents

  • Preface
  • Introduction
  • I. Research Design
  • II. An Examination of the Relationship Between Trust in Figures and Trust in Factions
  • III. Summary and Analysis of Estimated Models of Popular Political Trust and Distrust
  • IV. Examining "No answer/don't know" Responses to the Survey Question on Trust
  • Concluding Remarks
  • References
Preface
 

Since 1993, the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center (JMCC) has been regularly conducting public opinion polls. These surveys encompass a wide range of subjects that are of interest to the Palestinian public opinion. It also draws the interest of non-Palestinian parties who are, directly or indirectly, engaged with the Palestine question.

Furthermore, the JMCC Polling Unit conducts commissioned surveys for researchers whose research and analysis require an examination of public opinion.

The unit had participated in joint surveys such as regional polls on an Arab level and another poll with an Israeli research center.

Throughout the discourse of the periodic polls, it has been realized that there is inadequate usage of the accumulating technical data. Thus, leading us to expand the polling unit to include data analysis that will hopefully assist the reader, researcher and those interested in comprehending Palestinian attitudes towards the issues the polls deal with. JMCC before has published three analytical reports. The present study is the first of three public opinion analysis to do with popular political trust conducted by the author.

The Palestinian public opinion towards the peace process and the Palestinian leadership, who are ingrained within this process, is one of the most important subjects the surveys has traced since the beginning of this political process and the return of the Palestinian leadership.

The most important trend that are clear within in this discourse is the continuous and steady increase within the Palestinian people in the distrust of any leadership figure and leading factions in Palestinian politics.

The analysis attempts to specialize in studying the Palestinian people’s trust and distrust of the political echelon, the political activists and the Palestinian political organizations by explaining the factors influencing these trends through an in-depth survey study.

Accordingly, the polls and the analytical studies constitute a worthy contribution in empowering the trust of the people in themselves as well as reinforcing accountability within the discourse of democratization of the Palestinian society.

Ghassan Khatib
Director

Introduction
 
 Popular trust in political figures and factions is plainly a necessary condition for state- and nation-building, democratization, and social order. Confidence in political figures and factions promotes public compliance with state demands, organization and mobilization of the population for specialized tasks, the search for improvement or reform from within rather than without the burgeoning political system, and popular legitimization of the state's symbols and myths.  Public trust also encourages the popular participation and political competition upon which democracy is based.  In short, we may say of popular political trust what Ibn Khaldun (1967: 127) said of "group feeling,” that it is “by necessity” required for “every mass [political] undertaking."
 While popular trust is necessary for state- and nation-building, democratization, and social order, Jerusalem Media & Communication Centre (JMCC) public opinion polls have revealed that large proportions of the Palestinian public in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, do not trust any political figure or faction. For the past few years, JMCC public opinion surveys have been asking respondents to indicate which political figure and faction they trust most. Responses to these questions are summarized in Graphs 1 and 2. In each graph, the proportion of those polled who indicated trust in some figure/faction is represented by the top band, and the proportion of those polled who claimed that they trust no political figure/faction is represented by the bottom band.  The graphs make evident that many Palestinians distrust political figures and factions. As is discernible from Graph 1, the proportion of the public sampled which reported distrust in political figures averaged 21.5%, and reached as high as 27.8% in May 1988. Over this same time period, as depicted in Graph 2, the proportion of the public sampled which expressed distrust in political factions averaged 26.8%, and reached as high as 37.7% in August 1996.
Various specific political developments have certainly contributed to the high level of distrust in Palestinian political figures and factions. Notably, this pervasive distrust is no doubt related to inadequate progress toward a satisfactory final status solution with Israel. For one, Israel’s commitment to the spirit, if not also the letter, of the interim agreements has at best been highly questionable. According to a document published by the Palestinian Authority (PA) in July 1996,
   Israel had by this date committed 23 types of violations of the interim agreements.  This trend was no doubt accentuated by the tenure of a right-wing Israeli government from July 1996 to July 1999. Furthermore, Israeli violations of the interim agreements have been accompanied by continued Israeli human rights violations, including detention and torture, house demolitions, and closures.
Disaffection with Palestinian leaders is no doubt also related to failings of the PA. As was revealed by the May 1997 PA General Control Office investigation and confirmed by a special investigation headed by Tayib ‘Abd al-Rahim in July 1997, various ministries and agencies of the PA have been plagued with extensive financial, administrative, and legal, corruption and ineptitude.  Perhaps equally troubling is Arafat’s nominal if not insolent response to the Palestinian Legislative Council’s (PLC’s) demands for reforms following in the wake of the charges of the two investigations. As is well-known, moreover, the PA has committed extensive violations of basic civil and political liberties, such as the rights to due process of law, freedom of the press, expression, and assembly, and so on.  To this list of disconcerting political trends, one can add the stagnant if not worsening state of the economy of the West Bank and Gaza, the demobilization of many Palestinian oppositional factions, and the continued preponderance of Israeli power in relation to the Palestinians.
Such developments have no doubt affected the aggregate levels – that is, the population percentages – of popular trust and distrust in political figures and factions. Yet, such developments do not inform us about the factors that account for variation within the population at any given point in time. In other words, at any given point in time, some Palestinians do and other Palestinians do not trust political figures and factions. As the political developments delimited above are constant at any given point in time and as they impartially embrace all Palestinians of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, they cannot in themselves differentiate between people who trust and people who do not trust. Adequate understanding of popular trust and distrust thus requires identification of those variables that at any given point in time account for the tendency of individual Palestinians to trust or distrust political figures and factions. Simply put, the question raised is: what factors differentiate between individuals who trust political figures and factions and individuals who distrust political figures and factions?
 It is the aim of this study to address this question by analyzing data collected in two JMCC public opinion polls, one conducted in November 1997 and the other in May 1998. These surveys enable us to examine the impact on the propensity toward political trust or distrust of factors that can roughly be fit into four categories: (1) views on issues to do with Palestinian-Israeli relations; (2) views on domestic political issues, such as the performance of the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian Legislative Council; (3) socioeconomic attributes, such as age, gender, region of residence, i.e., West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, etc.; and (4) psychological factors, namely, optimism or pessimism about the future in general. The main aim of this study, then, is to estimate the absolute and relative impacts of individual members of these four distinct classes of factors upon people’s tendencies to trust or distrust political figures and factions.
 A subsidiary set of analyses conducted in this study examines the possibility that many respondents responded “no answer/don’t know” to the survey questions on political trust in order to conceal support for Islamists or other rejectionists – support which may be understood by these respondents to be outlawed or at least disliked by the authorities. A substantial level of such misinformation is likely to bias the results of analyses of the factors accounting for trust/distrust in political figures and factions. More generally, dishonest responses pertaining to politically sensitive issues – such as support for Islamists, suicide bombings, armed struggle, etc. – may represent a major limitation of Palestinian survey research. Accordingly, the intention of the subsidiary analysis is to assess the extent to which the set of respondents reporting “no answer/don’t know” to the survey questions on trust is comprised of people who are in reality sympathetic toward Islamists.
 Among the most notable findings of this study are the following. Firstly, as concerns the relationship between trust in figures, on the one side, and trust in factions, on the other side, most people who trust (distrust) some figure also trust (distrust) some faction, and vice versa. At the same time, however, many people trust either some figure or some faction but not both. Thus, the relationship between trust in figures and trust in factions is positive but far from perfect. Furthermore, this study presents a basic approach for assessing the extent to which the Palestinian people identify figures with these figures’ factional affiliations, and the extent to which the popular support of particular figures is dispersed across supporters of more than one faction. The importance of factional affiliation in trust toward figures and the dispersion of the support of particular figures across various factions could not be adequately assessed in this study due to major data constraints. Keeping in mind these constraints, Haidar Abdul-Shafi was found to enjoy a broader base of support, in terms of the factional sympathies of the respondents, than any other Palestinian figure.
As concerns the explanation of trust in factions and figures, by far the most important factor affecting a person’s tendency to trust or distrust is the person’s evaluation of the PA. The second most important factor affecting a person’s tendency to trust or distrust is the person’s evaluation of the PLC. Simply, negative views of the PA and/or the PLC promote the likelihood of distrusting all political figures and factions, and positive evaluations of the PA and/or PLC decrease the likelihood of distrust in all figures and factions. What is more, the tendency for criticism of the PA to lead to disaffection with the entire political system is particularly likely when this criticism is coupled with opposition to armed violence in the struggle with Israel and opposition to political Islam. Similarly, some evidence suggests that while opposition to negotiations with Israel by itself might not be meaningfully related to the propensity to trust any figure or faction, political distrust might be promoted by the conjunction of opposition to negotiations with Israel and opposition to confrontational policies toward Israel. The most general finding regarding socioeconomic variables is that no socioeconomic variable exerts a statistically significant effect across the various analyses of popular political trust/distrust conducted in this study. More specifically, age, gender, region of residence, i.e., West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and residence-type, i.e., city, village, refugee camp, were found to exert only statistically significant effects only sporadically across the various analyses of political trust/distrust conducted in this study.
As concerns the reasons people respond “no answer/don’t know” to the trust-most survey questions, evidence which can only at best be described as moderate suggests that some respondents report “no answer/don’t know” to survey questions on trust in figures and factions in order to conceal militant preferences. This finding enhances our confidence that the findings of this study to do with the factors that account for whether or not a person exhibits political trust or distrust are not biased by the tendency of Islamist sympathizers to conceal their preference for Islamists by responding “no answer/don’t know.” East Jerusalemites display a higher propensity to respond “no answer/don’t know” to survey questions soliciting preferences over figures and factions than did Gaza and West Bank residents. Additionally, level of education appears to simultaneously exert an indirect positive effect – by increasing the knowledge with which a person can assess who he or she trusts most – and a direct negative effect – perhaps by increasing a person’s criticism of Islamists or perhaps by increasing the person’s general level of disappointment with the state of political affairs – on the probability of responding “no answer/don’t know” to the survey questions on political trust.
 The remainder of this study is divided into four parts. Part I discusses the research design utilized to investigate the factors influencing people’s tendencies to trust or distrust political figures and factions. Though this first part of the study is not absolutely necessary for understanding the ensuing analyses, it no doubt enhances the reader’s understanding of these analyses. Furthermore, some sections of Part I – most notably those to do with scaling independent variables and examining the relationship between trust/distrust in figures/factions, on the one side, and positive/negative opinion on figures/factions, on the other –are substantively meaningful and may thus be of interest even to the reader who is not particularly interested in the methodology of this study. Part II reports the results of a set of analyses to do with the relationship between trust in figures, on the one side, and trust in factions, on the other. This set of analyses helps to guide the construction of models accounting for whether a person trusts or distrusts some figure/faction, and as such comprises a component of the research design of this study. Regardless of the implications for this study’s research design of the present analysis of the relationship between trust in figures and trust in factions, however, such analysis is substantively meaningful in its own right. Accordingly, the author encapsulates discussion of this analysis into an autonomous part of the study in order to encourage the non-methodologically inclined reader to read it. Part III  summarizes and analyzes four models estimated with a statistical technique called logistic regression that account for respondents’ likelihood of trusting or distrusting political figures and factions. The first of these models accounts for responses to the survey question on trust in figures with November 1997 data, the second model accounts for responses to the survey question on trust in figures with May 1998 data, the third model accounts for responses to the question on trust in factions with November 1997 data, and the four model accounts for responses to the survey question on trust in factions with May 1998 data. Lastly, Part IV summarizes and analyzes the findings of four models accounting for the tendency of respondents to respond “no answer/don’t know” to the survey questions on trust. Concluding remarks recapitulate the main findings of this study and suggest areas for future survey research aimed at advancing our understanding of Palestinian public trust/distrust in political figures and factions.
 Parts I and II may not be of primary concern to the reader interested in the main findings of the study. The reader interested in the main findings may wish to skip Parts I and II altogether and begin directly with Part III. Alternatively, the author has bolded the key points in the discussions of Parts I and II. Accordingly, the reader may wish to read only the bolded sections of Parts I and II, and then proceed to Part III. Meanwhile, because Parts III and IV, and in particular Part III, are of substantive interest and generally accessible to all readers, these parts do not place the main points in bold.