Ethnicity, Islam, and Pakistani Public Opinion toward the Pakistani Taliban

Abstract

We contend that existing studies of public opinion toward militant Islamist violence have ignored a potentially important aspect of public attitudes: ethnic identification. We argue that the prevailing ethnicity of the group committing the violence and the ethnicity of the respondent are an important linkage in explaining whether an individual is likely to support violence committed by a group, even if that violence is committed in the name of an Islamist ideology that makes no reference to and even downplays the importance of ethnicity. We base this logic on the reasoning of studies in social psychology that show that individuals are more likely to trust and support those who they perceive to be like them in attributes that they consider important and typically ethnicity is one of the most important of such attributes. We apply this framework to a study of Pakistani public opinion toward the Pakistani Taliban. Using survey data from an original survey carried out in Pakistan in 2013, with 7,656 respondents, we tested our hypothesis in a multiple regression analysis. The results demonstrate that co-ethnicity between the respondent and the Islamist militant group is the most important predictor of support for the militant groups.

Keywords: terrorism, public opinion, militant Islam, ethnicity