Public Support for Power Grabs after Civil Conflict

Abstract

Power-sharing is a recognized strategy for reaching durable settlements among rivals. However, power-sharing arrangements are often violated when one side grabs power. We examine public perceptions of power-sharing versus power-grabbing in the context of local policing in Mosul, Iraq. In a survey experiment, we investigate if ­individuals believe that security in Mosul, in the aftermath of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) occupation, is enhanced or reduced under power-sharing versus power-grabbing treatments, which vary the authority held by distinct factions of the counter-ISIS coalition. The public is more likely to support power-grabbing than power-sharing in matters of policing and security. In the case of power-grabbing, there are also important moderating effects of conflict-related victimization. Unlike nonvictims who favor ingroup power-grabbing to enhance local ­sectarian control, victims place a premium on stability, welcoming even external, out-group control over power-sharing among groups who might be at odds. Our results underscore the challenges of institutionalizing power-sharing mechanisms for peacebuilding after conflict.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

The data and materials that support the findings of this study are available in the Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/RONPWR.f.

Notes

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50 See the Online Appendix for further discussion.

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57 Sunni paramilitary groups also operate in Iraq, but Hashd groups are mostly understood as Shia-affiliated.

58 Iraqi police forces from the Saddam era were disbanded and reorganized in 2003 under the Coalition Provisional Authority. In Mosul, the local or municipal police are employed through the Iraqi Police Service (ISP) is staffed and administered locally and distinct from the Federal Police (FP) which is directly controlled by the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad and staffed nationally. While IPS personnel also receive paychecks from the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad, it is under local administrative control, though residents may not necessarily understand the complexities of the relationship between different policing forces. We focus here on local policing through the IPS and reinforce their local aspects relative to Hashd paramilitaries in our research design.

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79 Other work finds that victimization by an in-group combatant does not have much effect on civilian support for the combatant. However, these works considered victimization in the form of collateral damage, that is, victimization as an inadvertent consequence of combat. We suggest that civilians will develop more negative attitudes toward the in-group combatant when the victimization takes place outside of combat and is deliberate. See Jason Lyall, Graeme Blair, and Kosuke Imai, “Explaining Support for Combatants during Wartime: A Survey Experiment in Afghanistan,” American Political Science Review, 107 no. 4 (2013): 679–705.

80 Hale, “Focus.”

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82 Our survey did not include questions measuring the degree to which respondents associated the local police with the (Sunni) in-group and the Hashds with the (Shia) outgroup. When designing the survey, we decided not to include questions that directly measured perceptions of sectarianism. Our concern was that such questions could pose dangers if local police or Hashd patrols intercepted and questioned enumerators and respondents. Even if these ethical and security conditions did not exist, it is unclear what value such questions might have. Including the questions before treatment may have influenced respondents’ choices on subsequent questions; placing the questions later in the survey flow may have made responses subject to post-treatment bias.

83 Jessica Watkins et al., “Local Policing in Iraq Post ISIL: Carving out an Arena for Community Service?,” in + London School of Economics Middle East Centre Paper Series, vol. 51 (2021).

84 Gaston, Erica, “Iraq After ISIL: Mosul” (Global Public Policy Institute, 2017), https://www.gppi.net/2017/08/21/isil-after-iraq-mosul.

85 The local or municipal police through the Iraqi Police Service (IPS) tends to be staffed and administered locally, while the Federal Police (FP) is controlled more directly by the Ministry of the Interior in Baghdad and is staffed from around the country. We consider IPS officers as locals under local control, while FP officers and Hashd groups as outsiders under Baghdad’s authority.

86 Staniland, “Militias.”

87 Derick W. Brinkerhoff, “Rebuilding Governance in Failed States and Post‐conflict Societies: Core Concepts and Cross‐cutting Themes,” Public Administration and Development 25, no. 1 (2005): 3–14.

88 We also asked respondents whether they felt angry, afraid, sad, worried, happy, and satisfied in response to each survey vignette before inquiring about security perceptions. We did this to examine whether emotions serve as a plausible mediator of treatment effects. We discuss this in detail in the sections “Ethical Considerations about Experimental Treatment Effects” and “Emotional Mediators of Treatment Effects” in the Online Supplemental Appendix. We did not find evidence of strong emotional mediation on treatment effects, and we focus more in the manuscript on security perceptions and the moderating effects of victimization.

89 Alternate designs could focus on predicting who supports power-sharing as a dependent variable (see Online supplemental Appendix). In contrast, we examine whether people regard power-sharing as enhancing or reducing security in contrast to tangible alternatives. We believe this design is essential to understanding the logic of what power-sharing is expected to do in the context of other options.

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93 We had insufficient female enumerators to stratify sampling (50/50) by gender on a large scale and we worried that achieving parity in female-to-male recruitment would be challenging.

94 Staniland, “Militias.”

95 All regression analyses are robust to ordered probit estimation (see Online Supplemental Appendix).

96 In the Online Supplemental Appendix, we perform internal validity checks, which indicate how attitudes and expectations about power-sharing versus power-grabbing can explain experimental treatment effects. We also explore how treatment effects are sensitive to the inclusion of interaction terms between treatments, sectarian identity, and location, control variables measuring demographics, social distance toward Sunni and Shia Muslims, social distance toward people from Mosul and Baghdad in general, inter-group contact, incentives for material gain, the importance of ethnic identity and religiosity, and emotions in response to our treatments.

97 While self-reporting may underrepresent the full extent of victimization, such underreporting likely biases against our hypothesis.

98 We lack response variation to assess the moderating effects of victimization by the Iraqi army during liberation.

99 As noted in our research design, while experimental treatments are randomized, victimization experiences are not, creating endogeneity issues for causal inference regarding victimization’s moderating effects. We provide further discussion of correlates of victimization in the Online Supplemental Appendix. We find, however, that the main moderating effects of victimization on our power-sharing and power-grabbing treatments are robust when we control for observable correlates of victimization in our Online Supplemental Appendix.

100 Hartzell and Hoddie, “Power Sharing and the Rule.”

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102 Hartzell and Hoddie, Power Sharing and Democracy.

103 Adam J. Berinsky, “Assuming the Costs of War: Events, Elites, and American Public Support for Military Conflict,” The Journal of Politics 69, no. 4 (2007): 975–97; John Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, University of Maryland; Army Research Office/Minerva Research Initiative under grant number W911NF-18-10089.

Notes on contributors

James Igoe Walsh

James Igoe Walsh is Professor of Political Science, Data Science, and Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Sam Whitt

Sam Whitt is Professor of Political Science at High Point University.

Jacob Aronson

Jacob Aronson is an Assistant Research Scientist at the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland.

Jonathan Hall

Jonathan Hall is Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University.

Paul Huth

Paul Huth is a Professor in the Government and Politics department at the University of Maryland.

Vera Mironova

Vera Mironova is an independent researcher who is affiliated with the Middle East Institute.