Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-94d59 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T12:34:39.524Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

An Experimental Investigation of Causal Attributions for the Political Behavior of Muslim Candidates: Can a Muslim Represent you?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2009

Eileen Braman*
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington
Abdulkader H. Sinno*
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington
*
Address correspondences and reprint requests to: Eileen Braman, Department of Political Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. E-mail: ebraman@indiana.edu. Abdulkader Sinno, Department of Political Science & Middle Eastern Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. E-mail: asinno@indiana.edu.
Address correspondences and reprint requests to: Eileen Braman, Department of Political Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. E-mail: ebraman@indiana.edu. Abdulkader Sinno, Department of Political Science & Middle Eastern Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. E-mail: asinno@indiana.edu.

Abstract

American Muslim representation in elected office has lagged behind that of other groups of comparable size. Muslims now make up 2% of the total United States population and enjoy much larger concentrations in some urban areas. American Muslims are also disproportionately educated and enjoy a higher average socio-economic status than members of groups with similar numbers that have made strides in terms of political representation in our democracy. Yet Muslims have not made similar advances in the political arena. There are a number of reasons that might account for this situation. Here, we look at one possible explanation that is especially intriguing — and perhaps a bit troubling: the idea that voters make different causal attributions for the behavior of Muslim candidates for office. We employ an experimental design to examine the attributions participants use to “explain” the behavior of hypothetical Muslim and non-Muslim candidates. We conduct two experiments involving distinct political offices: State Attorney General and United States Senator. We find that respondents generally do not attribute behavior differently in the case of Muslim and Christian candidates, except in the case of lax prosecution of a terrorism case. Politically sophisticated respondents assume that a Muslim prosecutor who does not have a large Muslim constituency is sympathetic to Muslim terrorists, but not one with a larger Muslim voting base. Non-sophisticates attribute his behavior to such motivations regardless of the concentration of Muslims in his district.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

The authors would like to thank Thomas E. Nelson, David Campbell, Kenneth Mulligan and the editors and anonymous reviewers at Politics and Religion for their helpful comments on various aspects of this project. A previous version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.

References

REFERENCES

Alexander, Deborah, and Anderson, Kristi. 1993. “Gender as a Factor in the Attribution of Leadership Traits.” Political Research Quarterly 46:527545.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bagby, Ihsan, Perl, Paul M., and Froehle, Brian T.. 2001. The Mosque in America: A National Portrait. Washington, D.C.: Council on American-Islamic Relations.Google Scholar
Brady, Henry E., and Sniderman, Paul. 1985. “Attitude Attribution: A Group Bias for Political Reasoning.” American Political Science Review 79:10611078.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell, David E. 2006. “The Religious “Threat” in Contemporary American Elections.” Journal of Politics 68:104115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilbert, T. 1989. “Thinking Lightly About Others: Automatic Components of the Social Inference Process.” In Unintended Thought, eds. Bargh, J.A. and Uleman, J.S.. New York, NY: Gilford.Google Scholar
Gomez, Brad, and Wilson, J. Matthew. 2000. “Political Sophistication and Economic Voting in the American Electorate: A Theory of Heterogeneous Attribution.” American Journal of Political Science 45:899914.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gomez, Brad, and Wilson, J. Matthew. 2006. “Rethinking Symbolic Racism: Evidence of Attribution Bias.” Journal of Politics 68:611625.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck, ed. 2002. Muslims in the West: From Sojourners to Citizens. Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck, ed. 2004. Not Quite American? The Shaping of Arab and Muslim Identities in the United States, Edmondson Lecture Series. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.Google Scholar
Huddy, Leonie, and Terkidsen, Nayda. 1993. “Gender Stereotypes and the Perception of Male and Female Candidates.” American Journal of Political Science 37:119147.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hughes, Michael, and Tuch, Steven. 2000. “How Beliefs about Poverty Inflence Racieal Policy.” In Racialized Politcs: The Debate About Racism in America, eds. Sears, David O., Sidanius, Jim, and Bobo, Lawrence. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Iyengar, Shanto. 1989. “How Citizens Think about National Issues: A Matter of Responsibility.” American Journal of Political Science 33:878900.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keppel, Geoffery. 1982. Design and Analysis: A Researcher's Handbook. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Kunda, Ziva. (1999). Social Cognition: Making Sense of People. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGraw, Kathleen. 1998. “Manipulating Public Opinion with Moral Justification.” Annals of the American Academy of Political Science 560:120142.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGraw, Kathleen, Mark Fische, Karen Stenner, and Lodge, Milton. 1996. “What's in a Word? Bias Trait Descriptions of Political Leaders.” Political Behavior 18: 263287.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mondak, Jeffery. 2001. “Developing Knowledge Scales.” American Journal of Political Science 45:224238.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelson, Thomas E. 1999. “Group Affect and Attribution in Social Policy.” Journal of Politics 61:331362.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nisbet, Erik C., and Shanahan, James. 2004. Restrictions on Civil Liberties, Views of Islam, and Muslim Americans. An MSRG Special Report. Ithaca, NY: Media and Society Research Group, Cornell University.Google Scholar
Peffley, Mark. 1984. “The Voter as Juror: Attributing Responsibility for Economic Conditions.” Political Behavior 6:275294.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pettigrew, Thomas F. 1979. “The Ultimate Attribution Error: Extending Allport's Cognitive Analysis to Prejudice.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 5: 461–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Forum, Pew. 2003. “Religion and Politics: Contention and Consensus.” http://pewforum.org/publications/surveys/religion-politics.pdf (Accessed July 24, 2003).Google Scholar
Plous, Scott. 1993. The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making. New York, NY: McGraw Hill.Google Scholar
Sapiro, Virginia. 1981. “If U.S. Senator Baker were a Woman: An Experimental Study of Candidate Image.” Political Psychology 2: 6183.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sharp, Elaine B., and Joslyn, Mark. 2001. “Individual and Contextual Effects on Attributions about Pornography.” Journal of Politics 63:501519.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sigelman, Carol K., Lee Sigelman, Barbara J. Walkoz, and Nits, Michael. 1995. “Black Candidates, White Voters: Understading Racial Bias in Political Perceptions.” American Journal of Political Science 39:243265.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sinno, Abdulkader. 2008. Muslims in Western Politics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Tom. 2002. “The Polls-Review: The Muslim Population of the United States: The Methodology of Estimates.” Public Opinion Quarterly 66:404417.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, D.M., and Jaggi, V. 1974. “Ethnocentrism and Causal Attribution in a South Indian Context.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 5:162171.CrossRefGoogle Scholar