Anti-Americanism and the American World Order

6. The Sources of the Policy and Polity Frames

chapter six The Sources of the Policy and Polity Frames Introduction Next we shall try to identify some sources of anti-American sentiment by probing the characteristics of the respondents and the political contexts within which they elaborated their opinions in the two samples of data from the 2002 Zogby International Survey and the 2002 Chicago Council on Foreign Relations / German Marshall Fund (CCFR/GMF) survey. From the data analyzed in Chapter 4, we saw that the variation in anti-American sentiment is primarily located at the individual level.61 What accounts for the patterns of variation in the popular image of the United States is, therefore, the social and political identity of the respondents rather than their country’s level of development or its relationship with the United States. The empirical analyses in this chapter extend the analyses presented in Chapter 4 by including individual- and country-level explanatory variables in the statistical models. The goal is to identify what factors are systematically associated with the propensity to oppose the United States among the mass publics in eight predominantly Islamic countries and in six European countries.62 First we will look at how levels of societal and policy-oriented anti-Americanism differed across individuals and across countries. The empirical results presented here illustrate first the individual-level relationships between respondents ’ identities and patterns of anti-American opinion and, second, the countrylevel patterns. We will see that attitudes towards the United States systematically varied with respect to levels of information, political attentiveness, and political ideology and that those elements affected the patterns of responses in the two dimensions of the United States that are being investigated: its polity and its policies. 138 Anti-Americanism and the American World Order Individual-level Determinants of Anti-Americanism Starting from the group of Islamic countries in South Asia and the Middle East, the analysis centers on religious affiliation and access to sources of information , beside standard demographic factors such as gender, marital status, and age. While all the countries included in this chapter, with the exception of Lebanon , are predominantly Islamic, it is worth investigating whether the small fractions of individuals who are not Muslim articulated more positive views than those who are. An empirical finding of such nature would replicate, from data measured at the individual level, the aggregate findings on anti-American proneness of Muslims reported in Chapter 1 and, for a different sample of countries, in Chapter 5. The second set of individual factors is information access: respondents were asked whether they had Internet access, whether they had satellite television, how many newspapers they read, and how many languages they spoke beyond their mother tongue. Each of these indicators captures a different component of respondents’ political awareness, under the assumption that the more one reads or watches television, the more likely one is to be exposed to streams of political communication. But the indicators also distinguish between the traditional informational form of the newspaper and the globalized information society exempli fied in satellite television and the Internet. In what seems a direct application of Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum, several scholars have started to argue that the medium through which information is diffused is affecting the dynamics of public opinion formation in the Middle East (Eickelman and Anderson, 2003). Marc Lynch (2003a), for example, traces the transformation of Arab public discourse to the emergence of new media outlets that bypass and undermine state control over information. In an analogous way, Fatema Mernissi (2002, ix–xxi) emphasizes how information technology has the potential to revive the notions of personal opinion and innovation in the Islamic tradition and make them familiar to large portions of the public. Political views previously curtailed receive prime time, often in a style of broadcasting that is American in its inspiration (Ayish, 2001). The political themes that have occupied center stage on the satellite television networks, from the issues of democracy and economic reform to the Palestinian cause and the sanctions and bombing campaigns in Iraq, often carry an intense or outrageous anti-American rhetoric(Lynch,2003a).Somescholarsremainskepticaloftheconnectionbetween new media diffusion and the emergence of a public sphere; they emphasize that The Sources of the Policy and Polity Frames 139 political discourse is shaped more by informal communication in the mosque, the coffeehouses, or the marketplace than by the information flows coming out of satellites and Internet sites (Fandy, 2000). But it behooves us...