How Threats of Exclusion Mobilize Palestinian Political Participation

Abstract

Do exclusionary policies mobilize minority political participation? We theorize that the threat of exclusionary policies creates and resurfaces grievances that facilitate mobilization. To test our theory, we leverage Donald Trump's announcement of a peace plan for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which posed a threat to the citizenship status of Palestinian citizens of Israel residing in the Triangle area adjacent to the West Bank. First, using more than 170,000 posts from public Facebook groups and pages, we show that Trump's announcement was indeed a more salient political event for Triangle residents. Then, employing locality‐level election data as well as records detailing the origin of citizens’ joining a Jewish‐Arab social movement, we use a difference‐in‐difference design to demonstrate that the threat to citizenship imposed by Trump's plan increased mobilization in the Triangle area. Our evidence from three distinct data sources suggests that threats of exclusion can mobilize minority political behavior.

Legacies of Survival: Historical Violence and Ethnic Minority Behavior

“…Another control is a variable that distinguishes between regions that are adjacent to territories occupied by Israel in 1967. This is because proximity to these territories can affect voting; these regions are more likely to be affected by the Palestinian national movement and are more likely to be threatened with expulsion from the state (Weiss, Siegel, and Romney 2022) and they also correlate with designation in the UN proposal, so this is an essential control. We also included the peripherality index of the ICBS, which calculates the distance of each village to the population centers of economic activity.…”

V Political Process : Public Opinion, Attitudes, Parties, Forces, Groups and Elections / Vie Politique : Opinion Publique, Attitudes, Partis, Forces, Groupes et Élections

“…Mass opinion around the world toward the former colonizer. British Journal of Political Science 53(4), Oct. 2023Oct.…”