Policies or Prejudices? An Analysis of Antisemitic and Anti-Israel Views on Social Media and Social Surveys

Abstract

This paper examines the extent to which personal biases affect political views, in the context of how antisemitism influences opinions about Israel. Two empirical analyses are conducted. The first one analyzes social media chatter about Jews and Israel in the UK, revealing a strong, positive relationship between negative chatter about both of them at the daily-location level. In order to establish causality, social media chatter about a “Jewish” football team in the English Premier League (Tottenham) is used as an instrument for negative expressions about Jewish people to explain negativity towards Israel. The second empirical analysis uses the 2016 wave of the German Social Survey, which reveals a strong and robust relationship between several commonly used measures of antisemitic beliefs and holding anti-Israel views. A causal interpretation of this finding is supported by an IV analysis motivated by Voigtländer and Voth (2015) who show that Nazi indoctrination during the WWII period had a lifelong impact on antisemitic views. In both analyses, the IV estimates are considerably larger than OLS coefficients.