Whither Democracy in Palestine? Palestinian Public Opinion Surveys towards Democracy, 1997–2016

Abstract

This article examines the extent of Palestinian public support for democracy through the time period from 1997 to 2016. The analysis is based on data collected from five public surveys launched in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip. Our findings show that evidently the Palestinians support almost all elements of democracy, measured in these surveys, and support moderately few others, especially freedom of establishing parties and not using violent means to overthrow a ‘bad’ government. Our findings also reveal that this support is nearly constant and has not changed significantly since the early years of the Oslo accords era until recently. Based on these findings, and a few others revealed by using multiple regression analysis, we argue that Palestinian public opinion is not fully democratic, but rather is semi (or nearly) democratic. We also argue that the cultural hypothesis, claiming that Muslim Arab culture is incompatible with democracy, has no support according to the empirical evidence of this study.