Which Syrians believe that a political solution to the conflict is likely ?

Uptodatepronto posted the results of the July 2013 poll of r/SyrianCivilWar opinions in the Syrian conflicts. With only 333 samples, a huge unknown self-selection bias and who knows what ballot stuffing, this data must be taken as anecdotal.

There were three questions :

Who do you support in the Syrian Civil War ? Do you believe there can be a political solution to the conflict ? Who, if anyone should the United States, France and Britain arm ?

The possible answers to the first question were quite sparse, so I decided to aggregate them to have large enough samples in each category… I’m sure that many will object to the mixed bag that I made of the ‘Government’ and ‘Rebels’ aggregates – did I mention that I’m a clueless foreign observer ?

Original answer Aggregate None of the factions involved Neutral Neutral FSA Rebel Al Nusra Islamic State of Iraq and Levant SAA Government Hizbollah Shabeebha Kurdish Kurdish

I consider the first and third questions to be redundant : while a majority rejects foreign injection of weapons into the conflict, there is a strong correlation between support for a given side and desire to see it armed… Though two government-side supporters want arms for the FSA and one government-side supporter wants them for ‘anyone who opposes the Assad regime’ – remember what I said about the data ?

Who, if anyone should the United States, France and Britain arm ? Who do you support in the Syrian Civil War ? No-one FSA through Supreme Military Council SAA Kurds Anyone who opposes the Assad regime Government 108 2 9 1 Kurdish 17 4 5 Neutral 69 7 1 1 Rebel 49 53 1

Now, let’s perform the cross tabulation that I came here for :

Do you believe there can be a political solution to the conflict ? Who do you support in the Syrian Civil War ? Certainly Very likely Likely Maybe Unlikely Very unlikely Impossible Government 10 4 19 21 32 21 13 Neutral 8 4 7 12 20 20 8 Rebel 3 2 3 16 22 45 12 Kurdish 2 3 8 8 4

From that chart lets graph the proportion of supporters of each aggregate party for the total of each political solution likelihood answer class :

From this representation, I make the following observations:

Neutrals and supporters of factions aligned with the government are slightly more likely to believe in the likelihood of a political solution

Kurds and other rebels are more likely to find a political solution highly unlikely

Those could be interesting hypothesis to test in a wider and more disciplined survey… So, more than ever, the real conclusion is : moar data !

The worksheet I produced this from is available here but, again I must emphasize how lacking the raw material is.