Rebel groups employ a number of strategies beyond violence, and these alternative tactics are often thought to improve the reputation and legitimacy of rebel actors. How powerful states (and their publics) view rebels can affect their chances of international recognition, inclusion in peace talks, and whether they are eventually successful at achieving their objectives. This study employs two experiments to test the link between rebel tactics and opinions of these rebels held by external audiences. We examine the impact of six rebel behaviors on American public opinion: (a) nonviolent demonstrations, (b) nonviolent interventions (such as blockades and sit ins), (c) social noncooperation (such as hunger strikes), (d) terrorism, (e) stone throwing, and (f) the use of local democratic practice (elections) in rebel groups. We find that the use of elections within rebel actors, demonstrations, and hunger strikes improve positive perceptions of rebels, whereas rebel use of terrorism decreases support.

Introduction Rebel groups vary widely in the tactics they use to pursue political change, and they make these strategic choices weighing the pros and cons of specific tactics. Existing studies of contentious politics highlight the violent tactics rebel groups use (Salehyan et al., 2014; Thomas, 2014), as well as the consequences of these tactics (Stewart and Liou, 2017; Cohen, 2013). Different violent tactics can quickly bring new recruits (Stewart and Liou, 2017), increase local compliance (Kalyvas, 2006), and enhance group cohesion (Cohen, 2013). Yet, some violent tactics can decrease local civilian support in certain contexts (Lyall et al., 2013). Nonviolent tactics by rebels can lead to foreign recruitment or sponsorship (Coggins, 2014) or increase local civilian support (Flynn and Stewart, 2018). Many studies of tactical choice reflect an implicit (or at times explicit) belief that particular tactics will be viewed more or less favorably by both people on the ground and external observers (c.f. Chenoweth and Stephan (2011) on the legitimacy advantage of nonviolence), and that this favorability will translate into increased support for the actors using these tactics. Although a central part of arguments related to both violent and nonviolent tactics is how they elicit external perceptions (positive or negative), empirical work on this perceptual link remains limited. In this article, we employ two survey experiments to map the response of American public opinion to specific rebel group tactics, providing survey respondents with randomized informational text varying the tactics used by the rebel group and then comparing how much support they profess for the group and its leader. This research increases our understanding of tactical choice by focusing on a particular audience (American civilians) and employing experimental design to narrow the focus on tactics of rebel groups rather than other possible confounders. We advance the growing body of experimental work on tactics by testing several unique expectations. First, we examine the expectation that specific nonviolent tactics will lead to increased support for rebel actors, examining four discrete nonviolent tactics across two experiments. Second, we probe the link between violent tactics and external public support shown in other studies (c.f. Flynn and Stewart 2018), but examine an additional lower-intensity tactic—stone throwing. Third, we look more specifically at “democratic” tactics, arguing that rebel use of the democratic process can increase support for the group from an American audience. To our knowledge, this is first experimental analysis that examines internal political process within rebel actors and public perceptions of these rebels. In the first experiment (Study 1), we recruited a national online sample and examined how various tactics of resistance influence support for rebel groups amongst an American public.1 We found that nonviolent tactics (such as demonstrations) increase support for rebel groups and the use of terrorism by rebel groups decreases support. We find that rebels’ use of elections internally is also associated with increased support for the rebel group. In the second experiment (Study 2), we focused explicitly on three contentious nonviolent tactics: demonstrations, nonviolent interventions (including blockades and sit ins), and social noncooperation (hunger strikes) to further explore the relationship between nonviolent tactics and support amongst an American public. Study 2 provides additional support for our expectations that nonviolent tactics (specifically hunger strikes and demonstrations) increase support for rebel actors.

Two experimental studies Our two experiments are oriented around the tactics and behavior by rebel actors. The actors of interest are engaged in ongoing disputes with the government that have led to casualties and constitute a challenge to the status quo. While often defined by their use of attacks against the state, “rebel” actors use a variety of violent tactics and these actors are defined and conceptualized in varying ways in the literature (c.f. Kalyvas and Balcells, 2010). Yet, rebel groups also engage in many behaviors that are not violent, including nonviolent direct action (Cunningham et al., 2017), providing public goods (Heger and Jung, 2017), and judicial processes (Binningsbø and Loyle, 2018). By framing the experiment about actors already considered “rebels,” we provide a hard test of the effect of tactics and behaviors that may increase positive external public opinion.4 We used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) online recruitment platform to conduct our first experiment on public perceptions. This platform is frequently used in social science experimental survey research (Huff and Tingley, 2015), because it offers a cost-effective way to recruit a participant pool that is more representative of the United States (U.S.) population than in-person convenience samples (Berinsky et al., 2012). Although MTurk samples tend to be younger, more educated, and more liberal than the general U.S. population (Huff and Tingley, 2015), they typically show similar effects in direction, significance, and magnitude in comparison to studies using nationally representative samples (Mullinix et al., 2015). We conducted Study 1 in April 2017 and all participants were at least 18 years old, could read and write in English, lived in the U.S., had a satisfactory completion percentage of 96%+, and had completed more than 500 MTurk tasks. Participants were compensated on completion. We also collected demographic data on age, ideology, gender, education, and income. As expected with random assignment, chi-squared tests show that demographic characteristics were not statistically correlated with any of the experimental groups and the demographics of our participants are similar to other MTurk studies. We present the demographic breakdown and measures by experimental group in Online Appendix A. We conducted Study 2 using students enrolled in political science courses at the University of Maryland in spring 2018. Although university students offer a less representative sample than our first study, we were better able to standardize the environment in which the participants completed the study. We embedded both survey experiments in Qualtrics and asked participants to read a short “news story” (constructed by the authors) about potential ceasefire accords between a rebel group and a government. Study 1 used the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and the government of Ukraine; Study 2 focused on the Afar group versus the government of Ethiopia. Varying the groups and regions used allowed us to assess the generalizability of our findings. We constructed the stories to look like BBC news articles to increase believability and external validity. All stories state similar background information on the conflict.5 We then experimentally manipulated the types of tactics used by the rebel group to determine how various tactics influence support for the rebel group and the government. Participants in Study 1 were randomly assigned to one of the following treatments: (a) control (no mention of specific strategies); (b) terrorism, (c) stone throwing at cars, windows, and people; (d) elections carried out by the group; (e) small and large demonstrations; (f) nonviolent interventions, such as sit ins, occupations, or blockades; or (g) social noncooperation tactics, such as hunger strikes and self-immolation.6 The “news story” each group received in Study 1 was identical except for the tactic used by the rebel group. Study 2 focused explicitly on nonviolent tactics, and participants were randomly assigned to one of the following treatments: (a) control; (b) small and large demonstrations; (c) nonviolent interventions (blockades and sit ins); and (d) social noncooperation tactics (hunger strikes). The stimuli in Study 2 were mostly similar to Study 1 stimuli except that we provided specific details about the tactics in these “news stories” to mirror the type of information news outlets include in their coverage of these types of stories. For example, the demonstrations vignette included that supporters “initiated a peace march throughout” the capital city of Addis Ababa “to create awareness” and “chant[ed] slogans and wav[ed] banners in the demonstration” to pressure government leaders. We did this to determine if specific types of nonviolent direct action mattered differently. In contrast to Study 1, we eliminated any mention of self-immolation to isolate the effects of a particular form of social noncooperation (hunger strikes). We did this because there is disagreement as to whether self-immolation counts as a form of nonviolence among nonviolent activists. All news stories are available in Online Appendix B and Online Appendix D. The experimental questions are available in Online Appendix C and Online Appendix E. In the online experiment, we recruited 1533 participants to complete the study and the number of participants in each treatment ranged from 214 to 221. In the laboratory study, we recruited 459 participants to complete the study, and the number of participants in each treatment ranged from 114 to 115. The number of participants per group is shown in Table 1. Table 1. Participants in each experimental condition. View larger version After reading the “news story,” participants answer the dependent variable questions. These questions assess participant attitudes towards the rebel group and its leader, by asking them to rate them on a five-point scale. The group question reads: “What is your overall opinion of the Donetsk People’s Republic?”7 and respondents can select: very favorable, favorable, neutral, unfavorable, or very unfavorable. The leader assessment is the same but with the leader named in the article replacing the group name. Question order is randomized to eliminate any potential order effects. In addition to standard demographic questions, we include an attention check question.

Conclusion Experimental analysis allows us to isolate the effects of rebel behavior and tactics on external public opinion. Select other studies have addressed both local and external public opinion about rebel behavior. This study contributes to that growing research agenda by examining a novel set of tactics, including distinct nonviolent actions and internal democratic process. Our results suggest a strong role for rebel elections in eliciting positive perceptions of the group and the rebel leader. Nonviolent tactics also increase favorability of respondents, but there appear to be nuances across types of nonviolence. Terrorism leads to negative favorability of both rebel groups and their leaders. Positive public opinion in powerful states can be a key part of rebel group success. Rebel groups court external public opinion (Bob, 2005), and there is increasing evidence that foreign policy may be more firmly rooted in public opinion than previously believed (Kertzer and Zeitzoff, 2017). Demonstrating the link between rebel behavior and external public opinion provides important evidence for the idea that what rebels do beyond violence can play a central role in their success. This is an area rich for future research into other tactics and their impacts on external public opinion, on how closely rebel leadership monitors and responds to these public attitudes, and on the variety of different support patterns between diasporas (and other external publics) and rebel groups.

Acknowledgements The authors thank the editors and reviewers for their constructive feedback, as well as Megan Stewart and Sarah Croco. Thanks to Antione Banks for supporting the project through the University of Maryland Government and Politics Research Laboratory.

Declaration of Conflicting Interest

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. ORCID iD

Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7495-5972 Supplemental materials

The supplemental files are available at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/2053168019877032 The replication files are available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/OQ7EA8

Notes 1.

Pre-registered through Evidence in Government and Politics (EGAP) (20170413AB). 2.

Future work on tactical choice could explore the ways that different contexts, tactical requirements, and perceptions of efficacy effect external public opinion. 3.

This study is centered on domestic public opinion, and shows that inclusion of provisions that appear to legitimize rebels in peace deals leads to negative public opinion of the deal. This differs from our examination of elections because they are focused on elections that grant power at the center, and we are focused on internal process within rebels. 4.

In a 2002 survey, less than half the U.S. respondents expressed support of U.S. troops being used to “bring peace to a region where there is civil war” (Hostli, 2004: 275). This sentiment is perhaps even stronger after the terror attack of 9/11 and concerns about rebel use of terrorism (ibid, 97). 5.

We included estimates of loss of life and the role that intense military hostilities contributed to a breakdown in the rule of law in both studies. 6.

This menu of tactics in informed by Thomas (2014) and Cunningham et al. (2017). 7.

Adapted from “What is your overall opinion of Ukraine? Is it favorable, mostly favorable, mostly unfavorable, or very unfavorable?” Gallup Organization, 8 February to 11 February 2015 http://news.gallup.com/poll/1642/russia.aspx.

Carnegie Corporation of New York Grant

This publication was made possible (in part) by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.