ABC News has new and remarkably thorough report available on their website on public opinion in Afghanistan (see here for the accompanying article discussing the report). This could undoubtedly represent quite a treasure trove of data for anyone studying this topic, which then led me to the question of whether there were actually any political scientists working on this topic. I did a quick Google Scholar search of “Afghanistan” and “Public Opinion” and couldn’t find anything, so I would like to invite readers of The Monkey Cage to comment if they know of any relevant papers or article. In particular, I’d be very interested in any studies of the reliability of the polls referenced in the ABC report.
On to the substance of the report, there are really a lot of interesting topics covered – and in most cases time series data are provided – including attitudes toward security and the US forces in the country, beliefs about corruption generally and fraud in the most recent presidential elections, and even questions on topics such as whether women should be allowed to work disaggregated by demographic characteristics of the respondents. But two of the most eye-catching results are as follows:
Here we can see that there has been a rather dramatic increase in Afghans’ optimism about the future essentially since US President Obama took office in January of 2009. Note that this appears to be both a short term optimism about one’s own life as well as a more long term optimism about the hope for one’s childrens’ lives.
Also interesting is the fact that there seems to be a reversal in blame for the violence in Afghanistan. A year ago, slightly more than a third of Afghans felt the US/NATO forces were primarily to blame for the violence while only slightly more than a quarter blamed the Taliban. Now more than twice as many people (42% – 17%) blame the Taliban as blame the US/NATO forces.
As mentioned previously, it would be great to know if anyone had any research on the reliability of these figures.
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Here is a short post from a (I believe) PhD student at the University of Chicago:
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/22481
Actually, here’s a more updated take on your question from today’s HuffPo:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/13/afghanistan-experts-doubt_n_422482.html
you might be interested in the work by some colleagues of mine at free university berlin.
http://www.sfb-governance.de/publikationen/sfbgov_wp/wp7_en/SFB_700_Working_Paper_No__7.pdf
http://www.bmz.de/en/service/infothek/evaluation/BMZEvaluierungsberichte/BMZ_Eval-028e_web.pdf
Any specifc ideas on the change in attitudes other thean general reference to Obama now being president.
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