Replication Data for: Sectarian Framing in the Syrian Civil War

How do civilians respond to civil war narratives? Do they react to ethnic frames more strongly than to alternatives? Governments and rebels battle for hearts and minds as well as strategic terrain, and winning the narrative war can shift legitimacy, popular support, and material resources to the sympathetically framed side. We examine the effect of one-sided and competing war discourses on ordinary people's understandings of the Syrian civil war -- a conflict with multiple narratives, but which has become more communal over time. We conduct a framing experiment with a representative sample of Syrian refugees in Lebanon in which we vary the narrative that describes the reasons for the conflict. We find that sectarian explanations, framed in isolation, strongly increase the importance government supporters place on fighting. When counterframed against competing narratives, however, the rallying effect of sectarianism drops and vanishes.平民如何回应内战叙事？他们是否会对族裔框架产生相较于其他叙事框架更强的反应？政府与反叛势力不仅争夺战略要地，更展开攻心之战；赢得叙事话语权，可将合法性、民众支持与物质资源倾斜至契合该叙事框架的一方。本研究考察单边叙事与竞争性战争话语对普通民众认知叙利亚内战的影响——这场冲突本就存在多重叙事，且随时间推移愈发凸显社群对立特质。我们针对黎巴嫩境内的叙利亚难民代表性样本开展框架实验，通过调整关于冲突起因的叙事内容设置实验变量。研究发现，单独呈现教派主义解释框架时，会显著提升政府支持者对参战行动的重视程度。但当该框架与竞争性叙事形成对冲时，教派主义所带来的动员效应便会减弱直至消失。