Mass Dissimulation in the Syrian Civil War

Why do civilians falsify their loyalties in civil wars? Government and rebel forces often seek popular collaboration for their wartime efforts, but civilian victimization encourages dissimulation as people seek safety when everyone’s loyalties are suspect. This article uses a list experiment embedded in two surveys of displaced Syrians in Lebanon, to examine popular support for the two most brutal belligerents in the Syrian civil war: the incumbent regime and jihadi rebels. These data reveal systematic dissimulation across the political spectrum as different constituencies misrepresent themselves in different ways. The list experiment demonstrates large overstatements of support for the incumbent and smaller understatements of support for the jihadis, with misrepresentation concentrating among self-declared government and rebel sympathizers, respectively. It also reveals that jihadi support is so sensitive that it breaks the list experiment among nonrebels, whose nonsense answers indicate the desire to avoid suspicion of harboring extremist sympathies.