Draft:Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins is an American scholar of Middle Eastern politics based at Princeton University. He serves as project director of Arab Barometer, which is the longest standing and largest publicly available project tracking the beliefs and attitudes of citizens living in the Middle East and North Africa. Robbins earned his Bachelor's Degree in Foreign Service from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University followed by his PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan. He received the American Political Science Association Aaron Wildavsky Award for Best Dissertation in Religion and Politics Award. He has been a research fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center and a Research Associate at the Pew Research Center.

Robbins specializes in public opinion and survey methods with a particular focus on the Middle East and North Africa. He has published and presented extensively on the views of Arab publics, including views of democracy, support for political Islam, trust in government, economic conditions, and youth, among other topics. Additionally, he has been a leader in improving data quality in non-Western contexts, having written extensively on means to prevent data fabrication and to detect low-quality interviews during survey fieldwork. These efforts resulted in his appointment as an author of the joint American Association for Public Opinion Research / World Association for Public Opinion Task Force on Quality in Comparative Surveys designed to set forth best practices for survey research practices.

His work and research are frequently covered by major media outlets, including the BBC World Service, The Economist, CNN, CNN International, Science Magazine, the Times of London, Der Spiegel, and the Washington Post,   among others, to discuss a wide range of issues relating to the Middle East and survey methodology.

Robbins is a member of the Board of Directors of the Santa Fe Opera, the Lensic Center for the Performing Arts, and Global Santa Fe.

Publications

 * What Palestinians Really Think of Hamas. (2023). Foreign Affairs.
 * Why Democracy Stalled in the Middle East. (2022). Foreign Affairs.
 * Improving data quality in face-to-face survey research. (2020). PS: Political Science & Politics.
 * New frontiers in detecting data fabrication. (2018). In Advances in Comparative Survey Methods: Multicultural, Multinational and Multiregional Contexts. Wiley Press.
 * Youth, Religion and Democracy After the Arab Uprisings: Evidence from the Arab Barometer. (2017). The Muslim World.
 * The ascendance of official Islams. (2017). Democracy and Security.
 * Don't get duped: Fraud through duplication in public opinion surveys. (2016). Statistical Journal of the IAOS.
 * The state of social justice in the Arab world: the Arab uprisings of 2011 and beyond. (2016). Contemporary Readings in Law & Social Justice.
 * After the Arab Spring: People still want democracy. (2015). Journal of Democracy.
 * Political System Preferences of Arab Publics. (2014). In The Arab Uprisings Explained. Columbia University Press.
 * The rise of official Islam in Jordan. (2013). Politics, Religion & Ideology.
 * The effect of elections on public opinion toward democracy: Evidence from longitudinal survey research in Algeria. (2012). Comparative Political Studies.
 * New findings on Arabs and democracy. (2012). Journal of Democracy.
 * Tunisians voted for jobs, not Islam. (2011). Foreign Policy.
 * What leads some ordinary Arab men and women to approve of terrorist acts against the United States? (2007). Journal of Conflict Resolution.