Replication of "How Threats of Exclusion Mobilize Palestinian Political Participation"
Weiss et al. (2023) study the effect of Trump’s peace plan announcement on Palestinian political participation, arguing that a threat of exclusion mobilizes minorities. Their study includes: (1) social media analysis showing differential treatment effects, (2) a difference-in-differences (DiD) analysis of voter turnout, and (3) a DiD analysis of social movement registrations. First, we reproduce their analysis in R and find no substantial errors. Second, we check the parallel trends assumption more rigorously and find that it does not unequivocally hold. Third, we conduct a series of robustness and sensitivity checks, ultimately demonstrating that different definitions of the treatment group and an outcome variable alter the results significantly. Although the results generally support the authors’ main argument, our replication raises questions about expanding their grievance mechanism. Our findings indicate that ambiguous and weak threats are more likely to result in institutionalized political participation, while explicit and strong threats tend to mobilize non-institutionalized political participation.