129 4 different from people who practice Islam. Amongst anti-flankers, more than 60 percent of the respondents answered that they perceive themselves as “completely different” from Muslims. Only 30 percent or less of respondents categorized as moderates and pro-flankers answered “completely different” to this question in the survey. On a whole, anti-flankers perceive themselves as significantly less similar to Muslims than moderates and pro-flankers. Pro-flankers perceive themselves as being the most similar to Muslims, even though the marginal mean-score does not differ significantly with the moderates using a 95 percent confidence interval. Figure 5. Do flankers and moderates perceive being similar to people who practice Islam? Does perceived similarity with people who practice Islam predict what voters expect of Muslim politicians towards same-sex adoption? I ran linear models amongst subsets of flankers and moderates with perceived similarity to all groups (see methods) as independent variables and expected policy position towards same-sex adoption as a dependent variable. The only statistically significant effect resulted from perceived similarity with people who practice Islam and expected policy positions towards samesex adoption amongst pro-flankers. The more they perceive themselves as similar to Muslims, the more likely they are to expect Muslim politicians are in favor of samesex adoption and vice versa: the more they perceive themselves as different from Muslims, the less likely they are to expect Muslim politicians to be in favor of samesex adoption. Given the academic debate over the endogenous relationship between
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