Do extreme security threats reduce affective polarization? While one line of research suggests that external threats increase domestic unity, recent work has emphasized the durability of partisan affect even following violent events. We examine this question in the Israeli case, testing whether partisan animosity decreased following the October 7, 2023, attack and the ensuing war in Gaza. Analyses of panel and cross-sectional survey data show that affective polarization has been highly persistent during these extreme security threats: measured with both feeling thermometers and social distance items, affective polarization did not decrease throughout the period examined. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for understanding the durability of political animosity.

National identity is a powerful force in contemporary politics, but its effects vary across contexts. This chapter synthesizes research on how national identity shapes economic and political outcomes when it competes with other group identities. We employ a conceptual framework in which individuals weigh national identity against alternative identities such as economic class, ethnicity, partisanship, and supranational affiliations. The relative salience of these identities determines attitudes and behaviors across multiple domains. We review evidence across five main areas. In international trade, we examine how national identity affects consumer behavior, policy preferences, and trade wars. In redistribution politics, we review how competition between national and class identities shapes welfare preferences, and how ethnic diversity and immigration affect redistribution. In conflict settings, we analyze how national identification influences both civil war and ethnic violence within countries, and military conflict between nations. We examine how nationalist parties translate preferences into policy once in power, covering immigration, welfare chauvinism, family and fertility policies, and foreign affairs. Finally, we discuss whether shared national identity can reduce partisan polarization. Two general lessons emerge. First, national identity shapes political and economic outcomes far beyond populism, xenophobia, and immigration. Second, understanding the political-economy implications of national identity requires identifying the salient alternative identities with which it competes in each setting, and analyzing when it dominates in equilibrium. This helps assess when national identity is likely to support free trade or induce trade wars, increase or decrease support for redistribution, intensify or prevent conflict, unite or divide partisans.

Immediately after the swearing-in of Netanyahu’s sixth government at the end of 2022, Justice Minister Yariv Levin presented a comprehensive plan to reshape the foundations of the regime in Israel. How can the concern about his plan and the strong reactions it provoked in the Israeli public be explained? To what extent is this a political struggle unique to Israel? And what are the common characteristics between it and the threats to democracy in other countries? In this essay, Prof. Yaniv Roznai and Prof. Noam Gidron combine legal and political perspectives to examine Israel’s democratic backsliding and to explain the challenges facing Israeli democracy. The essay points to the strengthening of populism and polarization as two trends that together undermine the democratic order in Israel. The authors examine the deep-seated processes and the weakness of the institutional structures that brought us to the constitutional crisis of 2023-2026.

We examine who mobilizes against democratic backsliding, focusing on mass protests against the judicial overhaul advanced by the Israeli government in 2023. As contemporary subversion of democracy is often driven by governments that won an electoral majority, we posit that protesting against the government's actions requires people to have a thick conception of democracy that goes beyond majority rule. Drawing on panel data collected before and after the overhaul's announcement, we show that citizens vary substantially in their conception of democracy, and that a thick conception not only predicts protesting against backsliding but also moderates the role of other key factors in mobilizing against democratic erosion. The findings highlight the role of small-d democrats in safeguarding democracy.

We review the literature on how affective polarization levels are related to economic conditions including unemployment and income inequality, and to economic policy debates over such issues as tax policy and government intervention in the economy. Both economic conditions and economic policy debates are consistently associated with affective polarization, although over the past decade, polarization is more strongly associated with cultural issue debates over national identity and immigration than with purely economic debates – patterns that we substantiate via empirical analyses that update earlier findings on this topic.

Concerns over democratic backsliding have proliferated recently, as elected politicians have sought to undermine democratic checks and balances. This study examines the underpinnings of public support for democratic backsliding, delineating five theoretical explanations: personalistic leadership, affective polarization, populism, majoritarianism, and entanglement with the legal system. We test the explanatory power of these accounts within the Israeli context, leveraging panel survey data collected before and after the government announced its plan to curtail the courts. Results indicate that support for the plan is best explained by two forces: prior attachment to the leader heading the backsliding effort and animosity toward partisan opponents. Notably, populist attitudes are not associated with support for the government's plan. The theoretical framework and longitudinal research design help explain who supports democratic backsliding.

The 2022 Israeli elections stand out as a turning point in the country’s political history. Following a period of unprecedented political instability, the right-wing government formed following the elections—Benjamin Netanyahu's sixth government—was the most radical in Israel’s history.This book examines the 2022 Israeli elections through various theoretical perspectives and diverse research designs and data sources. The first part scrutinizes various aspects of Israeli democracy related to the elections. These include ideological and affective polarization, cleavages, voter turnout, involvement of citizens and civil organizations in election campaigns and the nature of the government that was established following the elections. The second part of the book presents studies of parties that participated in the elections: those that declined (Labor), those that ascended (Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit), and those that ascertained their power (United Torah Judaism and Shas). A valuable addition to the Elections in Israel series, the book—written by leading scholars of Israeli politics and society—touches on key themes, including political personalization, polarization, populism, the radical right, party decline and adaptation and democratic backsliding.The book will be of particular interest to students and researchers of Israeli politics and society—especially relating to the events of 2023 and the war in Gaza—as well as to social scientists interested in these political phenomena and their effects on democratic countries worldwide.

In recent years, increasing levels of political polarization in Israel have become a major source of concern. But is there clear evidence of such increased polarization among ordinary Israelis? In this chapter, we present evidence from 30 years of public opinion surveys in Israel and examine trends in ideological polarization as well as affective polarization (i.e., dislike across party lines). We find that all in all, the Israeli public is not more ideologically polarized today than in the 1990s. In contrast, levels of affective polarization have increased since the late 2000s and reached a record high in 2022. We conclude with discussing the implications of our findings for the current challenges facing Israeli democracy.

There is a broad consensus that the ideological space of Western democracies consists of two distinct dimensions: one economic and the other cultural. In this Element, the authors explore how ordinary citizens make sense of these two dimensions. Analyzing novel survey data collected across ten Western democracies, they employ text analysis techniques to investigate responses to open-ended questions. They examine variations in how people interpret these two ideological dimensions along three levels of analysis: across countries, based on demographic features, and along the left-right divide. Their results suggest that there are multiple two-dimensional spaces: that is, different groups ascribe different meanings to what the economic and cultural political divides stand for. They also find that the two dimensions are closely intertwined in people's minds. Their findings make theoretical contributions to the study of electoral politics and political ideology.

While scholars document associations between competing parties’ policy disputes and citizens’ cross-party hostility, that is, affective polarization, we lack causal comparative evidence of how different types of ideological disagreements shape partisan affective evaluations. We investigate this issue with a priming experiment across ten Western publics, which prompts some respondents to answer questions inviting them to discuss debates over either cultural or economic issues versus a control group that receives a non-political prompt. Respondents in the economic and cultural priming conditions expressed greater distrust of out-partisans, and, among respondents who received cultural priming, those who discussed immigration in their open-ended responses expressed far more distrust towards opponents – an effect driven by right-wing respondents who discussed immigration. These findings provide comparative evidence that economic and cultural debates cause affective polarization, with immigration as a primary cultural driver.