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.

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.

Affective polarization measures account for partisans’ feelings towards their own party versus its opponent(s), but not for how likely partisans are to encounter co-partisans versus out-partisans. However, the intensity of out-party dislike and the probability with which this comes into play both determine the social impact of cross-party hostility. We develop an affective fractionalization measure that accounts for both factors, and apply it to longitudinal survey data from 20 Western publics. From this perspective, countries with fewer dominant parties may be more harmonious because partisans have lower probabilities of interacting with political opponents. At the party level, partisans of smaller, more radical parties are particularly troubled because they strongly dislike out-partisans and have few co-partisans. Affective fractionalization has increased in most Western publics over time, primarily because of growing party-system fragmentation.

These are challenging times for journalists’ relationship with their audiences. Attacks against “the media” and the increasing weaponization of social media to harass journalists have drawn the attention of scholars worldwide. In the current climate, journalists are not only distrusted but also hated, which creates a series of distinct ramifications. In this article, we suggest a new framework to study journalists–audiences relationship, particularly in times of hostile populism: the imagined journalists approach. A mirror image of the much-studied concept of imagined audiences, imagined journalists refers to the entirety of ideas, feelings, stereotypes, and imaginaries that audiences hold regarding their imagined news producers. It brings together the research on media trust, audiences’ perceptions, antimedia populism, and the emotional turn in journalism—to generate a comprehensive understanding of people’s criticisms, narratives, and priorities. We demonstrate the potential of this approach by analyzing 1,215 responses to an open-ended question regarding journalists’ traits in Israel in 2021. Employing qualitative and quantitative analyses, we find that: (a) right-wing and pro-populist voters hold more negative views of journalists, as expected; (b) voters express three different types of criticism of journalists (professional, personal, and national)—only one of which directly relates to their professional conduct; (c) different types of voters express different types of criticism; and (d) while objectivity and bias remain main concerns, democracy is not a dominant factor in respondents’ thinking on journalists. These findings contribute theoretically and methodologically to future research in the field, as well as to urgent attempts to improve our information environment.

Measures of affective polarization—that is, dislike and hostility across party lines—have been developed and validated in the context of America’s two-party system. Yet increasingly, affective polarization is examined comparatively. We address this issue by introducing a novel dataset that measures aspects of partisan affect in 10 countries with diverse party systems. We detect associations between partisan affect toward out-parties versus affect toward out-parties’ supporters, but their strength varies across countries. We discuss measurement reasons for this variation and consider the implications of our findings for the emerging comparative affective polarization literature.

While dislike of opposing parties, that is, affective polarization, is a defining feature of contemporary politics, research on this topic largely centers on the United States. We introduce an approach that analyzes affective polarization between pairs of parties, bridging the US two-party system and multiparty systems in other democracies. Analyzing survey data from twenty Western democracies since the mid-1990s, first, we show that partisans' dislike of out-parties is linked to elite policy disagreements on economic issues and, increasingly over time, also to cultural issues. Secondly, we argue and empirically demonstrate that governing coalition partners in parliamentary democracies display much warmer feelings toward each other than we would expect based on elite policy (dis)agreements. Third, we show that radical right parties are disliked much more intensely than we would expect based on policy disputes and coalition arrangements. These findings highlight the policy-based and institutional underpinnings of affective polarization.

In January 2023, massive protests erupted in Israel against the right-wing government's proposed reforms to restructure the country's democracy--reforms that mirror the types of institutional changes that populist parties on the right in Hungary and Poland have used to steer their countries away from liberal democracy. Concern that the proposed reforms would lead to a concentration of power in the executive and a weakening of the courts sparked protests throughout Israel. These protests in turn led to the suspension of the proposed reforms. Analysis suggests that the erosion of democracy is driven by conservative elites rather than far-right parties. Likud, the establishment center-right party, exhibits intense populism but its voters do not overwhelmingly reject liberal democracy. Israel's case highlights the need to consider both mass and elite attitudes and challenges traditional distinctions in understanding democratic backsliding.

Sociological research on online discourse increasingly uses digital data consisting of messages combining multiple modes of media, with meaning arising from contents’ interaction across modes. Yet, techniques to study this interplay are underdeveloped relative to the toolkit for analyzing solely texts. The authors introduce an automated approach for relationally analyzing texts and images, focusing on how to examine the discursive meaning emerging from concepts’ connections across associated text and image modes. The authors validate this approach using a crowdsourced task and obtain results suggesting that applying social network metrics to semantic space can generate useful insights into how people understand discourse. To illustrate this approach, the authors examine the concept of “securitization” in online white supremacist discourse. The findings indicate that ideas of securitization link notions of personalistic leadership with imagery of space and place. This analysis demonstrates how the authors’ approach helps researchers understand multimodal material and meaning-making in digital discourse.

Comparative politics scholars argue that consensual democratic institutions encourage power-sharing that promotes “kinder, gentler” politics. We uncover one reason why this is the case: elite inter-party cooperation in consensual systems is associated with reduced inter-party hostility in the mass public. This is because governing parties’ supporters feel much more warmly toward their coalition partner(s) than we can explain based on policy agreement alone. Moreover, these warm affective evaluations linger long after the coalition itself has dissolved. We substantiate our arguments via analyses of CSES survey data from 19 Western democracies between 1996 and 2017, showing that current and past co-governance is associated with substantially warmer inter-party affective evaluations. This implies that electoral systems which encourage coalition governance may defuse partisan hostility.

Concern over partisan resentment and hostility has increased across Western democracies. Despite growing attention to affective polarization, existing research fails to ask whether who serves in office affects mass-level interparty hostility. Drawing on scholarship on women’s behavior as elected representatives and citizens’ beliefs about women politicians, we posit the women MPs affective bonus hypothesis: all else being equal, partisans display warmer affect toward out-parties with higher proportions of women MPs. We evaluate this claim with an original dataset on women’s presence in 125 political parties in 20 Western democracies from 1996 to 2017 combined with survey data on partisans’ affective ratings of political opponents. We show that women’s representation is associated with lower levels of partisan hostility and that both men and women partisans react positively to out-party women MPs. Increasing women’s parliamentary presence could thus mitigate cross-party hostility.