Coalition management is challenging, especially during the agenda-setting stage. The prime minister has to balance the priorities of the coalition partners, ministers from her party, and broader government priorities. To meet this challenge, the prime minister has agenda-setting power. Most research has studied the agenda-setting power during periods of stability. This paper asks how a crisis affects prime ministers' use of agenda-setting power by looking at the use of one discretionary agenda-setting rule: amending the agenda at the last minute. We use unique data from Israeli cabinet meetings over a period of 21 years and three crises, comparing prime ministers' last-minute changes to the agenda. We find that prime ministers are less inclined to change the agenda at the last minute during crises, and when they do so, this power is often, but not exclusively, deployed for crisis management. These findings suggest that crisis decreases the pressures exerted by prime ministers' party members and coalition partners, allowing prime ministers more latitude to promote their priorities without recourse to manipulation. The findings underscore the importance of coalition dynamics, coalition management, and agenda setting for crisis management.

Recent studies portray civil servants as potential guardians against populist attempts to undermine liberal democracy. However in polarized societies, bureaucrats, like citizens, tend to hold divergent perceptions of the threat that politicians’ actions pose to democracy. This, in turn, likely shapes bureaucrats’ responses. We examine this in the context of the attempt by Israel’s extreme right-wing populist government to curtail the powers and independence of the Israeli Supreme Court and replace legal advisors with political appointees (hereafter the “legal overhaul”). We employ a mixed-methods design, combining a survey, interviews, and a focus group with career civil servants, showing that those who perceive the legal overhaul as a threat to democracy are more inclined to exit government and less likely to voice and exert effort at work. These findings are attributed to respondents’ views of the legal overhaul as leading to future politicization, curtailed influence, and a threat to their role as civil servants.

Establishing and maintaining citizen trust is vital for the effectiveness and long-term viability of regulatory agencies. However, limited empirical research has been conducted on the relationship between regulatory action and citizen trust. This article addresses this gap by investigating the influence of various regulatory enforcement styles on citizen trust. We conducted a pre-registered and representative survey experiment in six countries (n = 5,765): Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, and Norway. Our study focuses on three key dimensions of enforcement style: formalism, coerciveness, and accommodation. We hypothesize that a strict and punitive enforcement style with minimal accommodation will enhance citizen trust. Surprisingly, we found no overall effect of enforcement on trust. However, specifically high levels of formalism (strictness) and coerciveness (punitiveness) exhibited a small positive effect on trust. Furthermore, we observed no discernible impact of an accommodative enforcement style. Additional analyses revealed that the effects of enforcement style were not consistent across country and regulatory domains. This suggests we need to reconsider assumptions underlying enforcement theory, as our findings imply that public trust seems less conditional on heavy-handed enforcement than initially anticipated.

This article examines whether and how an exogenous crisis affects citizens' attraction to government employment. Employing a panel survey with Israeli respondents, before and after Hamas' October 7 attack, we examine the change in their sector preferences and its association with trust in government, PSM, and partisanship. We find a moderate increase in respondents' preferences to work in government, alongside a larger increase in their preference to work in nonprofits. An increase in PSM underlies respondents' enhanced attraction to nonprofits. Additionally, the war amplifies the weight respondents assign to trust in government and PSM when choosing between government and nonprofits.

The global experience of political polarization, and politicians' attacks on democratic institutions, render individuals' identification with the governing coalition, or with its opposition, a likely antecedent of their attraction to work in government. This article examines to what extent individuals' partisan alignment with the governing coalition, and perceptions of its actions as a threat to democracy, shapes attraction to government jobs. Findings are based on a two-stage survey with 1861 Israeli panel respondents, aged 21–30, carried out during the government's attempt to undermine the legal system (hereafter: the Judicial Overhaul), and a follow-up survey experiment with 1211 of the respondents. Against the politically neutral explanations of previous research, we show that partisan alignment affects the propensity to choose a job in a government ministry versus other sectors. We find mixed evidence in support of the proposition that perceptions of the Judicial Overhaul as a threat to democracy underlie this effect.

Extant research has identified individual, organizational, and environmental level attributes that shape the variation in public managers’ external networking behavior. It theorized that public managers’ networking behavior is instrumentally motivated by resource deficiencies. We postulate that beyond motivation, managers’ and civil servants’ networking behavior is shaped by the structuring of opportunities for interaction ensuing from HRM policies and the spatial design of government offices. Employing a mixed-method blend of survey and focus groups with low- and mid-level Israeli civil servants in the first eight years of employment, we analyze whether and how opportunities, ensuing from their mode of recruitment and training, mobility between departments, and work at geographically central government offices enable their exchange with colleagues from other departments. We further show that underlying the association between opportunities for interaction and external networking behavior is civil servants’ sense of shared language and outlook and trust-based relations.

Current studies of citizens’ coping behaviors in public encounters lack a direct examination of what citizens say and how they say it. Moreover, despite the ubiquity of citizens’ written communications with the state, such interactions are seldom studied. This article contributes a relational approach to studies of citizens’ coping behaviors by developing a taxonomy and detailed operationalization of citizens’ communication styles in written public encounters. This taxonomy is based on an abductive content analysis of over 1,000 citizen web contacts to an Israeli welfare agency, mostly during coronavirus disease 2019. We show that citizens’ written communications differ in their inclination to espouse demanding, pleading, civil, or neutral styles. Additionally, we tentatively show that citizens’ subjective experiences of administrative burdens and trust in government are correlated with the variation in their communication styles. The taxonomy, its operationalization, and preliminary findings open up new avenues for studying citizens’ coping behaviors in written encounters.

The global experience of political polarization, and politicians’ attacks on democratic institutions, render individuals’ identification with the governing coalition, or with its opposition, a likely antecedent of their attraction to work for government organizations. This article examines to what extent individuals’ partisan alignmentwith the governing coalition, and perceptions of its actions as a threat to democracy, shape attraction to government jobs. Findings are based on a two-stage survey with 1,861 Israeli panel respondents, aged 21-30, carried out during the government’s attempt to undermine the legal system (hereafter: the Judicial Overhaul), and a follow-up survey experiment with 1,211of the respondents. Against the politically neutralexplanations of previous research, we showthat partisan alignment affects the propensity to choose a job in a government ministry versus other sectors. We find mixed evidence in support of the proposition that perceptions of the Judicial Overhaul as a threat to democracy underlie thiseffect.

Recent studies analyse bureaucrats’ responses to politicians’ engagement in unprincipled and illiberal policies, which are integral to democratic backsliding. Yet, in polarized societies, bureaucrats, due to their dual identities as government professionals and as citizens, are likely to hold divergent perceptions of the threat that politicians’ policies and actions pose to democracy. This, in turn, likely shapes their response, and thereby the extent to which they are likely to hinder or facilitate democratic backsliding. We examine this proposition in the context of Israel’s extreme right-wing coalition government’s attempt to curtail the powers and independence of the Supreme Court and replace government legal advisors selected on merit with political appointees (hereafter: the Legal Overhaul). We employ a mixed-methods design, combining a survey, interviews, and a focus group with civil servants in the Israeli central government. We find that civil servants who perceive the Legal Overhaul as a threat to Israel’s democracy report a higher inclination to exit government, and lower intentions to exercise their voice and to exert effort at work. Underlying these findings are respondents’ association of the Legal Overhaul with future politicization, and the threat posed to their conception of their role as civil servants.

This article examines whether, why and how inter-departmental networking behaviour enhances employees’ voice behaviour. Current literature suggests that employees’ willingness to voice ideas for improvement is contingent on managers creating an empowering and safe environment, yet external networking can also play a role by broadening employees’ horizons, alerting them to overlooked problems and providing them with access to alternative policy solutions and to strategic information regarding the position of other departments. Using a mixed-method of survey and focus groups, we show the association, and unpack the underlying mechanisms, between the intensity of public-sector employees’ networking with colleagues in other departments and their inclination to engage in voice behaviour