The Soviet Union and National Liberation Movements in the Third World (1988) is a systematic comparison of Soviet theory about, and actual behaviour toward, movements for national liberation in the Third World. In this definitive study, Professor Golan demonstrates that Soviet behaviour toward such movements is consistent with Soviet theory as stated in the writings and speeches of high-level influential within the Party, military and academic communities. In so doing, she advances our understanding of the ‘rules of thumb’ that Soviet leaders appeared to follow in deciding whether and how to assist the varied types of ‘anti-imperialist’ and separatist movements in the developing world. The first part of the book provides a detailed analysis of the various schools of thought among Soviet writers concerning different aspects of national liberation movements, and the second part analyses actual Soviet behaviour toward numerous movements around the world.

Affective polarization is increasingly studied comparatively, and virtually all studies that do so operationalize it using the feeling thermometer. Yet this survey instrument has not yet been validated in a multi-party context. We argue that for the thermometer to be a valid measure of partisan affect also in multi-party systems, it needs to capture sentiment towards partisans and to correlate with other measures of affective polarization. Using panel study fielded throughout Israel’s elections in 2019–2020, we show that both requirements hold. We use text analysis to substantiate that thermometer scores reflect sentiment towards party supporters, and demonstrate that they go hand-in-hand with preferences for social distance and discrimination in economic games. We discuss implications for the study of affective polarization.

Support for populist radical right parties in Europe has dramatically increased in the twenty-first century. We decompose the rise of the populist radical right between 2005-2020 into four components: changes in party positions, changes in voter characteristics (demographics and opinions), changes in voters' priorities, and a residual. We merge data on party positions from the Comparative Manifesto Project with data on voter characteristics from the Integrated Value Survey. Using a probabilistic voting model, we estimate voting priorities: the parameters of the utility function, which determine the weights voters place on different party positions, given their characteristics. We find that shifts in party positions and changes in voter characteristics explain only a negligible part of the rise of the populist radical right. Instead, the main driver behind the success of populist radical right parties lies in voters' changing priorities: voters---mainly older, non-unionized low-educated males---increasingly place a higher priority on cultural issues compared to economic issues. This allows populist radical right parties to tap into a preexisting reservoir of culturally conservative voters.

The hyper-election period of 2019–21 marked the climax of Benjamin Netanyahu’s rule and with it the transformation of the Israeli party-system. While most commentators read the political situation as personalisation of the ‘Yes Bibi’/‘No Bibi’ polarisation, this article argues that ideological analysis is necessary to understand the dynamics of the four elections and their structural effects. It argues that the dominant issue on the left/right continuum over the past 50 years – the Palestinian-Israeli conflict – gave way to an internal cleavage between Israel’s nature as a ‘Jewish and democratic state’. Netanyahu’s trial only intensified the National Camp’s thesis of the Deep State, accusing the Left, the civil service and the judicial system of being ‘undemocratic’ and condescending of ‘the people’s will’ while the centre-left bloc defended the ‘Jewish and democratic’ Israel, accusing the Right of offering a ‘Halachic state’. Thus, while the Right emphasised the Jewish people, and Netanyahu’s natural partners were the religious and Haredi parties, the centre-left bloc focused on ‘Israel before all’ (to use the newly formed Blue-and-White party’s slogan). Ideological realignment is thus the key to understanding the changes in Israeli party-system.

The regulation of market activity has been largely dominated by governmental command-and-control regulatory design (C&C), which was seen as the safest way to protect the public from potential harm by firms. In recent years, in an effort to move to more relaxed and less burdensome regulation, alternative regulatory tools have been developed, tools that rely on firms or other private actors in the various stages of regulation (self, or smart, regulation). Since these alternatives present a reduction in the extent to which the government regulates markets, they could have a negative impact on citizens’ trust in firms and willingness to use them, especially when it comes to new technologies that could pose a risk to users. Using two experimental surveys (n = 1,195), we examine the extent to which different regulatory designs affect citizens’ willingness to trust a firm in the field of financial technologies (Fintech). The results show that trust in the firm decreases with alternatives to traditional state regulation. However, when trust in the regulator is high, then trust in the regulated firm increases even when an altentaive to C&C is introduced and the regulator relies on pledges, suggesting that the path to relieving regulatory burden lies in increasing the trustworthiness of public regulators.

Affective polarization measures account for partisans’ feelings towards their own party versus its opponent(s), irrespective of how frequently partisans encounter co-partisans versus out-partisans in everyday interactions and public discourse. However, the social impact of cross-party hostility depends on both the intensity of dislike and the frequency with which this comes into play. We develop an affective fractionalization measure that accounts for both factors and apply it to longitudinal survey data from 20 Western publics. This fractionalization perspective implies that the partisans in countries with fewer dominant parties – notably the United States – may interact less frequently with out-partisans, which might cushion the negative social impact of inter-party animosity. At the party level, partisans of smaller and more radical parties are particularly isolated because they strongly dislike out-partisans but are highly likely to interact with them. Over time, affective fractionalization has increased in most countries, partly due to rising cross-party hostility but primarily because most Western party systems have become increasingly fragmented.

Automatic extraction of narrative elements from text, combining narrative theories with computational models, has been receiving increasing attention over the last few years. Previous works have utilized the oral narrative theory by Labov and Waletzky to identify various narrative elements in personal stories texts. Instead, we direct our focus to informational texts, specifically news stories. We introduce NEAT (Narrative Elements AnnoTation) – a novel NLP task for detecting narrative elements in raw text. For this purpose, we designed a new multi-label narrative annotation scheme, better suited for informational text (e.g. news media), by adapting elements from the narrative theory of Labov and Waletzky (Complication and Resolution) and adding a new narrative element of our own (Success). We then used this scheme to annotate a new dataset of 2,209 sentences, compiled from 46 news articles from various category domains. We trained a number of supervised models in several different setups over the annotated dataset to identify the different narrative elements, achieving an average F1 score of up to 0.77. The results demonstrate the holistic nature of our annotation scheme as well as its robustness to domain category.

Can a war can be just on both sides? Within the Western just war tradition, Catholic theologians traditionally held wars on both sides to be logically impossible. This view went unchallenged until questioned by two seventeenth-century Irish Franciscan Scotists. These were Aodh Mac Cathmhaoil (Hugo Cavellus) and John Punch. In this paper I lay out the Scotist theological grounds that led them to admit to the possibility of wars just on both sides. I also conjecture on possible reasons why Punch refrained from revising traditional just war theory in light of his own far-reaching theological conclusions.

Research on affective polarization – that is, dislike and hostility across party lines – originated in the study of the American two-party system and only recently traveled into multiparty contexts. This emerging body of research is hindered by lack of comprehensive data that capture multiple dimensions of polarization and examine how they develop over the course of political events such as electoral campaigns or the formation and dissolution of coalition governments. This research note introduces the Israel Polarization Panel [IPP] Dataset, 2019–2021, designed specifically to address this shortcoming. The IPP consists of 10 panel waves, following the same individuals over four elections. We first survey the key features of the IPP and then discuss its applications. The dataset is publicly available and should be of interest to scholars of polarization, political behavior and electoral politics.

What is the impact of uncommon but notable violent acts on conflict dynamics? We analyze the impact of the murder of a Palestinian child on the broader dynamics of Israeli-Palestinian violence in Jerusalem. By using novel micro-level event data and utilizing Discrete Fourier Transform and Bayesian Poisson Change Point Analysis, we compare the impact of the murder to that of other lethal but more typical Israeli-Palestinian events. We demonstrate that the murder had a large and durable impact on the average number of daily riots in Jerusalem, whereas the other events caused smaller, short-term effects. We demonstrate that scholars should devote more attention to the analysis of atypical violent acts and indicate a set of tools for conducting such analyses.