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.

In this work, we explore sources of inter-annotator disagreement in narrative analysis, in light of the question of whether or not a narrative plot exists in the text. For this purpose, we present a method for a conceptual decomposition of an existing annotation into two separate levels: (1) \textbf{whether} or not a narrative plot exists in the text, and (2) \textbf{which} plot elements exist in the text. We apply this method to an existing dataset of sentences annotated with three different narrative plot elements: \textit{Complication}, \textit{Resolution} and \textit{Success}. We then employ statistical analysis in order to quantify how much of the inter-annotator disagreement can be explained by each of the two levels. We further perform a qualitative analysis of disagreement cases in each level, observing several sources of disagreement, such as text ambiguity, scheme definition and personal differences between the annotators. The insights gathered on the dataset may serve to reduce inter-annotator disagreement in future annotation endeavors. We conclude with a broader discussion on the potential implications of our approach in studying and evaluating inter-annotator disagreement in other settings.

Public-administration research analyzes the variation in citizens’ experiences of administrative burdens, yet it is almost silent regarding their propensity to challenge bureaucratic hurdles. This article analyzes welfare applicants’ inclination to provide a bureaucracy with critical feedback regarding their experience of administrative burdens. We demonstrate that citizens’ minority identity and its intersection with gender, and prior reliance on means-tested benefits reduce their inclination to convey criticism, whereas academic education enhances it. The concrete research setting indicates that citizens’ objective knowledge and skills cannot account for the variation that we find. Drawing on supplementary analysis, we suggest that citizens’ internal self-efficacy, as well as their internalization of their social standing vis-à-vis bureaucracy, shape their voice behavior. These findings imply that the feedback that bureaucracies receive, and the problems that they are therefore more likely to rectify, pertain to those of citizens who are objectively and subjectively less burdened than others.

This research provides evidence regarding the causal effect of group conformity on task performance in stable and variable environments. Drawing on studies in cultural evolution, social learning, and social psychology, we experimentally tested the hypotheses that conformity improves group performance in a stable environment (H1), and decreases performance (by hindering adaptability) in a temporally variable environment (H2). We compare the performance of individuals, low conformity (LC) groups, and high conformity (HC) groups within a four-arm randomized lab-experiment (N=240). The two group conditions were based on a novel treatment of group conformity applied in the HC condition. The findings support the hypothesis that conformity decreases performance in a temporally variable environment. Although HC groups performed better than LC groups in stable environment, the results did not provide statistically significant support for the hypothesis that conformity increases group performance in stable conditions. Intra-group individual-level analyses provide insights into the mechanisms that account for the group-level results, by showing that lower conformity in groups facilitates efficient adaptability in the use of social information.

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.

Divided into three parts, this chapter deals with the Israel-Taiwan diplomatic dead-end resulting from bilateral refusal to establish official relations. This absence of official relations did not prevent the two parties from engaging in military relations. Taiwan decided to acquire Israeli defense technology of two types: non-conventional and conventional. In the second section, the chapter discusses the contribution of Professor Ernst David Bergmann to Taiwan’s military nuclear program – based on Israel’s experience and the Dimona reactor. Despite its rejection of official relations with Israel (and Israel’s reluctance), Taiwan adopted Bergmann’s suggestions and sent delegations of scientists and students to Israel. In its third section, the chapter deals with Israeli conventional arms and military technology transfers to Taiwan, including missiles of various types, vessels, and light weapons. Later, Taiwan was also given access to Israeli satellites. Paradoxically, this military cooperation with Taiwan had been one of the reasons that prompted Beijing to form military, and then diplomatic, relations with Israel – and ultimately, to force Israel to stop its military relations with Taiwan.

Does an ongoing stalemate in a peace process affect the international agenda toward the conflict and international perceptions about policies that should be adopted to resolve it? We provide a tentative answer to this question by drawing insight from analysis of developments and trends in international media attention to key terms and concepts in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict during cycles of violence, as well as periods of rapprochement and peace negotiations, in the last two and half decades (1996–2021). We find that although attention to the Israeli–Palestinian peace process has been declining over the years, much of the international discussion continues to be devoted to relaunching a negotiation process leading to a two-state solution. The ongoing stalemate in such “process,” we show, provides ample opportunities for alternative approaches to emerge advocating alternative endgames (e.g., one-state), international pressure (e.g., Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions), or unilateral steps (e.g., annexation). Each of these approaches promotes an alternative vision and provides a different path and employs its own terminology and vision of the future. The Israeli–Palestinian case study helps illustrate what may happen to peace when the process is stalled, and how a stalemate can produce change in the international debate on the conflict and push for the emergence of new policy directions and agendas.

What explains the ambition to get rich? Adam Smith is clear that commercial ambition, the passionate desire for great wealth, is not simply a desire to satisfy one’s material needs. His argument on what underlies it, however, is not obvious. I review three possibilities suggested by Smith’s work and the scholarly literature – vanity, the love of system, and the desire for tranquility – and conclude that none of them captures the underlying motive of commercial ambition. Instead, I argue that Smith understands commercial ambition as a misguided desire for excellence. Ambitious pursuers of wealth are driven by the desire to deserve and to enjoy recognition for their excellence, but their judgment of what is truly excellent is corrupted by the standards of a wealth-worshipping society. Instead of appealing to the moral standpoint of the impartial spectator, they construct in their minds and follow a corruptive moral guide: the wealth-worshipping spectator.

This study presents a theoretical model of honest behavior in the public sector (public-sector honesty) and its relationship with corruption. We test this model empirically by utilizing and extending a unique data set of honest behavior of public-and private-sector workers across 40 countries, gathered in a field experiment conducted by Cohn et al.(N= 17,303). We find that public-sector honesty is determined by country-level societal culture and public-sector culture; public-sector honesty predicts corruption levels, independently from the effect of incentive structures—in line with the Becker–Stigler model. We find no support for a global mean difference in honest behavior between public-and private-sector workers, alongside substantive cross-country variation in sector differences in honest behavior. The emphasis assigned to honesty of public-sector workers within each country appears to be locally determined by the prevailing public-sector culture. These results imply that beyond cross-national variation in the scope of publicness, it is very content may vary across countries. Lastly, the results of this study consistently fail to support the selection thesis, and we discuss the practical implications of this result for anticorruption policy.

Democracies in general and political parties in particular have undergone political personalization in recent decades. The power balance between politicians (one or many) and the team (the party as a collegial entity) has changed, and existing party typologies are no longer suited to the analysis of today’s democratic politics. Although some new personalized party types have been added, what is missing is a systematic attempt to contrast them with the collegial option. This article proposes a new classification of political parties to fill the lacuna. It includes five ideal types of parties: two personalized-decentralized types, referring to collections of separated autonomous activists or to separated autonomous individual politicians (plural); a collegial type, which is about the centrality of the team and is based mainly on collective authorities and collective decision making; and two personalized-centralized types, referring to the centrality of an individual politician in her capacity as the party leader or that of a specific individual who “owns” the party.