This book presents 12 pioneering essays and a novel introduction on policy over- and underreaction by Moshe Maor, a leading authority on disproportionate policy responses. Maor construes disproportion in an empirical rather than normative manner to improve our understanding of when, why, and how electorally vulnerable political executives and those operating in contexts of declining trust in government and rising negativity and populism resort to disproportionate policy measures. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.

This article draws from Frederick Douglass’s antebellum and wartime writings to reconstruct his approach to natural rights. Douglass admired many elements of the Enlightenment legacy. Yet in the same motion that he echoes European and American thinkers, he subtly qualifies, corrects, and revises their ideas, sometimes in radical ways. In his depictions of slavery, natural rights cease to be metaphysical abstractions and instead become embodied in our social relations. While they persist in outline, their substance is transformed to account for racialized power and structural violence. In this way, Douglass redefines a number of liberalism’s key moral and political concepts, including freedom, reason, dignity, and moral responsibility. He develops a political theory designed to reinforce the Enlightenment’s bare foundations with social insights of the oppressed: a philosophy of natural rights, told from below.

After Hamas's brutal October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, China appeared to side with the Islamists, as if its relationship with the Jewish state had deteriorated beyond repair. This was accompanied by an officially inspired wave of antisemitism and votes against Israel at the United Nations. Within a few months, however, the Chinese began to tone down their response and to repair what has become an important component in their Middle East policy. Israel was the first Middle Eastern government to recognize the People's Republic, though no diplomatic relations were established between the two until January 1992. The long delay was caused by Beijing's cultivation of ties with the Arab and Muslim worlds, which required enmity toward Israel. This had been expected to be a limited partnership. However, as this article shows, Israel has played a major role in China's regional strategy, somewhat in politics but much more in economic growth, defense modernization, technology, and innovation. In relative and, in some areas, absolute terms, Israel has proved to be as important to China as other regional states, and it has often won, implicitly and even explicitly, Beijing's appreciation—out of all proportion.

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.

This chapter examines the patterns of decline in support for the Israeli Labor Party across social groups. The transformation of Labor from a ruling party into a small marginal party is one of the most conspicuous phenomena in the Israeli party system of the past 30 years (1992–2022). Based on official election results, we compare the overall nationwide change in Labor's support to its support across six social groups: Israeli Arabs, Former Soviet Union (FSU) immigrants, development towns, well-off central cities, kibbutzim and settlements in the Occupied Territories. Within the overarching trend of decline, some meaningful variations emerge. Among several groups, support for Labor experienced a sharp decline as early as the 1990s, while in others it occurred in later years. Furthermore, on occasions, when Labor succeeded in boosting its support among some electorates, it lost support among others. In these cases, the identity of the party leader was an important factor in explaining voting patterns among the different groups.

The chapter uses election research in Israel as a test case to examine whether research reflects major developments in politics. Specifically, it explores whether the research of Israeli politics reflects the findings that in Israel personalization has been particularly deep and comprehensive, permeating all arenas: institutional, behavioral and the mass media. To examine the expression of personalization in research, it analyzes studies that appeared in the series The Elections in Israel. The personalization of Israeli politics identified in many empirical studies – and found to be much deeper than in other democracies – is not reflected in the way that politics is presented in these studies. The Elections in Israel books adhere instead to the party paradigm. However, the election series documents the trend of centralized personalization, and institutional developments – the adoption and abolition of direct election – did affect the expressions of personalization in the series.

In this study, we investigate how two crucial political institutions – the electoral system and the intraparty candidate selection method – incentivise elite personalistic campaigning behaviour. We offer two contributions. First, we show the interactive effect of the two institutions on elite behaviour in campaigns, unlike most of the extant literature that focuses on parliamentary activity. Second, we apply the distinction between leader-focused (centralised) and individual-focused (decentralised) personalism to candidate selection methods. We argue that selection methods dominated by the party leader and ones employing primaries, two types of selection methods usually seen as opposites on established scales of candidate selection, are actually similar in their effect on politicians’ personalistic behaviour during electoral campaigns. Using a dataset combining candidate surveys and expert coding of party selection rules, we analyse 9320 candidate responses from 101 parties across 16 democracies. We demonstrate that primaries-based selection methods correlate with more personalistic behaviour than collegial selection methods under party-centred electoral systems but with less personalistic behaviour in the most candidate-centred electoral systems. Leader-dominated selection methods similarly correlate with more personalistic behaviour than collegial ones only in closed-list PR systems, while their effect is insignificant in more candidate-centred systems. Our findings have wide-ranging implications. They call into question the conventional conceptualisation of candidate selection methods and their effect on politicians' behaviour. They also refine the scope of intraparty institutions’ impact, limiting it to party-centred electoral systems. Conversely, our findings serve as a reminder that students of electoral systems investigating their effects on elite behaviour must, at least in party-centred electoral systems, take intraparty institutions into consideration.

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.

The ongoing questions that ethno-nationally divided urban communities face concerning human rights are often exacerbated by large-scale events that challenge everyday local dynamics, such as wars and pandemics. This study, situated within discussions concerning the “localization” of human rights, explores what factors lead city-zens (citizens of the city) to pin expectations of safeguarding human rights on the local authority, focusing on urban identity, ethno-national identity, and the city’s ethno-national heterogeneity. We explore Israel’s homogeneous and mixed (Jewish-Palestinian) cities, wherein city-zens navigate their conflicting identities amidst eruptions of the long-standing conflict, as demonstrated by its latest escalation in October 2023. Drawing on an original survey and in-depth interviews, we find that urban identity is associated with city-zens’ expectations that their city will safeguard human rights, particularly among the (Jewish) majority in mixed cities. We further divide urban identity into legal and social dimensions, elucidating its role in shaping local perspectives on human rights in ethno-nationally conflicted societies.

This mini-review examines scholars' responses to the question, "What constitutes a new party?" It proposes a path out of a situation in which there is no one standard answer to this question, or even a dominant answer. The absence of a standard or dominant answer creates an interesting setting for theoretical and methodological creativity. At the same time, the situation is problematic: with no agreed answer, large n studies that differ in how they define and operationalize party newness are not comparable. And because political parties are central actors in democratic politics, this situation negatively affects comparative politics research. An agreed answer (or answers) is especially critical for studies that analyze stability, continuity, and change of party organizations, party systems, and the political system as a whole. This article reviews the approaches to party newness and identifies their main features. No one approach seems to be substantially preferable to the others. Thus, the way forward is to establish a database that will include the data already produced on party newness. Such a database will enable comparison of the different codifications and measurements and systematically examine their similarities and differences.