While political scientists regularly engage in spirited theoretical debates about elections and voting behavior, few have noticed that elected politicians also have theories of elections and voting. Here, we investigate politicians’ positions on eight central theoretical debates in the area of elections and voting behavior and compare politicians’ theories to those held by ordinary citizens. Using data from face-to-face interviews with nearly one thousand politicians in 11 countries, together with corresponding surveys of more than twelve thousand citizens, we show that politicians overwhelmingly hold thin, minimalist, “democratic realist” theories of voting, while citizens’ theories are more optimistic and policy oriented. Politicians’ theoretical tendencies—along with their theoretical misalignment from citizens—are remarkably consistent across countries. These theories are likely to have important consequences for how politicians campaign, communicate with the public, think about public policy, and represent their constituents.

Despite cultural associations with lighthearted social media interactions and humor, the GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) now appears in serious contexts as a legitimate form of online news, serving as a tool for documenting disasters, violence, and tragedies. The GIF’s repetitive, silent nature diverges from traditional visual news formats, offering narrative potentials different from the “decisive moment” of still photographs or the linear duration of videos. This article investigates the GIF’s unique storytelling format in tragic news coverage, leveraging insights from photojournalism and visual storytelling literature. Through visual analysis and in-depth interviews with Israeli news editors, this article explores the GIF’s centrality in Israeli news organizations’ adaptation to social media and the attention economy. Furthermore, the Israeli digital media ecosystem—characterized as a news-saturated environment of continuous negative news and high online news consumption—reveals the GIF as an emerging storytelling format with distinctive narrative strengths and constraints. Taken together, this context illuminates the ways in which GIFs’ production surfaces critical ethical considerations in contemporary visual journalism.

Interpersonal diplomatic incidents play a significant role in generating negative interpersonal relations between statespersons. Yet despite the obvious impact on international relations, thus far scholars have not systematically studied interpersonal interactions that have gone astray. In this paper, we discuss such incidents, identifying their causes and consequences. To this end, we collected stories about such incidents from interviews with fifty statespersons, fifteen autobiographies, and high-profile reports in the news media. We then applied the conceptual framework of politeness theory, an approach focusing on the management of social relations, to classify six types of offenses that lead to interpersonal diplomatic incidents: degradation, minimization, marginalization, unfriendliness, uncollegiality, and alienness. We further highlight the potential and actual consequences of these incidents and the factors that can curb their negative impact. In the conclusion we discuss the contribution of our findings to current IR theory, specifically the relational approach and the micro foundations of IR.

While North American Olim continue to arrive in Israel, many of them face challenges in adjusting to life in Israel and finding their place in Israeli society. Previous research has examined the challenges Olim face in adjusting to a new culture and has indicated that being far from the familiarities of home often leads to lifestyle changes and the development of multiple identities. Female immigrants may find it particularly challenging to find a sense of social belonging, while those from ultra-Orthodox communities are faced with unique challenges of their own as they are exposed to different sociocultural expectations in their newly expanded social circles. This study explores, through qualitative research methods and in-depth interviews, the challenges, experiences, dilemmas, and conflicts faced by ultra-Orthodox women as they journey through finding their identity both culturally and religiously following their move to Israel. The findings shed light on the motivations of these women for making aliyah, and the development of new social, cultural, and religious identities that follows.

Traditional agenda-setting research often focuses on the most urgent problems that dominate present public agendas. Challenging the prevalent conflation of importance with urgency in agenda-setting research, this article proposes a shift from a singular to a layered temporal conceptualization of public agendas. The suggested framework distinguishes between the immediate agenda, which addresses problems perceived as most urgent, and the delayed agenda, which focuses on issues deemed most important for the future. Enriching agenda-setting theory with insights from construal level theory, the study examines the psychological and media-related factors shaping the placement of topics on these agendas. Drawing upon original survey data and a large-scale news content analysis from the French 2022 Presidential Elections, as well as survey data from the 2023 to 2024 war in Israel and Gaza, the findings provide empirical support for the proposed framework. The results indicate that participants prioritize psychologically proximate issues on the immediate agenda, whereas psychologically distant issues gain importance on the delayed agenda. Additionally, we identify media agenda-setting effects that extend beyond the immediate temporal layer. Specifically, both studies provide evidence for a media priming effect, where news exposure increases issue salience without affecting temporal layering. The Israeli case reveals additional initial evidence for an urgency effect, where news exposure boosts issue salience of some issues primarily on the immediate agenda. Overall, the study contributes to a deeper understanding of public agendas and news media effects, introducing a temporally nuanced perspective that enriches classical approaches to agenda-setting research.

Citizens’ political behavior is shaped within a social context. In the course of their everyday lives, people interact with others and talk to them about politics, and these discussions are among the most common forms of political engagement (Pew Research Center, 2018). According to decades of research, political conversations between citizens are not only prevalent but also influential: they shape people’s political preferences, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors (Carlson, 2019; Eveland, 2004; Huckfeldt & Sprague, 1995; Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955; Lazarsfeld et al., 1948; Sinclair, 2012). When using the term interpersonal communication, researchers typically describe conversations about politics – broadly defined – between ordinary citizens. The discussion can take place face-to-face, but it may also be technically mediated through telephone, video chat, social media, and the like. The participants are two or more individuals whose relationship prior to the conversation can vary in strength: they can be closely related (e.g., Mutz & Mondak, 2006), mere acquaintances (e.g., Eveland & Kleinman, 2013), or even strangers who have just met for the first time (e.g., Levendusky et al., 2016).

Politicians' personality is believed to play a central role in their electoral success. It is unclear, however, how important different traits are to voters and how the impact of personality compares to that of other well-studied individual characteristics of politicians, such as gender, age, and political experience. Drawing on evidence from three studies—an observational study (N = 4543), a survey experiment (N = 1031), and a preregistered conjoint experiment (N = 4313)—conducted in Belgium, Canada, and Israel, we demonstrate that citizens value some traits (e.g., conscientiousness) more than others (e.g., extraversion) when choosing candidates. We also show that the relative effect of politicians' personality is greater than that of other individual characteristics. These results highlight the central role of elite personality in our understanding of voting behavior.

While authenticity has been identified as pivotal on social media, it has not been studied as part of a broader value ecology shaping content evaluation. Addressing this gap, we investigated users’ evaluations of prominent Instagram genres in relation to perceptions of authenticity. A survey of 1,000 users from the United States, Germany, Italy, Japan, and South Korea revealed transnational similarities in value-related interpretations of genres, alongside local variation. Participants described the most liked genres as expressing happiness, togetherness, and peacefulness, and authenticity was positively correlated with favorable evaluation of content across countries and genres. Ultimately, evaluation on Instagram is shaped by the intersection of perceived authenticity and pleasure derived from peaceful solitude or close social bonds. We conclude by reflecting on the utility of our multi-method approach and the importance of situating authenticity vis-à-vis other values in social media research.

Many studies claim that Instagram users like authentic images. However, authenticity has many aspects (e.g., telling the truth, being ordinary, being relatable, being true to oneself). Each aspect may play a different role in shaping what people like. Furthermore, there may be other relevant values that people like besides authenticity. This paper studies the values expressed by 15 popular types of Instagram images and the relationship between liking and authenticity. Our results are based on 1,000 responses to a survey distributed in Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. We found that people across countries like the same types of images, associate these images with similar values and tend to like images that they think are authentic, no matter which aspect of authenticity we focus on. We also found that the types of images people liked the most were associated with happiness, togetherness, and peacefulness. We conclude that people like Instagram images that combine authenticity with the pleasure of “me time” or close social relationships.

This editorial introduces the Social Media + Society special issue “Comparative Approaches To Studying Privacy.” Recognizing the importance of privacy in today’s digital societies and volatile political and regulatory environments, the editorial highlights the pressing need for comparative research on the topic and describes the articles in this special issue. The special issue addresses the theoretical, methodological, and practical challenges and opportunities of researching privacy across cultural, social, political, economic, and technological units of comparison. The articles in the special issue explore diverse privacy understandings, attitudes, and practices across contexts, challenging decontextualized and mono-cultural understandings in relation to social media and adjacent technologies. The special issue articles also illustrate fruitful ways privacy can be studied across different units of comparison with qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods. Several contributions in the special issue, including this editorial, not only broaden the scope of privacy research but also encourage engagement with multi-stakeholder perspectives in the context of social media, considering the role of policy, industry, and civil society. In the editorial, we briefly relate the special issue and its contributions to the comparative privacy research framework (CPRF), which serves as a useful starting point and a solid conceptual foundation for comparative privacy research. Finally, we develop a research agenda for future comparative privacy research, which critically examines position of power and epistemological biases, evaluates the comparability of the subject of study, determining and justifying relevant units of comparison, and helps to analyze how these units interact in shaping the concept of privacy.

Does spontaneous contact between individuals from different ethnonational groups affect their social resilience, specifically their ability to avoid escalation and radicalization following eruptions of ethnic violence? To address this question, we conducted a series of studies in mixed Jewish–Palestinian cities and academic settings. Study 1, based on data collected through large-scale online surveys of residents in both mixed and non-mixed cities in Israel (n = 944), reveals that Jewish and Palestinian residents living in mixed cities exhibit higher social resilience than residents of homogeneous cities. This heightened resilience is manifested through more favorable attitudes toward the outgroup and reduced feelings of tension during and following episodes of intercommunal violence. We propose that the underlying mechanism explaining this resilience to the disruptive effects of violence is the higher prevalence of spontaneous intergroup contact enabled in mixed settings compared to more homogeneous ones. This explanation is supported by Study 2, which involved two rounds of surveys completed by Jewish and Palestinian students (n = 6467) at a heterogeneous campus in a mixed city in Israel. The findings demonstrate that positive attitudes toward the outgroup following incidents of intercommunal violence were more durable among students exposed to spontaneous intergroup contact. We discuss the implications of our findings for deepening our understanding of conflict and conflict management in ethnically mixed and conflicted settings.