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.

How do critical artists intervene in urban space, and why? This question is explored in an interurban fieldwork study examining artistic interventions in four cities: Hanover and Hamburg in Germany, and Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Jerusalem in Israel. Grounded on a plethora of artistic interventions gathered in these cities, the article proposes a typology based on techniques, goals, sociability degrees and relations to urban space. On the one hand, urban artistic interventions vary from a compensatory improvement of social conditions to a highly political and protest-driven irritation of existing urban power structures and processes. On the other, the discourses behind the different modes of urban artistic intervention reveal similarities, bringing recurring concepts of “art in public space” to the forefront and referring to similar lines of reasoning which guide urban artists in their practice. This article extends the existing literature by offering a typology of artistic interventions in urban space, highlighting the critical agency of urban artists.

It is widely argued that command-and-control regulation is a burdensome, inefficient, and illiberal form of governance. In recent decades, many efforts have been made to find alternatives that could protect and enhance public interest in a less costly, less legalistic, less punitive, and less paternalistic manner. These alternatives include various instruments under the umbrella of smart and self-regulatory regimes. However, it is still unclear how such alternatives affect citizens' trust in regulated market actors. Using two experimental surveys (n=1195), we examine the extent to which nine different regulatory designs affect citizens' willingness to trust a hypothetical Fintech company. The results show that citizens' trust increases with the existence of a state regulator and decreases with self-regulatory regimes and deregulation. We also find an increase in trust when the state regulator relies on pledges rather than strict oversight, provided that the regulator is perceived as trustworthy. These results suggest that governmental command-and-control regulation may be more beneficial to both the public and firms than is often assumed, as more government regulation may mean more trust in the market.

Scholars have been paying increasing attention to the republican theory of liberty developed by the eighteenth-century British radical Richard Price. This article studies his narrative of a revolution of liberty, which consists in the downfall of oppressive powers, the establishment of republican institutions, and the introduction of a utopian age. In distinction from work that has focused on the millennial aspects of Price's narrative of emancipation, I highlight its political contexts and functions, situating its early development in utopian speculations about agrarian equality and population, demonstrating how the American Revolution had transformed it into a rallying cry for revolutionaries, and reconstructing its role as a source of politically mobilizing hope. This study differs from much of the scholarship on Price in looking beyond the Anglo-American context and presenting his work as part of a European conversation on the prospects of republican utopia, a conversation whose participants included Rousseau, Turgot, Mirabeau, and Condorcet.

The psychological literature highlights the dominance of morality in forming social judgments. However, in the political field, recent electoral victories by politicians involved in immoral behavior have shown that immorality does not end careers. Here, we demonstrate a strategy to explain scandalous politicians’ electoral success. In three experiments using both fictional and real politicians in various political settings, we show the effectiveness of a strategy emphasizing different image dimensions in mitigating the negative effects of a scandal. We find that scandal-hit candidates can effectively improve their image by shifting voters’ focus to any image dimension undamaged by scandal, including competence, warmth (studies 1–2), and even morality in undamaged moral foundations (studies 2–3), demonstrating that voters rely on a multi-dimensional model of moral image in appraising politicians. This suggests that politicians who morally transgress can repair their image and avoid accountability using positive messages—as long as they do not scratch the moral itch.

Social progress indices are key for assessing wellbeing and sustainable development of countries and societies. A pivotal neglected question is the appropriate level of substitution between ‘subjective’ - attitudes of individuals - and ‘objective’ - external standards- dimensions of social progress. Each dimension has its own rationale, history, and indicators. Our starting point is that the two perspectives have a special significance – jointly. Surprisingly, we do not find in the literature an approach that robustly represents this acknowledgment. Our approach addresses this lacuna, and advocates measuring social progress as a composition of the two components with a very low degree of substitution. Employing the constant elasticity of substitution function (CES), we empirically demonstrate the ramifications of this approach across assessments and rankings of countries. We show that the low substitution measurement matters the most for the middle- ranked countries. Representing social progress using two distinct subjective and objective components, with a low substitution elasticity is a robust measurement, that reflects an appealing conception of social progress.

This article examines how Catholic moral theologians analysed the constraints imposed by the rights of the dead to their good name on historical writing and research. The concern of Catholic moral theologians for persons’ rights to their good name coupled with their concern for the rights of dead persons placed serious moral constraints on the work of historians. At the same time, from very early on, these moral theologians showed appreciation of the benefits of historical writing, including writing on the less public aspects of historical figures. The general tendency was to allow historians some moral elbow room. There was, however, a clear red line: what was and had always been secret could not be revealed, regardless of the benefits. By the end of the nineteenth century, the authors of the casuist manualists revised the traditional doctrine and removed the moral red line that had been accepted until then. Historians could now reveal what had always been secret. This doctrinal development was the result of two historical events: the opening of the Vatican Archives and allowing propagandists and journalists within politically organized Catholic conservatism to fight as equals in the printed media.

Group leaders play a vital role in divided cities, particularly in local problem-solving and in everyday contestations. Their role as negotiators makes them perfectly positioned to promote urban processes for the group to which they belong but also raises questions regarding their loyalty. Seeking to understand these individuals’ thinking, this study asks how leaders from different groups in a divided city explain their development as leaders. Utilizing a life-story approach, we present a narrative analysis of 40 life-stories, as told by local leaders representing the main social groups in Jerusalem. Our findings suggest that leaders from different groups use distinctive narratives to ensure their relevancy: “The Homecomer,” used by Israeli-Jews; “The Middleman,” used by Palestinian-Arabs; and “The Pathfinder,” used by Israeli Ultraorthodox-Jews. More importantly, we found that all these leaders share a similar mind-set, what we call leadership development as discovery. Indeed, their development includes formative events that differentiate them from their community, helping them to see the divided city from a different perspective and positioning them as leaders. Understanding and acknowledging this spatial aspect in their narratives can be a first step in facilitating group collaborations, empowering local leaders, and even leading to the emergence of new ones. Our implications go beyond divided cities and can be further studied in ordinary cities.

Housing affordability is an acute problem in many developed economies. It is rooted, inter alia, in a conflict of interests across levels of government. Policies that seek to increase the supply of housing and lower their purchase price are popular among the general electorate, yet local governments deploy urban planning regulations to restrict densification and development of affordable housing within their jurisdictions. Moves to address this conflict would benefit from unpacking city officials' policy preferences and their variation. This paper compares the positions of local-government politicians vs. those of unelected bureaucrats in Israeli cities, drawing on survey and interview data. Our findings confirm the conflicts of interest between levels of government even within Israel's unitary, centralized context. However, we show that career bureaucrats, given their relative freedom from electoral pressures and commitment to professional values, are more amenable to citizens' and central government's shared interest in densification and affordable housing. We also highlight city officials' place of residence—within vs. outside the city—and their social identification with citizens and residents as antecedents of their urban-planning preferences. We draw on these findings to delineate directions for more effective central–local government collaboration in seeking affordable housing solutions.

This paper examines the use of the theological doctrine of probabilism by the Valencian political writer Juan de Madariaga in his Del senado y su príncipe of 1617. Madariaga’s work is but one example of the phenomenal diffusion of probabilism in political and legal writings in seventeenth century Spain. Such popularity must be understood in the institutional context of the Habsburg monarchy, effectively managed by an expanding number of powerful councils (consejos), constituting what Spanish historians call a ‘polysynodial regime’. Probabilists argued that council members could, within limits, defer to the majority opinion within the council without shirking their conscientious duties. As explained by Madariaga, by morally allowing such deferrals, probabilism strengthened the cohesiveness of the councils and preserved their authority in the eyes of the king and the people. It is suggested that by relying on probabilism in order to foster unanimity within the council, Madariaga was in fact attempting to remove occasions for one of the favoured criticisms against the polysynodial regime: that the multiplicity of contradictory advice confused the monarch and prevented the sort of expedite action necessary for solving the urgent problems of the monarchy.

Intraparty candidate selection methods are the drivers of many topics of interest to political scientists. Their operationalization, however, is made complicated because they tend to involve multiple selectorates that differ in their levels of inclusiveness and centralization and that play various roles within the process. This complexity poses a challenge for large-n comparative studies. Drawing on the Political Parties DataBase Round Two to analyze candidate selection methods in 184 parties from 35 democracies, we highlight the inadequacy of the currently available measures to correctly account for this complexity in large-n studies and offer improvements on this front. Specifically, we propose a continuous measure of inclusiveness that better captures the complexity of candidate selection methods and a new measure of complexity to facilitate future analyses into this feature. We recommend that scholars in other cross-national projects consider adopting similar or improved coding strategies in order to better capture these complexities.

Exploiting rare access to doctors’ real-world judgments of incapacity benefits applications to an Israeli governmental program (2015–17), we examine the prevalence and underlying mechanisms of discrimination against Muslims versus Jews. To mitigate confounding explanations for unequal treatment, we restrict the analysis to claimants whose applications passed a strict medical-disability threshold so that their medical condition was undisputed. Theoretically, we offer a comprehensive theoretical framework for possible micro-mechanisms underlying bureaucratic discrimination of minorities, the decision-environment conditions that instigate them, and observational implications for their decoding. Findings indicate that despite organizational commitment to equality Jewish doctors were more likely to reject applications by Muslims and to recommend partial compensation for Jews. We find no differences with regard to full compensation. Further, we empirically illustrate how our proposed theoretical framework can be employed to analyze which micro-mechanism is most likely to underlie discrimination and to empirically decipher among alternative explanations, demonstrating that bureaucratic discrimination, in this case, is best explained by implicit prejudice triggered under conditions of complexity and ambiguity that undermined doctors’ systematic processing of information.

Mainstream parties in Western Europe are increasingly struggling to hold together their base of support. As a lens for exploring this changing electoral landscape, this article focuses on the growing share of the electorate that is cross-pressured between conservative and progressive attitudes on economic and cultural issues. It argues that a stable asymmetry characterizes Western European mass attitudes: while support for the left is common among voters with progressive attitudes on both issues, it is enough to be conservative on one issue to turn right. Analyzing survey data collected from 1990 to 2017, the study shows that crosspressures are resolved in favor of the right and examines the trade-offs this poses to center-right parties. These findings contribute to debates on electoral dealignment and realignment and shed light on the electoral choices of the center-right.

When will self-interested vaccine-rich countries voluntarily donate their surplus vaccines to vaccine-poor countries during a pandemic? We develop a game-theoretic approach to address this question. We identify vaccine-rich countries’ optimal surplus donation strategies, and then examine whether these strategies are stable (Nash equilibrium or self-enforcing international agreement). We identify parameter ranges in which full or partial surplus stock donations are optimal for the donor countries. Within a more restrictive parameter region, these optimal strategies are also stable. This implies that, under certain conditions (notably a total amount of surplus vaccines that is sufficiently large), simple coordination can lead to significant donations by strictly self-interested vaccine-rich countries. On the other hand, if the total amount that the countries can donate is small, we expect no contribution from self-interested countries. The results of this analysis provide guidance to policy makers in identifying the circumstances in which coordination efforts are likely to be effective.

My involvement in China studies, and more specifically in the study of China’s Middle East policy, began in high school. Discharged from military service as a lieutenant, I continued my academic training at the Hebrew University, graduating summa cum laude with a master’s thesis on Sino-Palestinians relations. Still a student, in 1971 I joined the military intelligence where I set up the China Desk, and in 1973 left for the London School of Economics and Political Science where I wrote a PhD on China’s Middle East policy. Back at the Hebrew University, I began an academic career teaching and studying Chinese politics, Islam, foreign policy and defense modernization.

Two lines of research in the psychology of religion have developed independently of each other: why people are religious and how they are religious. Leveraging theories of goal constructs, we propose that these two lines of research are connected, such that religious expressions are the manifestation of religious motivations. In Part I, we build and test a model of relations between religious motivations and religious expressions using data from Christians in the United Kingdom (Study 1; N = 418) and Jews in Israel (Study 2; N = 505). In Part II, we demonstrate the utility of the model by showing how relations between religiosity and political ideology can be understood by this integrated model. We discuss how this model advances research on the psychology of religion beyond the refinement of typologies and how it can be used to model associations between religiosity and other constructs.

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The early modern scholastics’ detailed discussion of the justice of war also addressed the rights of victors. This chapter examines their views on the permissibility of killing and plundering — both of innocents and of culpable combatants — in the aftermath of victory. The focus is on Francisco de Vitoria, Francisco Suárez and Luis de Molina as well as Pedro de Lorca, Giles de Conink, Gaspar Hurtado and Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza. The chapter pays special attention to their account of individual liability to loss of life and property and the extent to which this liability derived from a person’s contribution to the war effort, their status as a citizen of the enemy state, and from whether or in how far they could contribute to a future threat. Authors such as Vitoria and Suárez, the chapter concludes, deployed a statist approach to combatant and civilian liability. The chapter also explores the late scholastic defence and critique of the permissibility of reprisals against citizens of enemy states. It closes by examining the scholastic resort to the ius gentium as a means to justify the duty of the citizens of a defeated state to surrender their property to the victors.

The alternativa system in Spanish American religious orders was an early example of deliberate electoral engineering to address the problem of social division. It was subject to criticism, however, for stealing voters’ freedom, ignoring the rights of candidates, and restricting access to competent officeholders. Moreover, it often gave disproportionate power to a minority faction. Hence, the alternativa remained, at best, an expedient, short-term solution to the problem of factionalism. Examining the canonists’ debate about the alternativa is instructive because it reveals the darker moral side of power-sharing regimes whenever and wherever they occur.

People at times experience intense dysfunctional emotions that distract their judgment regarding policy problems, policy tools, and/or target populations, leading to the emergence of policy bubbles (i.e., policy over- or underproduction over an extended period). In this paper, I elaborate on three strategies that governments can implement when faced with policy bubbles driven by such emotions: the wait-and-see approach, the emotional containment approach, and the bubble-pricking approach. Based on studies of policy bubbles and on the important literature regarding how different emotions may result in diverse behavior and judgment, I elaborate on the conditions under which each of these policy options may be the appropriate path to follow when encountering such policy bubbles. I conclude that the case for a wait-and-see approach is strong, among other instances, when such bubbles cannot be detected with a reasonable level of confidence while they are still in the initial overinvestment phase; the case for emotional containment is strong when policymakers are interested in preventing such bubbles from getting out of hand, yet they are politically constrained to better calibrate the policy investment to the policy problem; and the case for the bubble-pricking approach is strong when (i) the growth of policy bubbles driven by dysfunctional emotions causes significant harm, and (ii) governments do not have at their disposal the necessary tools to keep the harmful effects of such policy bubbles and their burst at a manageable level. Policymakers should also tailor their response to the particular characteristics of the policy bubble at hand and to the dysfunctional emotions sustaining it.

What, if any, dividends do agencies reap from collaboration with a highly reputable agency, such as the FDA? Utilizing a dataset covering 30 U.S. federal agencies over a period of 34 years (1980–2013), we estimate the short and long-term reputational effects of interagency collaboration. Collaboration is measured by the number of memorandums of understanding (MOUs) in effect between each agency and the FDA, while agency reputation is assessed using an automated measure of media-coverage valence (positive/negative tone) for each agency-year. To account for potential reverse and reciprocal causality, we utilize cross-lagged fixed-effects models. We find evidence of moderate rises in reputation due to increased collaboration with the FDA. These effects persist significantly for two years, before decaying to null after four years. Employing similar analyses, we furthermore estimate reversed causality – of reputation on the level of consequent collaboration – finding no evidence of such effects.

Research Support

Moshe Maor and Raanan Sulitzeanu-Kenan gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Israel Science Foundation under grant 1002/11.

Scattered over several provinces and cities' and gathered from many countries, China's modern Jewish communities had very little in common. Unlike Europe's Jewish communities, which had lived there for centuries, sharing histories, languages, and cultures, Jews arrived in China between the 1850s (mostly Baghdadi Jews who came by choice) and the late 1930s (mostly refugees who came by necessity). Representing different cultures and backgrounds, they could hardly communicate; professed various styles of Judaism, from orthodoxy to secularism; and belonged to a variety of socio-economic classes, some very rich, some very poor. Not surprisingly, China's modern Jewish communities, peaking at 20 to 30 thousand, were divided politically, ideologically, physically, and organizationally. B DAR was one group, in fact, a sub-group, one of the smaller, although at times, in the 1930s, it was the only, and certainly the most important and influential, Jewish youth movement in China.

Surprisingly, although the Israeli government adopted unregulated, unorganized, inefficient, uncoordinated, and uninformed governance arrangements during the first wave of COVID-19, the public health outcome was successful, a paradox that this theoretically informed article seeks to explain. Drawing on insights from blame avoidance literature, it develops and applies an analytical framework that focuses on how allegations of policy underreaction in times of crisis pose a threat to elected executives’ reputations and how these politicians can derive opportunities for crisis exploitation from governance choices, especially at politically sensitive junctures. Based on a historical-institutional analysis combined with elite interviews, it finds that the implementation of one of the most aggressive policy alternatives on the policy menu at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis (i.e., a shutdown of society and the economy), and the subsequent consistent adoption of the aforementioned governance arrangements constituted a politically well-calibrated and effective short-term strategy for Prime Minister Netanyahu.

There is no easy answer to the question of whether religiosity promotes or hinders commitment to democracy. Earlier research largely pointed to religiosity as a source of antidemocratic orientations. More recent empirical evidence is less conclusive, however, suggesting that the effect of religiosity on democratic commitment could be positive, negative, or null. We review the existing approaches to the study of religiosity and democratic commitment, focusing on support for the democratic system, political engagement, and political tolerance, by distinguishing accounts that examine a single dimension of religiosity from accounts that adopt a multidimensional approach. We show that multidimensional approaches, while effective in accounting for the effect of religiosity on discrete democratic norms, fall short of accounting for some of the inconsistencies in the literature and in identifying the mechanisms that may be responsible for shaping how religiosity affects endorsement of democratic norms as a whole. To fill this gap, we propose the Religious Motivations and Expressions (REME) model. Applying theories of goal constructs to religion, this model maps associations between three religious expressions (belief, social behavior, and private behavior) and the religious motivations that underly these expressions. We discuss how inconsistent associations between religiosity and elements of democratic commitment can be rendered interpretable once the motivations underlying religious expressions, as well as contextual information, are accounted for. We contend that applying goal constructs to religion is critical for understanding the nature of the religion-democracy nexus.

The core feature of a parliamentary system is not that governments tend to emerge from the legislatures in some way or another, but their political responsibility to this body. While in only some parliamentary systems the government needs formal support of parliament in order to take office, in all parliamentary systems no government can survive against the will of parliament. The academic literature related to the rules for how governments form is vast. Strikingly, scholars have paid far less attention to unpacking the core institution of parliamentary systems of government – the confidence relationship and the various no confidence procedures. Placing the focus on how the parliament can hold the government accountable, this special issue assesses the larger influences legislative confidence has on executive–legislative relations, and improves our understanding of the ways in which the executive may be challenged or dismissed.

Policy scholars tend to view disproportionate policy and its two component concepts – policy over- and underreaction – as either unintentional errors of commission or omission, or nonintentional responses that political executives never intended to implement yet are not executed unknowingly, inadvertently or accidentally. This article highlights a conceptual turn, whereby these concepts are reentering the policy lexicon as types of intentional policy responses that are largely undertaken when political executives are vulnerable to voters. Intentional overreactions derive from the desire of political executives to pander to voters’ opinions or signal extremity by overreacting to these opinions in domains susceptible to manipulation for credit-claiming purposes. Intentional underreactions are motivated by political executives’ attempts to avoid blame and may subsequently lead to deliberate overreaction. This conceptual turn forces scholars to recognise the political benefits that elected executives may reap from deliberately implementing disproportionate policies, and that such policies can at times be effective.

Since Eveland and Shah (2003) published their seminal study on the impact of social networks on media bias perceptions in the US, little has been researched about the interpersonal antecedents of hostile media perceptions. In this study we address this gap by investigating the role of safe, or like-minded, political discussions on individuals’ likelihood to perceive media as hostile. We use survey data from more than 5,000 individuals in Germany. Our findings reveal that like-minded discussions increase one’s likelihood to perceive media as hostile; yet, only among those more politically engaged and ideologically on the left. The significance and theoretical implications of the results are discussed in the concluding section.

Regulation & Governance was founded 15 years ago based on a vision and an ambitious set of goals laid out by the founding editors, John Braithwaite, Cary Coglianese, and David Levi-Faur (see their introduction to the first issue: “Can regulation and governance make a difference?”, 2007). Fifteen years later, the current editors of Regulation & Governance, in dialogue with the founders, reflect on that vision, on the journal's accomplishments, and on the next 15 years of Regulation & Governance. Our reflections are based on our joint, comprehensive overview of regulatory governance scholarship in different subfields – the decision to not refer to individual works here is deliberate and intended to reflect the inclusiveness of our notion of the field. We mark the journal's anniversary at a moment when multiple cataclysmic events are straining regulation and governance as never before: a global pandemic and the social, economic, and biological devastation trailing in its wake; national, institutional, and personal reckonings with the legacy and the lived reality of systemic racism, colonialism, and white supremacy; challenges to democratic governance; extreme and growing economic inequality; rising tides of authoritarianism and violent extremism around the globe; a looming climate emergency that threatens life on this planet as we know it. Regulatory governance is indispensable for confronting these crises. Yet, at this critical moment, regulation itself – from mask requirements to low carbon fuel policies – has become the object of virulent political backlash against governments that attempt to address these issues. As societies emerge from pandemic restrictions, the normative and legal order also is being tested by rising violent crime rates and other aggressive behaviors. In this sense, the original vision for Regulation & Governance is more relevant than ever. But, 15 years later, these challenges prompt us to ask once again, what difference can regulation and governance make?

While the role of social media in the spread of conspiracy theories has received much attention, a key deficit in previous research is the lack of distinction between different types of platforms. This study places the role of social media affordances in facilitating the spread of conspiracy beliefs at the center of its enquiry. We examine the relationship between platform use and conspiracy theory beliefs related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Relying on the concept of technological affordances, we theorize that variation across key features make some platforms more fertile places for conspiracy beliefs than others. Using data from a crossnational dataset based on a two-wave online survey conducted in 17 countries before and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we show that Twitter has a negative effect on conspiracy beliefs—as opposed to all other platforms under examination which are found to have a positive effect.

The literature dealing with undecided voters – a growing group of citizens in many democracies that can determine who wins in election campaigns – suggests two very different profiles. The first approach describes undecided voters as being generally uninformed about politics, while the second sees undecideds as sophisticated citizens who follow a campaign closely before making their final voting decision. The current study tries to make sense of this contrast, while examining differences between sophisticated and less sophisticated undecideds (their level of sophistication was based on their political interest and knowledge). Using two panel surveys, conducted before and after the April 2019 elections in Israel (N = 1427; N = 912), we examine a number of hypotheses about differences in terms of the undecided citizens' demographic backgrounds, how they search for political information during the election campaign, how they come to make their final decisions, and whether they ended up voting. The findings indicate that the typical sophisticated undecided voter is a citizen from a more privileged social background, exhibits greater trust in traditional media, consumes more news to follow the campaign (from various traditional news outlets and social media), is more likely to carry out online discussions about the elections, is more likely to base his or her decision on policy issues, is more likely to debate between parties within the same ideological camp (internal floater), and more likely to vote than less sophisticated undecided voters. Our typology, which makes a distinction between sophisticated and less sophisticated undecided voters, as well as these findings (and the comparison to the committed voters), can help political scientists and practitioners widen their understanding regarding this important group of voters in todays' complex political reality.

What role does news content play in explaining inter-party hostility? We argue that affective polarization is influenced by exposure to one of the most dominant ways to cover politics: strategy coverage. While previous studies have pointed to the negative consequences of covering politicians’ strategies and campaign tactics, we find that this reporting style decreases out-party hostility. Our findings are based on two separate studies: (1) a survey experiment and (2) a cross-sectional analysis that increases external validity by combining survey data with computational content analysis of the articles respondents were exposed to by their primary news sources throughout the 2016 US presidential campaign (415,604 articles from 157 American news outlets). The results demonstrate that despite the wide criticism of the tendency of journalists to focus on political strategies, such coverage may ease inter-party tensions in American politics.

In this research, we examine the role of attachment to an ideological group as a source of stability in a volatile multi-party system. In two studies conducted in Israel (N = 1320), we show that a multi-item Attachment to an Ideological Group (AIG) scale is strongly tied to vote choice and political engagement, and its effects are independent of, and more powerful than, issue-based ideology and partisan identity strength. Compared to individuals with a weak ideological attachment, those who score highly on the AIG scale are more likely to vote for a party from their ideological camp and participate in politics. Moreover, in two survey experiments, respondents high in AIG displayed stronger anger or enthusiasm—known harbingers of political action—in response to threat or reassurance to their ideological group’s status, attesting to a link between AIG and political engagement. Our findings underscore the importance of ideological group attachments in a volatile multi-party system.

Underrepresentation of women in politics is a matter of great concern to social scientists, citizens, and policymakers alike. Despite effort over the past decade to ameliorate it with gender quotas of different types, scientific research provides a mixed picture on the extent to which quotas can close these gender gaps under different conditions. We approach this puzzle by focusing on the orientation of electoral systems-candidate-centered vs. platform-centered-as a context that conditions the effect of quotas on representation. Our analyses of 76 countries' electoral rules and legislatures show that contrary to expectations, it is in candidate-oriented systems that quotas facilitate stronger effect on women's representation. Even after considering proportional representation, district magnitude, human development, or labor-force participation as alternative explanations, we show that quotas foster greater increases in gender representation in candidate-oriented systems. The broader implications are that in electoral systems that tend to have larger gender gaps, quotas have a substantial contribution to equal representation.

Studies of the ramifications of client race and ethnicity for bureaucrats’ judgments treat minority status as homogenous. Yet, individual identity does not boil down to race or ethnicity. Members of racial and ethnic minority groups likely vary in their experiences and capacity to overcome the negative sentiments and stereotypes that burden their inherited group. To transcend unidimensional explanations, we combine Van Oorschot's deservingness framework and a gendered lens to study how the intersection of group identity and gender, as well as individuals' work history, co-shape bureaucrats' categorization of clients. Empirically, we analyze Israeli doctors' categorization of applicants for state incapacity benefits, comparing their medical assessments of men and women of three social groups: the Jewish majority, Ultra-orthodox Jews, and Muslims. Interpreting the empirical findings, we offer that underlying the effect of applicants' group demographics are perceived cultural affinity to the majority and social contributions that vary with gender.

Studies concerning nonlinear political dynamics, such as regime change, focus on macro-level structural factors and political agency. Tipping points are pitched mainly at these levels, and scholars therefore devote less attention to meso-level factors. To bridge this gap, the current paper develops a verbal model that focuses on the collapse of mechanisms sustaining mythical institutions as drivers of such dynamics. A mythical institution enjoys a reputation for power and influence among the public based on widespread and persistent stereotypical beliefs that embody a collectivity’s sense of origin and tradition, high performance and stability, and/or vision and mission. The argument advanced here is that nonlinear political dynamics may occur when the collapse of such mechanisms reflects on the unquestioned legitimacy that the mythical institution enjoys, creating massive embarrassment for the regime that its mythical status needs tight restrictions to prevent believers from “fleeing.” This, in turn, undermines or debunks these institutions’ myths, thereby generating high levels of anxiety, fear, anger, or other (mixes of) emotions. Which emotional process dominates depends on which reaction is stronger at the moment in question. When the level reaches an affective tipping point, citizens begin to update their evaluations and consider new information. This leads to behavioral convergence (e.g, mass emigration, mass violence), which is in turn accelerated by public perceptions concerning the lack of an adequate response by the relevant mythical institutions, thus highlighting the irreversibility of this process. This argument is illustrated herein by examining the 1989 collapse of East Germany’s emigration restrictions system.

The article sheds light on the intellectual biography and theology of Khrīsṭufūrus Jibāra (d. 1901), a Christian Eastern Orthodox archimandrite who had a falling out with the church because of his controversial beliefs. Jibāra was born in Damascus and lived in Beirut, Cairo, Moscow, New York and Boston. He believed that harmonization between Christianity, Judaism and Islam would provide a remedy for religious conflicts and was a precondition for peace. Living in the second half of the nineteenth century, Jibāra developed a unique political theology that was shaped against a background of religious conflicts in Greater Syria, the Ottoman state policy of Pan-Islamism, and the global religious reaction to secularism. Influenced by ancient anti-Trinitarian Christian traditions and by contemporary puritan Unitarian theology, he developed a doctrine that he called ‘the straight path’, which challenged traditional Islam, traditional Christianity and secularism. His unique views shed light on the transreligious postulations of the reformist Islamic movement and present an exceptional attempt to reform Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

Are philosophers experts in moral matters? This contested question is as old as philosophy itself and has recently attracted renewed interest. While it is widely accepted that philosophers possess superior analytic abilities regarding moral matters, scholars still debate whether they are also better judgers of moral problems. We contribute to this debate by offering an empirical perspective on philosophers’ beliefs regarding this question using a novel and global study among 4,087 philosophers from 96 countries. We found that most philosophers believe that philosophers possess an improved ability to both analyze and judge moral problems and that they commonly see these two capacities as going hand in hand. We also point at significant associations between personal and professional attributes and philosophers’ beliefs, such as gender, age, working in the field of moral philosophy, public involvement, and association with the analytic tradition. We discuss the implications of these findings for the debate about moral expertise.

In my book, Cities and Immigration, I suggest shifting responsibilities for the integration of immigrants from the state to the city level. The articles in this issue challenge some of my suggestions. I discuss these challenges with regard to three questions: should a city enjoy greater autonomy to decide who, and how many, immigrants should settle within its borders? Should immigrants enjoy local voting rights even before naturalization? And is there a morally preferable model for integrating immigrants into the city?

Theoretical models of political agency primarily incorporate elected executives’ self-interest as motivating reelection-seeking behavior, which, in turn, keeps these politicians in check. A concerning trend of democratic backsliding highlights that these models fail to capture variations in the intensity of self-interest motivations and their effects, especially the discriminatory nature of some seemingly universal policies. To bridge this gap conceptually, I focus on elected executives’ efficiency in matching the intensity of the policy tool to the severity of policy problems, thus developing the Ladder of Discriminatory Policy. I tie climbing and descending this modular ladder to system-level policy punctuations; the asymmetric effects of policies on politically relevant target groups; and to elected executives’ progression between three self-interest constructs with varying levels of self-interest intensity. I explore socio-psychological and political mechanisms that may facilitate this progression and develop the Discriminatory Policy Conjecture, which can generate hypotheses regarding democratic backsliding and its remedies.

How do judicial techniques enable courts to have a very effective impact on actual national policy while avoiding making binding decisions? Previous academic studies have mostly focused on the controversial capacity (and willingness) of courts to intervene in a country's policy through statutory interpretation or authoritative decisions. We show that by refraining from sweeping landmark decisions, courts can have a latent but substantial impact on actual national policy through technical and procedural measures. The case study here is the Israeli immigration policy toward a large group of Palestinian litigants (916 petitions) who claim to be neglected security-related collaborators.

How does theorizing of fundamental political concepts change when theoretical primacy is accorded to the social and institutional form of the city instead of the state? Given the changing and increasingly central role that cities play in private and social lives, this chapter suggests a reconsideration of the theoretical concepts commonly applied in analyzing cities’ political dynamics and the social relations therein. The overall rationale is that not only do the meanings of fundamental political concepts such as equality, liberty and democracy change over time, but they are also contingent upon the political unit and the institutions analyzed. Consequently, political and legal theory must not only examine the nature and importance of these concepts but principally indicate how they are modified when applied to the city. Thus, this chapter suggests that the time is ripe for scholars to consider the canon of political and legal philosophy vis-à-vis the city

A key distinction in motivational processes is between motivations and the means for pursuing motivations. Despite being a motivated process, existing models of acculturation do not make this distinction, neither empirically nor theoretically. A motivational framework that is informed by theories of goal constructs to understand the process of acculturation is proposed. This model is tested in two distinct samples comprising immigrants from the former Soviet Union to Israel (N = 239) as well as immigrants from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh to Britain (N = 236). Results revealed that the motivation to preserve one's heritage culture and the motivation to adopt one's host culture were each uniquely associated with the respective means for doing so. Furthermore, outcomes in acculturation were determined by the match between acculturation motivations and acculturation means. These findings demonstrate the theoretical and practical implications of analyzing the process of acculturation using a motivational framework.

Jonathan Wolff Avner de-Shalit The purpose of this chapter is to apply the framework set out in our earlier work Disadvantage (2007) to aspects of the COVID-19 crisis. By doing this we aim to highlight some key social vulnerabilities in a stark light, in order to aid thinking about how to prevent or remedy some of the worst inequalities that have been magnified in these most difficult times. In addition, it allows us to present a detailed case study to illustrate our earlier analysis and supplement the more general accounts we have presented before. In our previous work we proposed that disadvantage has multiple dimensions, and that it is quite possible, conceptually, to be relatively disadvantaged on one or more dimensions but not necessarily in others. Yet a key idea from our work is that a number of empirical mechanisms tend to ‘cluster’ different dimensions of disadvantage together.

Exogenous shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic unleashes multiple fundamental questions about society beyond public health. Based on the classical concept of ‘need for orientation’ and the literature on the role of the media in times of crisis, we investigate to what extent the COVID-19 pandemic affected news consumption in comparative perspective. Based on a two-wave panel survey in 17 mostly European countries, our study targets the role of both legacy news brands (TV, radio, newspapers) and so-called contemporary news media (Internet-based and social media) during this global health crisis. Our results show an overall rise of news use across countries, but only for some types of news media. We find an increase of TV news consumption, and a higher reliance on social media and the Internet for news and information. This indicates that in times of crises and an unusually strong need for orientation, people mainly turn to news sources that are easily available and offer a more immediate coverage. Furthermore, we find the rise in news use to be mainly present among those who already have a higher level of trust in legacy media and among people that were more concerned about the impact of the pandemic.

This article reconstructs Adam Smith’s contribution to the conversation on the nature and value of free government in the eighteenth century. Smith contributes to this conversation in two ways. First, by embedding the idea of free government in a narrative of the progress of government, which traces the interplay between natural progress and social circumstances, and culminates in the establishment of modern free government in Britain. Second, by offering a theory of the form of free government fit for modern commercial states. Drawing on the “rational system of liberty” established in Britain, the Smithian model of free government is based on a “happy mixture” of republicanism and monarchism. Looking beyond the rational system, it merges the traditional concern for constitutional security against arbitrary power with a new science of policy intended to moderate the oppressive inclinations of legislators. The article contests Duncan Forbes’ reading of Smith as questioning the relation between individual liberty and free government, and brings Smith closer to Quentin Skinner’s work on the neo-Roman understanding of liberty. It suggests that Smith’s work may offer insight into some of the ways in which neo-Roman ideas were being creatively reformulated in the eighteenth century.

The significance of the German philosopher and social thinker, Georg Simmel (1858–1918), is only now being recognised by intellectual historians. Through penetrating readings of Simmel's thought, taken as a series of reflections on the essence of modernity and modern civilisation, Efraim Podoksik places his ideas within the context of intellectual life in Germany, and especially Berlin, under the Kaiserreich. Modernity, characterised by the growing differentiation and fragmentation of culture and society, was a fundamental issue during Simmel's life, underpinning central intellectual debates in Imperial Germany. Simmel's thought is depicted here as an attempt at transforming the complexity of these debates into a coherent worldview that can serve as an effective guide to understanding their main parameters. Paying particular attention to the genealogy and usage of the concepts of Bildung, culture and civilisation in Germany, this study offers contextual analyses of Simmel's philosophies of culture, society, art, religion and the feminine, as well as his interpretations of Dante, Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Goethe and Rembrandt.

Regulation is typically conceived as a two-party relationship between a rule-maker or regulator (R) and a rule-taker or target (T). We set out an agenda for the study of regulation as a three- (or more) party relationship, with intermediaries (I) at the center of the analysis. Intermediaries play major and varied roles in regulation, from providing expertise and feedback to facilitating implementation, from monitoring the behavior of regulatory targets to building communities of assurance and trust. After developing the basic regulator-intermediary-target (RIT) model, we discuss important extensions and variations of the model. We then discuss the varieties of regulatory capture that may appear where intermediaries are involved.

Theorists have long argued that discussing public affairs with others increases citizens’ knowledge of politics. Yet, empirical tests of this claim reach contradictory results, with some studies reporting large effects of discussion on knowledge while others report small effects or fail to confirm the hypothesis. To account for this inconsistency, the current study meta-analyzes this literature. The results, based on 163 research findings from 134 independent studies (N = 412,933), indicate positive and significant mean effect sizes of r = .15 for discussion frequency, r = .1 for discussion heterogeneity, and r = .18 for discussion network size. While all three effects are statistically significant, a meta-analytic relative weights analysis reveals that discussion heterogeneity explains little variance in political knowledge once discussion frequency and network size have been accounted for. In other words, how much citizens talk about politics matters much more than whom they talk to.

This article is an edited version of the roundtable that took place at the Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas (CIDE) in Mexico City, June 6th, 2018. Based on a set of key questions about regulation as a field of studies with implications for public administration, public management and public policies, as well as a fundamental activity of multiple organizations and numerous public servants, Sharon Gilad, Andrea Mennicken, Salvador Parrado, Bruno Queiroz Cunha and Martin Lodge participated in a free flowing conversation hosted by Mauricio I. Dussauge-Laguna. Their commentaries and points of view about theoretical and empirical developments of regulation around the world provide some interesting insights into the state of this field, its essential debates and its future implications (both theoretical and practical).

In a democracy what people think matters. Political philosophers are mostly democrats. They often justify deliberative and participatory democracy. And yet when it comes to philosophizing they often turn a blind eye to what people think; they sometimes even express profound doubts about what people think and about consulting the public. I call this the political philosophy gap. It has been justified in several ways. In this paper I first consider and dismiss the most common justifications. I then suggest a democratic and an epistemological reason why political philosophers should consider what people think when they formulate their theories. I put forward a proposal for a method of doing so, which I call public reflective equilibrium, and which consists of four stages of research and philosophy. Finally, I suggest that not only is it doable, but it has a potential to contribute a lot to contemporary political philosophy. It should not come instead of traditional ways of conducting political philosophy but as an additional, perhaps more political, method of political philosophy.

I would like to begin by expressing my sincere and profound thanks to all those who suggested criticism and comments to my paper. As I write this reply, like many around the world, I am at home, in the bizarre situation that has been imposed on us by the Coronavirus pandemic; or, to be more precise, imposed by governments due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Various regulations are restricting our freedom of movement and other basic liberties. As governments issue increasing numbers of restrictions and even consider transferring more power to the executive branch, people all over the globe are debating whether governments should be so paternalistic in their policies. In my own country, Israel, the government was poised to close the parliament. Fortunately, spontaneous demonstrations and a quick intervention by the government's legal adviser prevented this from happening.

East Asia (the post-Confucian countries) is by far more advanced than the Middle East, primarily in terms of better education, leadership quality and population control – for which East Asia ranks at the top of the world’s list (and the Middle East at the bottom). In an attempt to trace the origins of this gap, this article concentrates on one issue: the separation between state and religion. Whereas East Asia is the most irreligious region in the world (not in the sense that there is no religion but in the sense that religion is not allowed to institutionalize) but in the sense that the civilian and secular government is always above the clergy. On the other hand, the Middle East is not only the most religious region in the world but is also involves in the government and occasionally controls it, blocks all attempts at reform, and leads to lagging far behind East Asia. Given this situation, and fast population growth, change is unlikely.

Deontological defenders of retributivism about punishment believe that there is something intrinsically good about bad things happening to bad people, even if no additional good will follow.1 Some of them also believe that society, through its legal institutions, has a duty to punish criminals. As Kant famously stated that ‘Even if a civil society were to dissolve itself by common agreement of its members, [...], the last murderer remaining in prison must first be exe-cuted’.2 Some proponents of resurgent retributivism such as Michael Moore have endorsed and defended this view.

Regulation, that is, rulemaking, rule monitoring, and rule enforcement, is both a key policy and legal instrument and a pillar of the institutions that demarcate political, social, and economic lives. It is commonly defined as a sustained and focused control mechanism over valuable activities using direct and indirect rules. Most frequently, regulation is associated with the activity of public independent regulatory agencies, designed to promote economic, social, risk-management, integrity, or moral goals. Since the 1990s, more and more states worldwide are establishing such agencies and placing more emphasis on the use of authority, rules, and standard-setting, thus partially displacing earlier emphasis on public ownerships and directly provided services. Alongside this rise of the “regulatory state,” the expansion of regulation is also reflected in the rapidly growing variety of regulatory regimes that involves nonstate actors, such as private regulation, self-regulation, and civil regulation. Regulatory regimes can be explained and assessed from three theoretical perspectives: public-interest theories, private-interest theories, and institutional theories. Each perspective shines a different light on the motivations of the five regulatory actors: rule-makers, rule intermediaries, rule-takers, rule beneficiaries, and citizens. Over the years, diverse regulatory strategies evolved, including: prescriptive strategies that attempt to mandate adherence in precise terms what is required from the rule-takers; performance-based strategies that set in advance only the required outcomes; and process-based strategies that attempt to influence the internal incentives and norms of rule-takers. Although it appears that regulation is here to stay as a keystone of society, it still faces fundamental challenges of effectiveness, democratic control, and fairness.

Teaching social sciences frequently involves politically and ideologically fraught issues. This study examines the effect of students’ perceived ideological distance from their professors on their academic experience, drawing on a survey of 1,257 students from Social Science and Law faculties in Israel across five different universities. Congruent with previous findings from the US, the study’s results demonstrate that perceived ideological distance lowers students’ evaluations of their professors’ commitment to their success. Implications of the findings are discussed with reference to the current underrepresentation of right-wing and conservative academics in the social sciences.

The transition from low- to high-choice media environments has had far-reaching implications for citizens’ media use and its relationship with political knowledge. However, there is still a lack of comparative research on how citizens combine the usage of different media and how that is related to political knowledge. To fill this void, we use a unique cross-national survey about the online and offline media use habits of more than 28,000 individuals in 17 European countries. Our aim is to (i) profile different types of news consumers and (ii) understand how each user profile is linked to political knowledge acquisition. Our results show that five user profiles – news minimalists, social media news users, traditionalists, online news seekers, and hyper news consumers – can be identified, although the prevalence of these profiles varies across countries. Findings further show that both traditional and online-based news diets are correlated with higher political knowledge. However, online-based news use is more widespread in Southern Europe, where it is associated with lower levels of political knowledge than in Northern Europe. By focusing on news audiences, this study provides a comprehensive and fine-grained analysis of how contemporary European political information environments perform and contribute to an informed citizenry.

Scholars have emphasized Adam Smith's critique of the dangers of patriotism, but have not paid close attention to its potential value. This article recovers from Smith's work an attractive model of patriotism without nationalism. The potential value of patriotism lies in inspiring individuals to realize an ideal of impartial beneficence, which consists in overcoming selfishness and other subpolity partialities and in promoting the greater happiness of all fellow citizens. Smith defends virtuous patriotism against strong cosmopolitanism by arguing that a global division of labor, which directs individuals to benefit their compatriots, more effectively serves the interests of humanity than directly trying to promote global happiness. This article illuminates aspects of Smith's work that contrast with the “invisible hand” argument and favor the conscious pursuit of public interest in some contexts. It contributes to recent discussions of patriotism a distinctive way of understanding its relation to impartiality.

This article contends that an important driver of turnout is the national stories embraced by citizens. We suggest the notion of ‘story incentive,’ whereby adopting a group’s story components – those that connect the past, the future, and prominent national characters – motivates individuals to participate in that group’s political activities. Leaning on narrative theories and studies on voter turnout, we develop and test hypotheses regarding the effect of story components on the likelihood of voting. Our measurements of story incentives are based on election surveys and encompass Denmark, Israel, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US. The results support the main story-incentive hypothesis. We discuss the theoretical ramifications of the connection between adherence to national stories and voter turnout.

This paper argues that works of popular culture, specifically horror films, offer valuable insights into dominant and critical perceptions of the sources of violence in ongoing armed conflicts—an issue of concern for scholars of International Relations (IR) scholars, which as yet has not received sufficient attention. Accordingly, we present a new approach that IR scholars can utilize in their analysis of works of popular culture, applying it to two recent horror films from Israel/Palestine: Cannon Fodder (2013, dir. Eitan Gafny) and Freak Out (2015, dir. Boaz Armoni). The analysis of these films, combined with a discussion of films dealing with violence from other contexts, reveals how works of popular culture in general, and horror films in particular, can help address the question of whether violence in armed conflicts is perceived as endogenous or exogenous to the groups involved. This can also shed light on specific issues, such as the connection between social representation and violence, the link between the use of military technology and violence, and the blurred boundaries between endogenous and exogenous sources of violence.

When the past is contested by political actors, it can play a notable role both in present and in future politics. This is especially true when it comes to the memory of dominant parties, which are part and parcel of political and national history. Focusing on dominant parties in parliamentary democracies, this article examines the memory dynamics of a dominant party after its demise and highlights the importance of memory modes in understanding these dynamics. Using theories of collective memory, it identifies four possible modes of memory in a post-dominance era, suggesting discursive and power-related indications for each mode. The article then utilizes this framework to examine the memory of Mapai, the once-dominant party in Israel. On the basis of this analysis, the authors propose hypotheses concerning the comparative cases of Sweden, Italy, and Japan.

Western societies are increasingly enacting majority nationalism laws to strengthen majority culture. We propose that these laws may alter public attitudes about minorities’ equal citizenship with varied impact on majorities and minorities. To explore this issue, we examine the impact of Israel’s recently enacted Nation Law on the Jewish majority and the Arab minority. Experimental evidence from before the Law’s enactment reveals that both minority and majority respondents perceive the passage of the Law as permitting discrimination against the minority in housing, employment, and voting, but the effect on minority perceptions is larger. Panel and cross-sectional data from before and after the Law’s enactment reveal that the effect on majority respondents was fleeting, whereas the negative impact on minority respondents was stronger and more durable. These findings expose the troubling effects of majority nationalism laws and suggest that law may operate as a prism, expressing different messages to different groups.

What does it mean for citizens in democracies to be represented? Does it even matter? Representation theories and studies have mostly emphasized the representatives, giving only limited attention to the represented. In this paper, we address this lacuna by adopting Hanna Pitkin’s multidimensionality of representation and the act-for/stand-for tiered structure she posits, along with a reconceptualization of dyadic and collective representation as a matrix (rather than a dichotomy). We develop theoretically (and examine empirically) how citizens perceive all of Pitkin’s dimensions concurrently and their tiered structure at two points on the dyadic-collective matrix: representation by a politician/party and representation by the parliament. We develop a novel set of questions, based on in-depth interviews and designed to capture Pitkin’s theoretical concept of representation empirically among citizens. Utilizing the 2019-20 Israel National Election Studies, we find that citizens’ subjective patterns of representation are Pitkinian - multidimensional and tiered - across dyadic and collective representation. We further find that these patterns contribute to citizens’ overall feeling of representation, and that multidimensional representation, especially by the parliament (where they feel less represented), promotes support for democracy. Our study calls for more focus on representation from the citizens’ standpoint.

Deliberative democracy fosters greater involvement of the public in policymaking. However, psychological challenges involved in eliciting policy preferences receive little attention in this context. This study addresses the implications of opportunity cost neglect (OCN) and impact bias for policy preferences. Utilizing a survey experiment among residents of peripheral towns in Israel, we examine preferences regarding investment in rail infrastructure in peripheral areas. In line with psychological studies on OCN, we find evidence that priming awareness to alternatives can de-bias OCN in policy preferences. However, this method is less effective for people who exhibit impact bias (respondents for whom the policy is new), presenting a serious challenge to the validity of policy preferences of those who are expected to be most affected by the considered policy. This paper offers a theoretical contribution to the relationship between OCN and impact bias, and discusses the practical implications for public participation in policymaking.

Israel’s Declaration of Independence proclaims full equality for all of Israel’s citizens and calls upon members of the Arab nation “to participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship.” This pledge has not been kept. On the one hand, the government is using its majority to legislate laws that undermine the status and legitimacy of the Arab citizens. On the other, since 2007 the same government has been investing a great deal of money in improving the economic conditions in the Arab localities. The tenuous relationship between Jews and Arabs is under constant pressure. Nonetheless, a change has begun to surface tacitly in the official state policy toward Arab citizens, recognizing the justification of equality, in economic terms. The three subsequent Knesset elections held in 2019–2020 strengthened the political representation and clout of the Arab citizens; however, the discriminating barrier, preventing their recognition as legitimate partners in the government coalition, has not been removed.

Studies of the Israeli public sector point to the vast influence of the Ministry of Finance (MOF) across multiple policy domains. This chapter combines bureaucratic politics research and the notion of veto players to theorize a two-tiered power game between bureaucratic and political players. It argues that the policy influence of bureaucracies is shaped by stable institutional factors and by the extent to which powerful politicians are inclined to intervene. In Israel, legal provisions vest the MOF with an institutional advantage over other bureaus and their ministers. Yet the MOF’s ability to exploit its advantaged position is contingent upon the joint propensity of the prime minister (PM) and the finance minister (FM) to forgo intervention. The chapter associates the PM’s and FM’s inclination to support the MOF with their political motivation to maintain their grip on the agenda of an increasingly fragmented coalition government. Thus, the MOF’s supremacy is reliant upon, and underpins, political power.

This chapter reviews, analyzes, and explains general patterns of electoral behavior in national elections in Israel from 1949 to 2019. It examines both patterns of voter turnout and the choice of a specific party. While it looks at historical trends, it focuses mainly on more recent developments. The types of factors that explain variance and trends in these behavioral patterns are not unique to Israel. Yet the specific relative weight of each factor clearly tells much of the story of Israeli politics. These factors include, especially, the influence of religiosity on Jewish voting patterns and the separate development in voting patterns (turnout and party choice) of the minority population of Israeli Arab citizens.

Few countries receive as much attention as Israel and are at the same time as misunderstood. The Oxford Handbook of Israeli Politics and Society brings together the leading Israeli and international figures in order to offer the most wide-ranging treatment available of an intriguing country. This chapter tackles the issue of Israeli exceptionalism, arguing against those who shy away from assessing Israel in a comparative perspective—whether for reasons of complexity or because of a political agenda. Israel is indeed different, for many reasons, but it possesses enough similarities in its democratic political institutions and social makeup that to truly understand the country, scholars need to employ a comparative analytical perspective. The chapter argues that Israeli politics and society are comparable, that comparison will improve the ability to assess Israel, and that Israel can contribute to theory building and testing in comparative politics. The chapter then outlines the sections and summarizes the main features of each chapter in this handbook.

This chapter discusses Israel's policy in and toward the West Bank (and East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip from the Six-Day War (1967), when Israel occupied these areas, to the present. Although the focus here is on the political-security realm, other spheres (eg, economic, social, and cultural-discursive) are also addressed. The first part of the chapter discusses Israel's policy in and vis-à-vis the Territories in the first decade after 1967, which in retrospect was the policy's formative period. It then examines the four decades that followed, identifying elements of continuity and change in Israel's policy. This is followed by a discussion of the major challenges to Israel's policy since 1967: the first Palestinian intifada, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the second intifada, and Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. The concluding section tries to assess the cumulative impact of Israel's policy in and toward the Territories.

Permissibility of electoral systems, and in particular the conversion of voices in the electorate to the legislature, is broadly considered to depend on the number of seats per district (district magnitude) in a country. Yet the most prevalent electoral system in the democratic world, proportional representation with districts, is often characterized by an almost entirely overlooked variation: within the same country districts vary in their magnitude, sometimes by a factor of 20. How does such variation affect permissibility of electoral systems? Drawing on a broad cross-section of democracies, we demonstrate that contrary to what the literature implicitly assumes, other things equal, a combination of large and small districts results in greater permissibility than a set of districts of similar magnitude. We find that where districts are of similar (different) magnitude the degree of permissibility is lower (higher) than that found by current literature.

This chapter presents a critical discussion of the symbiosis between media and politics in Israel. Theoretically, the Israeli media operate in a pluralistic, democratic, and advanced sociopolitical climate, but in fact most of the media suffer from fragmentation, economic instability, and heavy political pressures. These elements are reflected, for example, in homogeneous news supply, massive cross-ownership, and recently by increasing governmental intervention. These elements have rapidly invaded social and online media as well. The first section of this chapter offers an overview of the structural, political, and economic characteristics of the Israeli news media. The second part outlines characteristics of the Israeli media coverage of political news, election campaigns, and political satire, such as framing, mediatization, negativity, personalization, and political bias.

Israel has experienced both failed and successful attempts to reform its democratic institutions in the seventy years since its founding. The most noteworthy failure has been in the promotion of much-needed electoral reform that would moderate the “extreme” features of the hyper-representative, party-centered electoral system. Successes range from small modifications of the electoral system to wide-ranging reforms of the government system at the local and national levels and within political parties. These reforms injected doses of majoritarianism and personalism into the system. But they did not help to solve the problems in the functioning of the Israeli regime; in fact, they often made them worse.

The contemporary perception of Israel’s judiciary as an independent branch does not coincide with Israel’s first government’s perception after establishing the first Supreme Court. To a great extent the executive branch deemed the court its long arm. Until the mid-1950s judges were appointed by the government, and questions of conflicts of interest and political affiliation—in the wide sense of the term—were not compelling. However, since the 1990s the court’s power of judicial review and the legitimacy of its decisions have become issues of heated public debate. Consequently, the process of appointing justices to the court has become subject to very strict public and political scrutiny. This chapter asks whether the Israeli judiciary truly constitutes a third independent branch of government. This is relevant considering the continuous attempts to change the existing balance of power, aiming to limit the court’s capacity to apply universal judicial doctrines and legal standards to executive and legislative decisions.

The Knesset is the legislative body of Israel, which has been a parliamentary, unitary democracy since its foundation. It is a unicameral parliament, elected through a proportional election system that to a great extent reflects Israeli society. Because there is no written constitution, the Knesset alone delineates the three branches of government. On top of its legislative role, the Knesset also oversees the executive branch, handles political conflicts, and is in charge of decision-making. Although it is the main source of all political power in Israel and appears strong on paper, it operates under structural, legal, procedural, and historical constraints. The result is a relatively weak legislative branch in practice, in some roles more so than in others.

Few countries receive as much attention as Israel and are at the same time as misunderstood. The Oxford Handbook of Israeli Politics and Society brings together leading Israeli and international figures to offer the most wide-ranging treatment available of an intriguing country. It serves as a comprehensive reference for the growing field of Israel studies and is also a significant resource for students and scholars of comparative politics, recognizing that in many ways Israel is not unique, but rather a test case of democracy in deeply divided societies and states engaged in intense conflict. The handbook presents an overview of the historical development of Israeli democracy through chapters examining the country’s history, contemporary society, political institutions, international relations, and most pressing political issues. It outlines the most relevant developments over time while not shying away from the strife both in and around Israel. It presents opposed narratives in full force, enabling readers to make their own judgments.

Israel’s political economy has been transformed since the 1980s from a developmental to a neoliberal model. This chapter describes and explains this transformation, emphasizing the unevenness and incompleteness of liberalization and its impact on socioeconomic inequality. Adopting a historical-institutionalist perspective to explain both the rise of Israeli neoliberalism and its unevenness, the chapter argues that liberalization was led by economic technocrats in state agencies, who were guided by liberal economic ideas and simultaneously pursuing their interest in greater authority and autonomy. The technocrats were empowered by re-engineering economic policy institutions and cooperating with other political actors. However, their ability to fulfill the goal of technocratic management of a competition-driven economy was limited by the continuing power of some sectors of both business and labor and the continuing vibrancy of the state’s national and military projects. The conclusion discusses recent challenges to neoliberalism in Israel as a result of public discontent and conflict between state actors.

Both the parties and the party system of Israel have undergone significant changes during the last seventy years. This chapter begins by delineating the transformation of the political parties in Israel, from classic mass parties to a plethora of types that coexist somewhat uneasily, and from parties focused on domestic socioeconomic issues to ones dominated by foreign policy and security concerns. It then shifts to its main focus, assessing the changes in the party system. The chapter argues two points: first, that while the Israeli parties were extremely volatile, the party blocs were surprisingly stable; and second, that while the Israeli party system exhibited two very stable periods during the first fifty years—albeit with a short, transformative interim phase—during the last twenty-five years it has exhibited accelerated change and instability.

This paper provides an integrative analysis of legal proportionality and policy analysis, and identifies the inherent potential of integrating the proportionality principle in policy analysis for enhancing the protection of rights in the policy process. Our analysis entails three key recommendations: (1) Mandating the inclusion of a rights-impact criterion in policy analysis in order to increase the likelihood that the three proportionality tests will be addressed; (2) The professional norm of considering several distinct alternatives serves the normative requirement of the necessity test and facilitates the mitigation of rights restrictions through the comparison and modification of the alternatives; (3) Requiring policymakers to present the factual basis for the undesirable phenomenon in the course of judicial review of the policy goal. Such integration of policy analysis and proportionality can streamline the consideration of fundamental rights in the policy-making process and consequently increase their protection. Adopting these practical measures may substantially assist courts in identifying ways to implement judicial review, while respecting the discretion of policymakers. Finally, these proposed practices are expected to fine-tune the incentive structure of policy-makers for conducting quality policy analysis while protecting human and civil rights.

The core feature of parliamentary democracy is government responsibility to the legislature. The most important instrument by which parliament can express its lack of support for the government is the vote of no confidence. This mechanism remains significantly under-studied, and research on votes of no confidence calls out for systematic attention. It is also timely because parliamentary democracies are making it procedurally harder for parliament to terminate the government. Through developing and conceptualising a series of indicators that affect the relative ease with which parliament can challenge and terminate government, this study proposes the first ever framework for analysing votes of no confidence. It then empirically locates countries in the framework and discusses those that have shifted over time. The goal of this study is to begin to fill an academic lacuna concerning, arguably, the defining feature of parliamentary democracy.

The collaborative effort of theory-driven content analysis can benefit significantly from the use of topic analysis methods, which allow researchers to add more categories while developing or testing a theory. This additive approach enables the reuse of previous efforts of analysis or even the merging of separate research projects, thereby making these methods more accessible and increasing the discipline’s ability to create and share content analysis capabilities. This paper proposes a weakly supervised topic analysis method that uses both a low-cost unsupervised method to compile a training set and supervised deep learning as an additive and accurate text classification method. We test the validity of the method, specifically its additivity, by comparing the results of the method after adding 200 categories to an initial number of 450. We show that the suggested method provides a foundation for a low-cost solution for large-scale topic analysis.

Do certain issues or governments tend to reproduce consistently either policy underreactions or policy overreactions? This chapter elaborates on the psychological and institutional explanations that can account for unintentional policy over- and underreaction styles and the strategic explanations that can account for their intentional counterparts. The arguments advanced in relation to psychological and institutional explanations are that policy over- and underreaction styles may occur as a result of psychological biases and strong emotions, as well as due to institutional values, procedures, myths, and routines. The arguments advanced in relation to strategic explanations are that (i) real or manufactured policy problems, especially in the areas of national security and crime prevention, may produce overreaction policy style because political executives wish to display their unwavering commitment to the resolution of problems by implementing aggressive and visible policies as well as by overspending on the military and police, and (ii) real or manufactured policy problems to which government supporters accord low priority may produce underreaction policy style, involving symbolic action and neglect. These disproportionate policy styles are likely to be pronounced when populist leaders hold executive positions.

Prima facie one’s obligations to the nation and to future generations might clash because of the tension between the particular, the concrete, and the contemporary versus the universal, the abstract, and the future-oriented. However, the nation is and should be regarded as an intergenerational community; this mode of thinking, called here “thinking like a nation,” yields concrete obligations to the not yet born, based in current persons and their strong belief that the nation constitutes their self, a self that transcends into the future. According to the transgenerational theory which is based on the nation, depleting resources or creating severe climate change harms contemporaries who regard the transgenerational community of the nation as what constitutes their self. However, some reasons why one should be cautious about thinking like a nation, especially when this becomes a chauvinistic attitude, are noted.