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A burgeoning literature considers the domestic causes and consequences of democratic backsliding for public perceptions of democracy but has yet to fully examine the role of international factors in explaining these perceptions. Specifically, the effect of democratic backsliding in one democracy on public support for democratic principles in other countries has, thus far, defied theoretical and empirical investigation. Addressing this gap, we propose and test a theory of the effects of backsliding on global opinion in which information about democratic decline in one country can lead to increased support for authoritarian governance in another country. To test this, we use an original survey experiment in Israel where we test the effect of two narratives regarding the 2020 U.S. elections—one signaling democratic decline and one signaling democratic resilience—on support for authoritarian governance. We find that respondents exposed to the narrative of U.S. democratic decline were more supportive of authoritarian governance compared to respondents exposed to the narrative of democratic resilience. We further find marginal evidence that the respondents' ideological preferences condition the effect of narrative exposure. Our findings suggest that the democratic backsliding literature has insufficiently explored the global consequences of domestic events and processes on democratic decline worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research reveals the association between conspiracy thinking, i.e. one's predisposition to believe in conspiracy theories, and trust in elections and election outcomes. This research, however, has thus far only examined single election cycles. In this letter, we examine whether citizens' conspiracy thinking, across electoral winners and losers, predicts electoral mistrust in the polarized, crisis-laden state of Israel. We test our expectation using four nationally representative samples fielded in 2022—before the electoral campaign started, during the campaign, and after the November national election, when a change in government took place. We show that conspiracy thinking predicts electoral mistrust and that this effect is independent of the effect of being an electoral loser. We also demonstrate that losing or winning the election does not meaningfully moderate the effect of conspiracy thinking on electoral mistrust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dynamic agenda representation assumes a linkage between the policy emphases prescribed by various democratic inputs (electoral promises and public opinion polls) and policy agendas ranging from the media to executive orders. An extrapolation of this idea would propose that, in the U.S. context, policy emphasis in major programmatic messages such as State of the Union addresses would be followed by the president's day‐to‐day communication. We investigate this congruence with a new database of presidential speeches that, for the first time, offers a deep learning‐enhanced sentence‐level policy topic coding of various forms of the speeches U.S. presidents made from Truman to Trump (for a total count of 16,523 speeches divided into nearly 2 million individual sentences). Using this database, we demonstrate that presidents' occasional, day‐to‐day remarks strongly correlate with the annual policy messages—in this sense, presidents are staying on the democratic script. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In coalition governments, parties invest much effort to manage delegation costs to individual ministers. In this article, we examine an intra-executive mechanism for managing delegation costs: Assigning ministerial co-responsibility in cabinet decisions. Using data of cabinet decisions in Israel, we test when and under what conditions co-responsibility is assigned. We find that co-responsibility is assigned strategically by cabinet members weighing the risk of a drift against the costs of imposing co-responsibility. These findings demonstrate an understudied mechanism through which coalition governments narrow ministerial autonomy and informational advantage once policies reach the cabinet. In doing so, this research contributes to a better understanding of policymaking in coalition governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Israel is covered extensively by the American press. Several studies have examined US news coverage during specific events, yet a systematic analysis of the nature of this coverage is still lacking. This article provides an in-depth investigation of the coverage of Israel from 1981 to 2013 in three leading newspapers in the United States. Using computer-based content analysis of 56,490 news articles, we examine how the intensity of the coverage and the specific topics discussed vary over time. Our empirical findings demonstrate a relative decline in coverage of Israel, and confirm existing theories about media coverage of foreign events--mainly that coverage increases during periods of tumult, especially instances of armed conflict resulting in military action, and decreases during periods of heightened peace talks., INTRODUCTION What we know about the world is determined by what the media chooses to tell us. (1) Newspapers offer readers information about the current state of affairs, influencing the [...]

Recent studies question whether declining response rates in survey data overstate the level of polarization of Americans. At issue are the sources of declining response rates—declining contact rates, associated mostly with random polling mechanisms, or declining cooperation rates, associated with personal preferences, knowledge, and interest in politics—and their differing effects on measures of polarization. Assessing 158 surveys (2004–2018), we show that declining cooperation is the primary source of declining response rates and that it leads to survey overrepresentation of people who are more engaged in politics. Analyzing individual responses to 1,223 policy questions in those surveys, we further show that, conditional on the policy area, this survey bias overestimates or underestimates the partisan divide among Americans. Our findings question the perceived strength of mass polarization and move forward the discussion about the effect of declining survey response on generalizations from survey data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During his 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump vowed to change U.S. priorities and strengthen his administration's relationship with Israel and its government. As president, Mr. Trump carried through his campaign promises: He recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem; he recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights; he withdrew the U.S. from the Iran Nuclear Deal; he cut funding for the Palestinians; took unilateral supportive actions at the U.N. and promoted peace negotiations between Israel and Arab countries in the region. The article reviews these measures as strategic partisan tools used by Donald Trump to fulfill commitments to his base and to appropriate issues which had long been avoided as partisan. In appropriating them for his own political gains, the former president tapped into and increased the ongoing partisan divide over Israel which may well become an irreversible trend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does exposure to terrorism affect political attitudes? This paper presents a new individual-level psychobiological model of political attitudes. Using a unique individual-level data of personal exposure to terrorism, a physiological marker of inflammation (CRP) and a psychological measure of perception of threat to an ongoing conflict—the Israel-Palestinian Conflict—we assess the effect of personal exposure to terrorism on militant attitudes concerning the conflict. Our data of physiological (blood samples), psychological, and attitudinal factors were collected in Israel during a military escalation along the Gaza Strip border. The findings reveal that among people personally exposed to terrorism, the perception of threat mediates an association between physiological conditions and militant attitudes. These findings contribute to the emerging literature on the biopolitics of political violence, suggesting a renewed focus on the dynamic interplay between physiological, psychological, and political factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the extension of party conflict to a foreign policy issue affect the ability of Americans to form an opinion about the issue? We test this using elite references and longitudinal public opinion data about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, a salient foreign policy issue in the United States that is increasingly characterized by partisan divisions. Our findings demonstrate that since the turn of the 21st century, the availability and clarity of party cues have increased, as well as the share of Americans who hold an opinion about the issue. Applying regression models to individual-level data, we reveal that the extension of party conflict to this issue has made it easier for more Americans to form an opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]