Alon Yakter

Due to the growing importance of diasporas in contemporary geopolitics, many states seek to cultivate diasporic attachment and encourage diaspora mobilization using strategic narratives. Are such appeals effective? We report results from a pre-registered two-wave survey experiment conducted among Jewish Americans before and during the Israel-Hamas war. Our intervention assesses the impact of three common appeals identified by prior work: threats to the homeland, shared historical memory, and discrimination in the diaspora’s country of residence. We find that none of these appeals influenced Jewish-Americans’ attachment to, support for, or intent to mobilize for Israel, even during a war in the “homeland.” Instead, baseline differences in these outcomes reflect deep-seated generational, denominational, and partisan cleavages within the Jewish American community. These findings suggest that intra-diaspora fragmentation and long-standing views of the “homeland” might dominate short-term rhetorical interventions. Consequently, strategic frames deployed by kin states and political animators may be less effective on diaspora audiences than intended.

Amid declining public standing, many political parties seek to regain disaffected voters through various institutional strategies. One key approach is democratizing legislative candidate selection to grant party members or voters greater influence and signal improved responsiveness, transparency, and legitimacy. Yet does this strategy pay off electorally? The growing literature on this topic provides conflicting answers and limited evidence. We argue that more inclusive candidate selection does not have meaningful effects at the polls despite its merits. Whereas voters favor such procedures in principle, as some suggest, they underprioritize them in favor of other considerations when electing parties. We support this argument with observational and experimental data, including a matching difference-in-differences estimation of party performance across thirty-four democracies and a survey democracies and a survey experiment in three countries. This article contributes to our understanding of the relationship between party institutions and voter behavior in an age of eroding public trust and rising anti-establishment sentiment.

Popular willingness to compromise is an important step for conflict resolution. A key argument suggests that improving expectations about the prospects of peace can increase public support for concessions. Yet a competing view, anchored in broader debates about preferences and expectations, suggests that prior ideological dispositions motivate biased future expectations rather than vice versa. This tension, however, remains understudied in violent conflicts. In this study, we leverage rich survey data from Israel to disentangle the causal relationship between expectations and preferences for compromise in a long-standing conflict. Using two decades of aggregate monthly series and two exogenous shocks to peace expectations, we find that changes in prospective expectations do predict subsequent shifts in support for compromise. We find no contrary evidence for a null, opposite, or heterogeneous relationship. The findings contribute to ongoing debates about the interrelations between expectations and preferences and provide insights into their implications for conflict resolution.

The relationship between personality traits and political attitudes has been studied extensively. However, existing accounts largely study personality’s links to liberal-conservative divisions on social and economic issues. We know far less about its attitudinal influences when politics is organized around other issue domains, particularly ethnonational conflicts. Addressing this gap, we examine the relationship between the Big Five personality traits, policy preferences, and political orientation in Israel, where the main ideological cleavage involves the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Using original survey data, we find that the known relationships with social and economic attitudes operate only partly and more weakly in this context. Unlike these domains, conflict-related preferences in Israel correlate primarily with greater conscientiousness, largely through authoritarian tendencies. General Left-Right orientations mimic this relationship, reflecting conflict-related views rather than social or economic inclinations. These findings expand the scope of current debates about personality and political attitudes and underscore the importance of national ideological contexts for future research.

With global changes, large-scale natural hazards are more frequent and intense, posing a particular challenge for groups in conflict. Do these shared external threats influence group willingness to cooperate and assist the adversary, and how? The literature suggests inconsistent expectations, from increased intergroup cooperation, to exacerbated animosity, to no discernable impact. We explore this question in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a joint exogenous threat for both sides. Using multiple surveys and a conjoint experiment, we examine whether and how COVID-19 threat perceptions affected Jewish-Israeli preferences for collaborating with the Palestinians against the pandemic, including a novel exploration of concrete policy priorities. We find that greater COVID-19 threat perceptions have little effect on collaborative policy preferences, corroborating politics-as-usual arguments: support for out-group assistance, cooperation, and cost-sharing is polarized by ideological orientation. Our findings outline both constraints and opportunities for intergroup collaboration policies in conflicts facing joint outside challenges.

Discussions of terrorism assume actual or threatened violence, but the term is regularly used to delegitimize rivals' nonviolent actions. Yet do ordinary citizens accept descriptions of nonviolence as terrorism? Using a preregistered survey-experiment in Israel, a salient conflictual context with diverse repertoires of contention, we find that audiences rate adversary nonviolence close to terrorism, consider it illegitimate, and justify its forceful repression. These perceptions vary by the action's threatened harm, its salience, and respondents' ideology. Explicitly labeling nonviolence as terrorism, moreover, particularly sways middle-of-the-road centrists. These relationships replicate in a lower-salience conflict, albeit with milder absolute judgments, indicating generalizability. Hence, popular perceptions of terrorism are more fluid and manipulable than assumed, potentially undermining the positive effects associated with nonviolent campaigns.

While support for redistribution remains high across Europe, voting for left-wing parties, traditionally identified with this agenda, has been under par. Past research explains this puzzle by class-based disagreements about redistributive priorities and by second-dimension attitudes. These explanations, however, assume coherent voter preferences reacting to structural changes. By contrast, I argue that part of the puzzle also lies in attitudinal ambivalence—simultaneous negative and positive evaluations—regarding redistributive policy. Using cross-sectional public opinion and party position data, I find that such ambivalence increases with lower political sophistication, greater value conflict, and weaker economic need. Electorally, it deepens detachment between support for redistribution and left-wing self-identification and increases voting for more economically and culturally right-wing parties. These patterns hold independently of class differences and second-dimension attitudes and replicate stably in earlier data. The findings contribute to ongoing debates about attitude structures and voting patterns and illuminate an additional challenge for economically progressive parties.

A large literature examines how citizens in violent conflicts react to the conflict's events, particularly violent escalations. Nevertheless, the temporal nature of these attitudinal changes remains under-studied. We suggest that popular reactions to greater violence are typically immediate but brief, indicating short-term emotional responses to physical threats. Over the longer term, however, public opinion is more commonly shaped by non-violent events signaling the adversary's perceived intentions, reflecting slower but deeper belief-updating processes. We support this argument using dynamic analyses of comprehensive monthly data from Israel spanning two full decades (2001–20). Rather than violence levels, we find that long-term changes in Jewish attitudes on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict follow non-violent events implying Palestinian preferences, particularly failed negotiations and out-group leadership changes. Our findings underscore the importance of public opinion's temporal dynamics and show that non-violent events, which are often overlooked in the literature, play a prominent role in shaping long-term attitudes in conflictual contexts.

What prolonged implications does conflict escalation have on voting behavior? The literature focuses primarily on the immediate effect of violent events on voting in nearby elections, leaving open questions about longer-term consequences. This article examines this question by studying Israel, where violent escalation in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in the early 2000s was followed by an unexpected electoral outcome: the emergence and consolidation of a new centrist bloc that transformed a longstanding Left-Right partisan divide into a three-bloc system. Using two decades of survey data, it is argued that this shift is best explained by a long-term attitudinal change toward the conflict by many Israelis after the escalation. Rather than a strictly hawkish shift, many voters have become ‘Doubtful Doves’: supportive of territorial compromise in principle, but skeptical about reaching an agreement with the Palestinians in practice. This underdiscussed attitudinal structure, dovish but doubtful, has formed a new electoral base for centrist parties, breaking the traditional Left-Right dichotomy. These findings illustrate that violent periods in conflicts can cause non-trivial long-term changes in popular attitude structures and voting patterns, which, under the right conditions, can trigger electoral re-equilibration.

The current consensus among comparative political scientists postulates that diverse democracies redistribute less than do homogeneous ones. However, whereas homogeneous democracies do redistribute more on average, diverse democracies exhibit high variation in redistributive outcomes. Why does ascriptive heterogeneity stifle redistribution in some cases but not in others? In this article, it is argued that diversity undermines redistributive outcomes when identity groups differ more starkly in their income levels. More importantly, under these conditions, the policy outcomes are not uniform: rather than general cutbacks, richer groups selectively under‐prioritise benefits and access for poorer, minority‐heavy groups while keeping their own redistributive interests protected. The result is not simply less redistribution aggregately, but a more exclusionary and regressive welfare state that prioritises the special needs of better‐off identity groups. Empirical support is found in these hypotheses using macro‐comparative panel data on multiple redistributive aspects in 22 developed democracies in the years 1980–2011. The article thus outlines a conditional and more nuanced relationship between diversity and redistributive outcomes than commonly assumed, as well as several broader lessons for research of identity politics and social policy.