In their recent research on Israeli politics, Noam Gidron and his co-authors explore the country’s affective polarization, support for judicial reform, Likud populism, and the relationships between these different elements.
Noam Gidron is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and the Politics, Philosophy and Economics Program (PPE) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He received his doctorate from the Department of Political Science at Harvard University in 2016, then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Niehaus Center at Princeton University in 2017-2018.
His research focuses on how polarization and populism threaten liberal democracy, focusing on the political choices and strategies that have contributed to their rise in recent decades. He studies how affective polarization varies from country to country and within countries. In addition, his work on populism explores how the lack of social recognition, fueled by economic policies and political discourse, favors support for populist parties, across all ideologies. Uniting these two lines of research, his recent studies also focus on how an emotionally polarized public provides fertile ground for populist leaders to erode democracy.
The life of ideas : What are the main factors that explain the democratic decline observed in Israel in recent years ? And why did part of the Israeli population support the attempt to reform the judicial system announced in January 2023? ?
Noam Gidron: In January 2023, the new right-wing government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, presented a comprehensive plan to restructure Israeli democracy. This plan, known as “ judicial reform “, had several interrelated components whose general objective was to strengthen the executive power and weaken the courts. Judicial reform fits into a familiar pattern of contemporary democratic backsliding, namely the erosion of checks and balances by duly elected governments.
Who supported judicial reform – and why ? While the specifics of the cases have been shaped by the particularities of Israeli politics, these questions speak to a broader academic debate about the politics of democratic backsliding, as well as public concerns about the future of our democracies.
I examined this question in a study co-authored with colleagues at Tel Aviv University recently published in the American Journal of Political Science (Yotam Margalit, Lior Sheffer, and Itamar Yakir).American Journal of Political Science. In this study, we explore several arguments identified in the political science literature regarding support for democratic backsliding. First, we might expect that support for reform was particularly pronounced among voters with a strong emotional attachment to Prime Minister Netanyahu. The second possible explanation focuses on affective polarization, namely antipathy and animosity between parties. The hypothesis here is that the more people hate their political opponents, the more they are willing to tip the democratic balance in their favor and against the opposing camp.
This suggests that right-wing coalition supporters who express more negative feelings toward opposition parties will be more likely to support reform. In addition to these two affective factors, we also examined whether people with a majoritarian view of democracy (i.e., those who believe that the will of the majority should not be restricted) and those who adhere to a populist worldview (i.e., those who view politics as a moral conflict between corrupt elites and the homogeneous people) are more likely to support the concentration of power in the hands of the ruling government and the weakening of checks and balances. institutional counterweights.
We examined these different arguments using a survey that we conducted among the same group of people over a long period of time. Without knowing that the government would soon introduce judicial reform, we collected data in early January 2023, in which we asked participants about their perception of democracy as well as their opinion towards Netanyahu and the different parties represented in the Israeli Parliament. We then returned to the same respondents in April, after the reform was announced and it became the most important policy issue in Israeli politics, and asked them whether they supported or opposed the reform.
And here’s the result of that survey: The factors that most strongly predicted support for reform among coalition party voters were their emotional attachment to Prime Minister Netanyahu and their dislike of opposition parties. In other words, emotional factors played a crucial role in explaining support for reform. A majoritarian view of democracy was also associated with support for reform, although this was much less the case for a populist worldview. Overall, these results suggest that at least in the Israeli context, deeply polarized public opinion has provided fertile ground for democratic backsliding.
The Life of Ideas: How has this emotional polarization developed in Israel over the past three decades ?
Noam Gidron: Analyzes of survey data collected in Israel suggest that hostility between political parties reached an all-time high in the 2022 elections (at least since the early 1990s), setting the stage for the conflict over judicial reform that unfolded in 2023.
In a study co-authored with Omer Yair and Yair Amitai (Reichman University), we analyzed Israeli survey data collected since 1992 to assess the emotional divide between the main parties of each of the two ideological blocs. We found that affective polarization – measured as the difference between how much respondents liked their own party and how much they disapproved of the main party in the opposing political bloc – intensified during the 1990s, a decade marked by the collapse of the Oslo Peace Accords and subsequent terrorist attacks, the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin, and the election of Netanyahu as prime minister.
This trend was reversed during the first decade of the 2000s, where affective polarization decreased somewhat. However, since 2009, after the return of Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister, emotional polarization has intensified gradually but steadily, reaching its peak during the 2022 elections. Judicial reform was therefore presented to the Israeli public at a time when the emotional divide between the parties was deep.
The life of ideas : Moving from voters to parties, how has the discourse of Likud leaders and representatives evolved during this period ?
Noam Gidron: When examining the evolution of party discourse and positions over time, one available source of data is expert surveys, that is, the informed assessment of people who closely follow politics. This data source is far from perfect and has many potential biases. It is therefore useful, but must be treated with caution.
According to one of the commonly used data sources, V-Party, Likud has become increasingly populist since the early 1990s, and especially since around 2015. Over the past decade, Likud representatives have increased attacks on elites of all kinds. At the same time, they also presented their party as the representative of “ TRUE ” people. So, according to this data source, there is a clear shift towards a more populist worldview.
Another way to approach this question is to move from comparisons over time to comparisons across countries. Here we can rely on another data source, the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES). We then see that Likud is an outlier in its reliance on populism compared to traditional center-right parties in Europe, such as the Christian Democratic Union of Germany. In contrast, Likud is closer in its degree of populism to far-right parties, such as Law and Justice in Poland. Combining these temporal and transnational perspectives, Likud’s current populist tendency clearly emerges.
The life of ideas : Did the war against Gaza which followed the Hamas attacks on October 7 reshape this Israeli polarization? ?
Noam Gidron: There was good reason to believe that the tragic events of the past two years, particularly the October 7 attack and the subsequent war in Gaza, would ease internal tensions in Israel. One might have expected that, in the face of an external security threat, partisan divisions would take a back seat. Alas, that’s not what the data shows.
The main pattern we see when tracking affective polarization after October 7 is one of continuity rather than abrupt change. In other words, affective polarization in Israeli society continues to fluctuate around the high levels recorded in the 2022 elections. Partisan animosity has proven more persistent than many expected and remains a fundamental feature of contemporary Israeli politics and society.