Partisan Polarization in Israel, with Chagai Weiss

Today on Scope Conditions, we’re talking about rising partisan animosity and what can be done about it.

When we think about partisan polarization, we’re often thinking about the United States – and about how the policy attitudes or ideological positions of Republicans and Democrats have moved further and further apart in recent decades. But partisan polarization is far from a uniquely American phenomenon. And it isn’t just about policy attitudes.

Increasingly, political scientists have been attending to the sociological and emotional features of partisan differentiation – to the ways partisanship can become a social identity, with party adherents developing warm feelings toward members of the same political camp – and deep hostility toward citizens on the opposing team. This is known as affective polarization. Moreover, recent studies have shown that affective polarization has been on the rise well beyond the U.S., in places like Switzerland, France, Denmark and – as we learn from our guest today – in Israel. 

Chagai Weiss is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a predoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and co-founder of the Intergroup Relations Workshop. He’s interested in how institutions and interpersonal interactions can shape conflict between social groups. While much of his work has focused on tensions between Jews and Palestinians, we’re talking to Chagai today about the social divide between left and right voters – who often view each other with deep distrust and enmity. In an article just published in Comparative Political Studies, Chagai and coauthor Lotem Bassan-Nygate use a set of natural and survey experiments in Israel to understand the drivers of affective polarization and shed light on potential institutional solutions.

In particular, they’re interested in how elite behavior can exacerbate or mitigate social divisions within the electorate. Does the cut-and-thrust of electoral competition contribute to mutual dislike between the voters of opposing parties? And can elites’ decisions to cooperate across party lines encourage their supporters to better get along? These are the questions Chagai and Lotem are interested in, and they’re especially salient ones right now in Israel – which is currently being governed by an unlikely and unwieldy coalition of left, right, and center parties. But they’re also tricky questions to answer. After all, when we observe elite competition or cooperation, they may be as much consequences of intergroup relations as they are drivers of those relations. 

We talk with Chagai about how he and Lotem gained leverage on these causal relationships by exploiting naturally occurring features of Israeli politics – including how they spotted a research design opportunity in the messy, indeterminate outcome of the fall 2019 Knesset elections.

Chagai also talks to us about the limits to using surveys and survey experiments to learn about the effects of elite behavior and institutions. Because they couldn’t manipulate institutions themselves, Chagai and Lotem manipulate information about elite behavior within institutions. But then it’s not straightforward to map from this light-touch informational treatment to conclusions about the real-world effects of macro-level political arrangements. Ultimately, Chagai suggests that studying institutional effects requires a multi-pronged research program that combines carefully crafted experiments with cross-national comparisons.