Comparative electoral research suggests that issue voting has increased and that the ability of social cleavages to account for voting patterns in most advanced industrial democracies has declined. In Israel, only the first of these generalizations holds. The capacity of social cleavages to structure the vote has been maintained along with our overall ability to explain the vote. Based on longitudinal analysis of electoral cleavages between 1969 and 1996 and on an analysis of the 1996 election, we argue that this pattern is driven by issues involving identity dilemmas that have become increasingly important in structuring the vote. Such dilemmas amalgamate policy issues and social allegiances, while reinforcing existing cleavage structures. Focusing on the 1996 election we probe the meanings of internal and external collective identity concerns in Israeli politics, their considerable overlap, and their translation into political choices.

This paper explores the impact of the Al-Aqsa Intifada on tolerance orientations of the Israeli Jewish public. We rely upon five surveys carried out between January 2000 and June 2002 to study in a real-life setting the amount and nature of change in political tolerance due to the conflict and the mechanisms behind it. Building on theory and research on intergroup relations in social psychology and political tolerance in political science, we focus upon threat and ingroup identification as the two primary factors in the social psychological processes resulting from conflict and leading to intolerance. We set the trends and explore mediation and interaction processes in the impact of this round of conflict on political tolerance.

How do persistent terrorist attacks influence political tolerance, a willingness to extend basic liberties to one's enemies? Studies in the U.S. and elsewhere have produced a number of valuable insights into how citizens respond to singular, massive attacks like 9/11. But they are less useful for evaluating how chronic and persistent terrorist attacks erode support for democratic values over the long haul. Our study focuses on political tolerance levels in Israel across a turbulent 30-year period, from 1980 to 2011, which allows us to distinguish the short-term impact of hundreds of terrorist attacks from the long-term influence of democratic longevity on political tolerance. We find that the corrosive influence of terrorism on political tolerance is much more powerful among Israelis who identify with the Right, who have also become much more sensitive to terrorism over time. We discuss the implications of our findings for other democracies under threat from terrorism.

In this article, we present data showing that national legislators are more tolerant than the public in Britain, Israel, New Zealand and the United States. Two explanations for this phenomenon are presented and assessed. The first is the selective recruitment of Members of Parliament, Knesset and Congress from among those in the electorate whose demographic, ideological and personality characteristics predispose them to be tolerant. Although this process does operate in all four countries, it is insufficient to explain all of the differences in tolerance between elites and the public in at least three countries. The second explanation relies on a process of explicitly political socialization, leading to differences in tolerance between elites and their public that transcend individual-level, personal characteristics. Relying on our analysis of political tolerance among legislators in the four countries, we suggest how this process of political socialization may be operating.

The defining challenge for Israel since 1967 has been the future of the territories captured in the Six Day War and the population living in them. With the stalemate festering and the salience of the conflict very high, the conflict with the Palestinians has become the major cleavage dimension in Israeli politics. Building on the multidimensional conceptualization of cleavage, we argue that despite the occurrence of many, dramatic, changes, the cleavage structure has not changed in the past decade, and the 1977 realignment is still in place. The primary cleavage is a full and consistent interlocking cleavage. Its potency, and the quality that permits it to achieve this overarching position, is associated with its expression of underlying collective identity dilemmas, which combine external and internal dimensions. Collective identity concerns, more readily than others, produce full cleavages and are likely to dominate and endure, overriding other issues. The establishment, positioning and success of Kadima in the 2006 elections are explicated within this framework.