Noam Gidron
Biographic Data
| ID | 186246 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Noam Gidron |
| GIVEN NAMES | Noam |
| FAMILY NAME | Gidron |
| SIGNATURE | GIDRON N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0217-1204 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 998 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
The Elections in Israel 2022
Why masses support democratic backsliding
Concerns over democratic backsliding have proliferated recently, as elected politicians have sought to undermine democratic checks and balances. This study examines the underpinnings of public support for democratic backsliding, delineating five theoretical explanations: personalistic leadership, affective polarization, populism, majoritarianism, and entanglement with the legal system. We test the explanatory power of these accounts within the Is…
Beyond Observational Relationships
While scholars document associations between competing parties’ policy disputes and citizens’ cross-party hostility, that is, affective polarization, we lack causal comparative evidence of how different types of ideological disagreements shape partisan affective evaluations. We investigate this issue with a priming experiment across ten Western publics, which prompts some respondents to answer questions inviting them to discuss debates over eithe…
Imagined Journalists
These are challenging times for journalists’ relationship with their audiences. Attacks against “the media” and the increasing weaponization of social media to harass journalists have drawn the attention of scholars worldwide. In the current climate, journalists are not only distrusted but also hated , which creates a series of distinct ramifications. In this article, we suggest a new framework to study journalists–audiences relationship, particu…
Differentiating the sources of post‐election partisan affect warming
While scholars have closely examined the intensification of negative affect across party lines during elections, less is known about the decline of partisan hostility in the aftermath of election campaigns. Synthesizing insights from research on electoral rules and political psychology, we theorize and empirically test two such mechanisms of post‐election negative affect decline. The first is that of winners' generosity: the expectation that self…
Who Supports Democratic Backsliding? Evidence from Israel
Concerns over democratic backsliding have proliferated recently, as elected politicians have sought to undermine democratic checks and balances. This study examines the underpinnings of public support for democratic backsliding, delineating five theoretical accounts: personalistic leadership, affective polarization, populism, majoritarianism and entanglement with the law. We test the explanatory power of these accounts within the Israeli context,…
What Do We Measure When We Measure Affective Polarization across Countries
Measures of affective polarization—that is, dislike and hostility across party lines—have been developed and validated in the context of America’s two-party system. Yet increasingly, affective polarization is examined comparatively. We address this issue by introducing a novel dataset that measures aspects of partisan affect in 10 countries with diverse party systems. We detect associations between partisan affect toward out-parties versus affect…
Why Israeli Democracy Is in Crisis
In January 2023, massive protests erupted in Israel against the right-wing government's proposed reforms to restructure the country's democracy--reforms that mirror the types of institutional changes that populist parties on the right in Hungary and Poland have used to steer their countries away from liberal democracy. Concern that the proposed reforms would lead to a concentration of power in the executive and a weakening of the courts sparked p…
The Way we Were
Comparative politics scholars argue that consensual democratic institutions encourage power-sharing that promotes “kinder, gentler” politics. We uncover one reason why this is the case: elite inter-party cooperation in consensual systems is associated with reduced inter-party hostility in the mass public. This is because governing parties’ supporters feel much more warmly toward their coalition partner(s) than we can explain based on policy agree…
Who Dislikes Whom? Affective Polarization between Pairs of Parties in Western Democracies
While dislike of opposing parties, that is, affective polarization, is a defining feature of contemporary politics, research on this topic largely centers on the United States. We introduce an approach that analyzes affective polarization between pairs of parties, bridging the US two-party system and multiparty systems in other democracies. Analyzing survey data from twenty Western democracies since the mid-1990s, first, we show that partisans' d…
Can't We All Just Get Along? How Women MPs Can Ameliorate Affective Polarization in Western Publics
Concern over partisan resentment and hostility has increased across Western democracies. Despite growing attention to affective polarization, existing research fails to ask whetherwhoserves in office affects mass-level interparty hostility. Drawing on scholarship on women's behavior as elected representatives and citizens' beliefs about women politicians, we posit the women MPs affective bonus hypothesis: all else being equal, partisans display w…
Analyzing Text and Images in Digital Communication
Sociological research on online discourse increasingly uses digital data consisting of messages combining multiple modes of media, with meaning arising from contents' interaction across modes. Yet, techniques to study this interplay are underdeveloped relative to the toolkit for analyzing solely texts. The authors introduce an automated approach for relationally analyzing texts and images, focusing on how to examine the discursive meaning emergin…
Majority Nationalism Laws and the Equal Citizenship of Minorities
Western societies are increasingly enacting majority nationalism laws to strengthen majority culture. We propose that these laws may alter attitudes about minorities’ equal citizenship with varied impact on majorities and minorities. To explore this issue, we examine the impact of Israel’s recently enacted Nation Law on the Jewish majority and the Arab minority. Experimental evidence from before the law’s enactment reveals that both minority and …
Populism and the affective partisan space in nine European publics
While scholars increasingly link affective polarization to the rise of populist parties, existing empirical studies are limited to the effects of radical right parties, without considering the possible effects of leftist populist parties or of parties' varying degrees of populism. Analyzing novel survey data across eight European publics, we analyze whether citizens' affective party evaluations broadly map onto these parties' varying degrees of p…
Many Ways to be Right
Mainstream parties in Western Europe are increasingly struggling to hold together their base of support. As a lens for exploring this changing electoral landscape, this article focuses on the growing share of the electorate that is cross-pressured between conservative and progressive attitudes on economic and cultural issues. It argues that a stable asymmetry characterizes Western European mass attitudes: while support for the left is common amon…
Too Old to Forget
Scholars have argued that immigrants’ trust in institutions is the result of the exposure to host-country institutions but also shaped by past experiences in the country of origin. These experiences create a “home-country point of reference,” a political/institutional memory that becomes the relevant comparison for any political/institutional interaction in the host country. We develop further this concept and unpack its key determinants—the age …
The Israel Polarization Panel Dataset, 2019-2021
Validating the feeling thermometer as a measure of partisan affect in multi-party systems
American Affective Polarization in Comparative Perspective
American political observers express increasing concern about affective polarization, i.e., partisans' resentment toward political opponents. We advance debates about America's partisan divisions by comparing affective polarization in the US over the past 25 years with affective polarization in 19 other western publics. We conclude that American affective polarization is not extreme in comparative perspective, although Americans' dislike of parti…
Populism as a Problem of Social Integration
We argue that support for parties of the radical right and left can usefully be understood as a problem of social integration—an approach that brings together economic and cultural explanations for populism. With comparative survey data, we assess whether support for parties of the radical right and left is associated with feelings of social marginalization. We find that people who feel more socially marginal—because they lack strong attachment t…
Do Changes in Material Circumstances Drive Support for Populist Radical Parties? Panel Data Evidence from the Netherlands during the Great Recession, 2007-2015
Political developments since the 2008 financial crisis have sparked renewed interest in the electoral implications of economic downturns. Research describes a correlation between adverse economic conditions and support for radical parties campaigning on the populist promise to retake the country from a corrupt elite. But does the success of radical parties following economic crises rely on people who are directly affected? To answer this question…
The Provocative Effect of Law
Western societies have experienced ethnic and religious diversification in recent decades. These demographic changes have been met by efforts to defend the local dominant culture using majority nationalism laws, intended to protect the cultural heritage of the majority. We empirically examine majority nationalism laws’ expressive effects on patterns of minority discrimination using the Israeli draft Nation Law (NL) as a case study. Drawing on two…
Exclusion and Cooperation in Diverse Societies
It is well-established that in diverse societies, certain groups prefer to exclude other groups from power and often from society entirely. Yet as many societies are diversifying at an increasingly rapid pace, the need for cross-group cooperation to solve collective action problems has intensified. Do preferences for exclusion inhibit the ability of individuals to cooperate and, therefore, diminish the ability for societies to collectively provid…
The politics of social status
This paper explores the factors that have recently increased support for candidates and causes of the populist right across the developed democracies, especially among a core group of working-class men. In the context of debates about whether the key causal factors are economic or cultural, we contend that an effective analysis must rest on understanding how economic and cultural developments interact to generate support for populism. We suggest …
The Populist Style in American Politics
This paper examines populist claims-making in US presidential elections. We define populism as a discursive strategy that juxtaposes the virtuous populace with a corrupt elite and views the former as the sole legitimate source of political power. In contrast to past research, we argue that populism is best operationalized as an attribute of political claims rather than a stable ideological property of political actors. This analytical strategy al…
The politics of social status
This paper explores the factors that have recently increased support for candidates and causes of the populist right across the developed democracies, especially among a core group of working-class men. In the context of debates about whether the key causal factors are economic or cultural, we contend that an effective analysis must rest on understanding how economic and cultural developments interact to generate support for populism. We suggest …
Populism as a Problem of Social Integration
We argue that support for parties of the radical right and left can usefully be understood as a problem of social integration—an approach that brings together economic and cultural explanations for populism. With comparative survey data, we assess whether support for parties of the radical right and left is associated with feelings of social marginalization. We find that people who feel more socially marginal—because they lack strong attachment t…
Who Dislikes Whom? Affective Polarization between Pairs of Parties in Western Democracies
While dislike of opposing parties, that is, affective polarization, is a defining feature of contemporary politics, research on this topic largely centers on the United States. We introduce an approach that analyzes affective polarization between pairs of parties, bridging the US two-party system and multiparty systems in other democracies. Analyzing survey data from twenty Western democracies since the mid-1990s, first, we show that partisans' d…
Many Ways to be Right
Mainstream parties in Western Europe are increasingly struggling to hold together their base of support. As a lens for exploring this changing electoral landscape, this article focuses on the growing share of the electorate that is cross-pressured between conservative and progressive attitudes on economic and cultural issues. It argues that a stable asymmetry characterizes Western European mass attitudes: while support for the left is common amon…
Validating the feeling thermometer as a measure of partisan affect in multi-party systems
The Way we Were
Comparative politics scholars argue that consensual democratic institutions encourage power-sharing that promotes “kinder, gentler” politics. We uncover one reason why this is the case: elite inter-party cooperation in consensual systems is associated with reduced inter-party hostility in the mass public. This is because governing parties’ supporters feel much more warmly toward their coalition partner(s) than we can explain based on policy agree…
Why Israeli Democracy Is in Crisis
In January 2023, massive protests erupted in Israel against the right-wing government's proposed reforms to restructure the country's democracy--reforms that mirror the types of institutional changes that populist parties on the right in Hungary and Poland have used to steer their countries away from liberal democracy. Concern that the proposed reforms would lead to a concentration of power in the executive and a weakening of the courts sparked p…
Exclusion and Cooperation in Diverse Societies
It is well-established that in diverse societies, certain groups prefer to exclude other groups from power and often from society entirely. Yet as many societies are diversifying at an increasingly rapid pace, the need for cross-group cooperation to solve collective action problems has intensified. Do preferences for exclusion inhibit the ability of individuals to cooperate and, therefore, diminish the ability for societies to collectively provid…
Intergroup Behavioral Strategies as Contextually Determined
Why are the negative effects of social diversity more pronounced in some places than in others? What are the mechanisms underlying the relationship between diversity and discriminatory behaviors, and why do they vary in prevalence and strength across locations? Experimental research has made advances in examining these questions by testing for differences in behavior when interacting with individuals from different groups. At the same time, resea…
Do Changes in Material Circumstances Drive Support for Populist Radical Parties? Panel Data Evidence from the Netherlands during the Great Recession, 2007-2015
Political developments since the 2008 financial crisis have sparked renewed interest in the electoral implications of economic downturns. Research describes a correlation between adverse economic conditions and support for radical parties campaigning on the populist promise to retake the country from a corrupt elite. But does the success of radical parties following economic crises rely on people who are directly affected? To answer this question…
Can't We All Just Get Along? How Women MPs Can Ameliorate Affective Polarization in Western Publics
Concern over partisan resentment and hostility has increased across Western democracies. Despite growing attention to affective polarization, existing research fails to ask whetherwhoserves in office affects mass-level interparty hostility. Drawing on scholarship on women's behavior as elected representatives and citizens' beliefs about women politicians, we posit the women MPs affective bonus hypothesis: all else being equal, partisans display w…
The Israel Polarization Panel Dataset, 2019-2021
Too Old to Forget
Scholars have argued that immigrants’ trust in institutions is the result of the exposure to host-country institutions but also shaped by past experiences in the country of origin. These experiences create a “home-country point of reference,” a political/institutional memory that becomes the relevant comparison for any political/institutional interaction in the host country. We develop further this concept and unpack its key determinants—the age …
Differentiating the sources of post‐election partisan affect warming
While scholars have closely examined the intensification of negative affect across party lines during elections, less is known about the decline of partisan hostility in the aftermath of election campaigns. Synthesizing insights from research on electoral rules and political psychology, we theorize and empirically test two such mechanisms of post‐election negative affect decline. The first is that of winners' generosity: the expectation that self…
What Do We Measure When We Measure Affective Polarization across Countries
Measures of affective polarization—that is, dislike and hostility across party lines—have been developed and validated in the context of America’s two-party system. Yet increasingly, affective polarization is examined comparatively. We address this issue by introducing a novel dataset that measures aspects of partisan affect in 10 countries with diverse party systems. We detect associations between partisan affect toward out-parties versus affect…
Imagined Journalists
These are challenging times for journalists’ relationship with their audiences. Attacks against “the media” and the increasing weaponization of social media to harass journalists have drawn the attention of scholars worldwide. In the current climate, journalists are not only distrusted but also hated , which creates a series of distinct ramifications. In this article, we suggest a new framework to study journalists–audiences relationship, particu…
Why masses support democratic backsliding
Concerns over democratic backsliding have proliferated recently, as elected politicians have sought to undermine democratic checks and balances. This study examines the underpinnings of public support for democratic backsliding, delineating five theoretical explanations: personalistic leadership, affective polarization, populism, majoritarianism, and entanglement with the legal system. We test the explanatory power of these accounts within the Is…
Analyzing Text and Images in Digital Communication
Sociological research on online discourse increasingly uses digital data consisting of messages combining multiple modes of media, with meaning arising from contents' interaction across modes. Yet, techniques to study this interplay are underdeveloped relative to the toolkit for analyzing solely texts. The authors introduce an automated approach for relationally analyzing texts and images, focusing on how to examine the discursive meaning emergin…
Populism and the affective partisan space in nine European publics
While scholars increasingly link affective polarization to the rise of populist parties, existing empirical studies are limited to the effects of radical right parties, without considering the possible effects of leftist populist parties or of parties' varying degrees of populism. Analyzing novel survey data across eight European publics, we analyze whether citizens' affective party evaluations broadly map onto these parties' varying degrees of p…
Beyond Observational Relationships
While scholars document associations between competing parties’ policy disputes and citizens’ cross-party hostility, that is, affective polarization, we lack causal comparative evidence of how different types of ideological disagreements shape partisan affective evaluations. We investigate this issue with a priming experiment across ten Western publics, which prompts some respondents to answer questions inviting them to discuss debates over eithe…
Varieties of Populism
The Populist Style in American Politics
This paper examines populist claims-making in US presidential elections. We define populism as a discursive strategy that juxtaposes the virtuous populace with a corrupt elite and views the former as the sole legitimate source of political power. In contrast to past research, we argue that populism is best operationalized as an attribute of political claims rather than a stable ideological property of political actors. This analytical strategy al…
Intergroup Behavioral Strategies as Contextually Determined
Why are the negative effects of social diversity more pronounced in some places than in others? What are the mechanisms underlying the relationship between diversity and discriminatory behaviors, and why do they vary in prevalence and strength across locations? Experimental research has made advances in examining these questions by testing for differences in behavior when interacting with individuals from different groups. At the same time, resea…
The politics of social status
This paper explores the factors that have recently increased support for candidates and causes of the populist right across the developed democracies, especially among a core group of working-class men. In the context of debates about whether the key causal factors are economic or cultural, we contend that an effective analysis must rest on understanding how economic and cultural developments interact to generate support for populism. We suggest …
The Provocative Effect of Law
Western societies have experienced ethnic and religious diversification in recent decades. These demographic changes have been met by efforts to defend the local dominant culture using majority nationalism laws, intended to protect the cultural heritage of the majority. We empirically examine majority nationalism laws’ expressive effects on patterns of minority discrimination using the Israeli draft Nation Law (NL) as a case study. Drawing on two…
Exclusion and Cooperation in Diverse Societies
It is well-established that in diverse societies, certain groups prefer to exclude other groups from power and often from society entirely. Yet as many societies are diversifying at an increasingly rapid pace, the need for cross-group cooperation to solve collective action problems has intensified. Do preferences for exclusion inhibit the ability of individuals to cooperate and, therefore, diminish the ability for societies to collectively provid…
Do Changes in Material Circumstances Drive Support for Populist Radical Parties? Panel Data Evidence from the Netherlands during the Great Recession, 2007-2015
Political developments since the 2008 financial crisis have sparked renewed interest in the electoral implications of economic downturns. Research describes a correlation between adverse economic conditions and support for radical parties campaigning on the populist promise to retake the country from a corrupt elite. But does the success of radical parties following economic crises rely on people who are directly affected? To answer this question…
American Affective Polarization in Comparative Perspective
American political observers express increasing concern about affective polarization, i.e., partisans' resentment toward political opponents. We advance debates about America's partisan divisions by comparing affective polarization in the US over the past 25 years with affective polarization in 19 other western publics. We conclude that American affective polarization is not extreme in comparative perspective, although Americans' dislike of parti…
Populism as a Problem of Social Integration
We argue that support for parties of the radical right and left can usefully be understood as a problem of social integration—an approach that brings together economic and cultural explanations for populism. With comparative survey data, we assess whether support for parties of the radical right and left is associated with feelings of social marginalization. We find that people who feel more socially marginal—because they lack strong attachment t…
Majority Nationalism Laws and the Equal Citizenship of Minorities
Western societies are increasingly enacting majority nationalism laws to strengthen majority culture. We propose that these laws may alter attitudes about minorities’ equal citizenship with varied impact on majorities and minorities. To explore this issue, we examine the impact of Israel’s recently enacted Nation Law on the Jewish majority and the Arab minority. Experimental evidence from before the law’s enactment reveals that both minority and …
Populism and the affective partisan space in nine European publics
While scholars increasingly link affective polarization to the rise of populist parties, existing empirical studies are limited to the effects of radical right parties, without considering the possible effects of leftist populist parties or of parties' varying degrees of populism. Analyzing novel survey data across eight European publics, we analyze whether citizens' affective party evaluations broadly map onto these parties' varying degrees of p…
Many Ways to be Right
Mainstream parties in Western Europe are increasingly struggling to hold together their base of support. As a lens for exploring this changing electoral landscape, this article focuses on the growing share of the electorate that is cross-pressured between conservative and progressive attitudes on economic and cultural issues. It argues that a stable asymmetry characterizes Western European mass attitudes: while support for the left is common amon…
Too Old to Forget
Scholars have argued that immigrants’ trust in institutions is the result of the exposure to host-country institutions but also shaped by past experiences in the country of origin. These experiences create a “home-country point of reference,” a political/institutional memory that becomes the relevant comparison for any political/institutional interaction in the host country. We develop further this concept and unpack its key determinants—the age …
The Israel Polarization Panel Dataset, 2019-2021
Validating the feeling thermometer as a measure of partisan affect in multi-party systems
Who Supports Democratic Backsliding? Evidence from Israel
Concerns over democratic backsliding have proliferated recently, as elected politicians have sought to undermine democratic checks and balances. This study examines the underpinnings of public support for democratic backsliding, delineating five theoretical accounts: personalistic leadership, affective polarization, populism, majoritarianism and entanglement with the law. We test the explanatory power of these accounts within the Israeli context,…
What Do We Measure When We Measure Affective Polarization across Countries
Measures of affective polarization—that is, dislike and hostility across party lines—have been developed and validated in the context of America’s two-party system. Yet increasingly, affective polarization is examined comparatively. We address this issue by introducing a novel dataset that measures aspects of partisan affect in 10 countries with diverse party systems. We detect associations between partisan affect toward out-parties versus affect…
Why Israeli Democracy Is in Crisis
In January 2023, massive protests erupted in Israel against the right-wing government's proposed reforms to restructure the country's democracy--reforms that mirror the types of institutional changes that populist parties on the right in Hungary and Poland have used to steer their countries away from liberal democracy. Concern that the proposed reforms would lead to a concentration of power in the executive and a weakening of the courts sparked p…
The Way we Were
Comparative politics scholars argue that consensual democratic institutions encourage power-sharing that promotes “kinder, gentler” politics. We uncover one reason why this is the case: elite inter-party cooperation in consensual systems is associated with reduced inter-party hostility in the mass public. This is because governing parties’ supporters feel much more warmly toward their coalition partner(s) than we can explain based on policy agree…
Who Dislikes Whom? Affective Polarization between Pairs of Parties in Western Democracies
While dislike of opposing parties, that is, affective polarization, is a defining feature of contemporary politics, research on this topic largely centers on the United States. We introduce an approach that analyzes affective polarization between pairs of parties, bridging the US two-party system and multiparty systems in other democracies. Analyzing survey data from twenty Western democracies since the mid-1990s, first, we show that partisans' d…
Can't We All Just Get Along? How Women MPs Can Ameliorate Affective Polarization in Western Publics
Concern over partisan resentment and hostility has increased across Western democracies. Despite growing attention to affective polarization, existing research fails to ask whetherwhoserves in office affects mass-level interparty hostility. Drawing on scholarship on women's behavior as elected representatives and citizens' beliefs about women politicians, we posit the women MPs affective bonus hypothesis: all else being equal, partisans display w…
Analyzing Text and Images in Digital Communication
Sociological research on online discourse increasingly uses digital data consisting of messages combining multiple modes of media, with meaning arising from contents' interaction across modes. Yet, techniques to study this interplay are underdeveloped relative to the toolkit for analyzing solely texts. The authors introduce an automated approach for relationally analyzing texts and images, focusing on how to examine the discursive meaning emergin…
Imagined Journalists
These are challenging times for journalists’ relationship with their audiences. Attacks against “the media” and the increasing weaponization of social media to harass journalists have drawn the attention of scholars worldwide. In the current climate, journalists are not only distrusted but also hated , which creates a series of distinct ramifications. In this article, we suggest a new framework to study journalists–audiences relationship, particu…
Differentiating the sources of post‐election partisan affect warming
While scholars have closely examined the intensification of negative affect across party lines during elections, less is known about the decline of partisan hostility in the aftermath of election campaigns. Synthesizing insights from research on electoral rules and political psychology, we theorize and empirically test two such mechanisms of post‐election negative affect decline. The first is that of winners' generosity: the expectation that self…
The Elections in Israel 2022
Political science (26 works) · Politics (21 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (20 works) · Law (20 works) · Populism, Right-Wing Movements (18 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Political economy (15 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Economics (12 works)