Raanan Sulitzeanu-Kenan
Biographic Data
| ID | 83829 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Raanan Sulitzeanu-Kenan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Raanan |
| FAMILY NAME | Sulitzeanu-Kenan |
| SIGNATURE | SULITZEANU-KENAN R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9663-8954 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 322 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Public sector culture does not increase honest behavior
Honest behavior of public sector workers is an important quality of governance, impacting the functioning of government institutions, the level of corruption, economic development and public trust. Scholars often assume that honesty is inherent to public sector culture, however empirical evidence on the causal effect of public sector culture on honest behavior is lacking. This research addresses this question by estimating the causal effect of pr…
Cross-national evidence for political philosophers’ civic behavior
The moral behavior of philosophers has gained notable attention in recent years as a robust means of exploring the relationship between moral reflection and behavior. These studies post that if philosophers, who are deeply engaged with moral reflection, do not act more ethically, we should not expect moral reflection to affect the behavior of lay people. Overall, these studies find no evidence that philosophers (including moral ones) behave in a …
A taste for government employment also rests on its political flavor
The global experience of political polarization, and politicians' attacks on democratic institutions, render individuals' identification with the governing coalition, or with its opposition, a likely antecedent of their attraction to work in government. This article examines to what extent individuals' partisan alignment with the governing coalition, and perceptions of its actions as a threat to democracy, shapes attraction to government jobs. Fi…
Liberal–democratic values and philosophers' beliefs about moral expertise
In recent decades, the discipline of bioethics has grown rapidly, as has the practice of ethical consultation. Interestingly, this new recognition of the relevance of moral philosophy to our daily life has been accompanied by skepticism among philosophers regarding the existence of moral expertise or the benefits of philosophical training. In his recent article in Bioethics , William R. Smith suggested that this skepticism is rooted in philosophe…
The reputational dividends of collaborating with a highly reputable agency
What reputational dividends in the media, if any, do federal agencies reap from collaboration with a highly reputable agency, such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)? Utilizing a dataset covering 30 U.S. federal agencies over a period of 34 years (1980–2013), we estimate the short and long‐term reputational effects of interagency collaboration. Collaboration is measured by the number of memorandums of understanding in effect between e…
Conformity and Group Performance
This research provides evidence regarding the causal effect of group conformity on task performance in stable and variable environments. Drawing on studies in cultural evolution, social learning, and social psychology, we experimentally tested the hypotheses that conformity improves group performance in a stable environment (H1) and decreases performance (by hindering adaptability) in a temporally variable environment (H2). We compare the perform…
An empirical perspective on moral expertise
Considerable attention in bioethics has been devoted to moral expertise and its implications for handling applied moral problems. The existence and nature of moral expertise has been a contested topic, and particularly, whether philosophers are moral experts. In this study, we put the question of philosophers’ moral expertise in a wider context, utilizing a novel and global study among 4,087 philosophers from 96 countries. We find that despite th…
Public-Sector Honesty and Corruption
This study presents a theoretical model of honest behavior in the public sector (public-sector honesty) and its relationship with corruption. We test this model empirically by utilizing and extending a unique data set of honest behavior of public- and private-sector workers across 40 countries, gathered in a field experiment conducted by Cohn et al. (N = 17,303). We find that public-sector honesty is determined by country-level societal culture a…
Protecting Rights in the Policy Process
This paper provides an integrative analysis of legal proportionality and policy analysis, and identifies the inherent potential of integrating the proportionality principle in policy analysis for enhancing the protection of rights in the policy process. Our analysis entails three key recommendations: (1) Mandating the inclusion of a rights-impact criterion in policy analysis in order to increase the likelihood that the three proportionality tests…
Foregone and predicted futures
Deliberative democracy fosters greater involvement of the public in policymaking. However, psychological challenges involved in eliciting policy preferences receive little attention in this context. This study addresses the implications of opportunity cost neglect (OCN) and impact bias for policy preferences. Utilizing a survey experiment among residents of peripheral towns in Israel, we examine preferences regarding investment in rail infrastruc…
When Covid-19, constitutional crisis, and political deadlock meet
This article describes the efforts made by the Israeli government to contain the spread of COVID-19, which were implemented amidst a constitutional crisis and a yearlong electoral impasse, under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was awaiting a trial for charges of fraud, bribery, and breach of trust. It thereafter draws on the disproportionate policy perspective to ascertain the ideas and sensitivities that placed key polic…
Unreliable Protection
The proportionality principle is an international humanitarian law requirement intended to constrain the use of military force in order to protect civilians in armed conflicts. This research experimentally assesses the reliability of its application by legal and moral experts (in 11 countries), by military officers (in two countries) and by laypeople. Reliability was evaluated according to three criteria: inter-expert convergence; sensitivity to …
The slippery slope of rights-restricting temporary measures
Times of emergency often serve as triggers for the creation of new policy. Such policies may involve restriction of human rights, and various mechanisms can be used to mitigate the severity of such restrictions. One such mechanism is the temporary measure. A series of three experiments examined the potential of temporary measures for increasing the likelihood of approval of rights-restricting policy and the role of time – both prospectively and r…
Can Institutions Make Voters Care about Corruption
Voters' punishment of corrupt politicians at the ballot box is oftentimes modest, at best. Recent studies suggest that this minor electoral sanctioning is due to limited corruption information and to the relative weakness of integrity considerations in voting behavior. We demonstrate that anticorruption measures taken by elite institutions—in this case, the Israeli Supreme Court—in close proximity to an election can increase electoral sanctioning…
Policy and Blame Attribution
Explaining Self‐Interested Behavior of Public‐Spirited Policy Makers
Public choice theory (PCT) has had a powerful influence on political science and, to a lesser extent, public administration. Based on the premise that public officials are rational maximizers of their own utility, PCT has a quite successful record of correctly predicting governmental decisions and policies. This success is puzzling in light of behavioral findings showing that officials do not necessarily seek to maximize their own utility. Drawin…
Form and Content
Crisis inquiries are intended to serve as instruments for restoring legitimacy. This intended goal has led to particular legitimacy-enhancing institutional choices in the design of these ad hoc institutions. This research utilizes a national panel study to test the effect of institutional attributes of a crisis inquiry and the content of its report on its legitimacy, and the effects of the inquiry findings on public opinion regarding the inquired…
Facts, Preferences, and Doctrine
Legal proportionality is one of the most important principles for adjudicating among conflicting values. However, rather little is known about the factors that play a role in the formation of proportionality judgments. This research presents the first empirical analysis in this regard, relying on a sample of 331 legal experts (lawyers and legal academics). The policy domain addressed by the experiment is the antiterrorist military practice of tar…
Responsive Change
How do reputational threats affect agency outputs? We undertake quantitative and qualitative analyses of reputation and outputs data regarding the fight against welfare fraud by the main service delivery agency for the Australian government in the field of social policy. We find that an agency's response to reputational threats is endogenously differential both within the set of agency outputs and between agency outputs and other activities (a pa…
Biased Judgment of Political Bias
The Effect of Salient Reputational Threats on the Pace of FDA Enforcement
Do reputational concerns affect the duration of enforcement decisions? We analyze “time to decision” in warning letter processes by two enforcement divisions within the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. We find that nearly all criticism of these divisions revolves around the FDA's primary consumer protection responsibilities (i.e., underenforcement), thus questioning the validity of the FDA's unique rep…
Making a Difference
How does individual political efficacy affect the construction of policy preferences? This article presents a model of individual-level politicization of policy preference, which draws on psychological and political explanations and posits that greater external political efficacy results in a stronger effect of political ideology on concrete policy preference. Two empirical studies that test this hypothesis are reported: an original survey experi…
Reflection in the Shadow of Blame
Commissions of inquiry play an important role in the aftermath of crisis, by serving as instruments of accountability and policy learning. Yet crises also involve a high-stake game of political survival, in which accountability and learning pose a serious threat to incumbent politicians. The political decision of whether to appoint a commission of inquiry after a crisis thus provides a unique prism for studying the intense conflict between politi…
Teacher's PAT? Multiple‐role principal–agent theory, education politics, and bureaucrat power
This article aims to contribute to current debates about political power and agency relationships in education and other public sectors. In a recent clarion call for a major redirection of political principal–agent theories (PAT), Terry Moe has argued that standard information asymmetries ought no longer to be regarded as the sole foundation of bureaucrat power. According to Moe, current theories largely overlook the direct electoral power of age…
Scything the grass
English The media salience trends of 40 events in the UK between 1984 and 2003 were examined to determine the validity of allegations regarding the agenda-setting effect of appointing public inquiries. Results show that, contrary to the ‘long grass’ argument, the attenuation in media salience following the appointment of a public inquiry is not different from that of non-inquired events. The findings are analysed and an alternative explanation is…
The Effect of Salient Reputational Threats on the Pace of FDA Enforcement
Do reputational concerns affect the duration of enforcement decisions? We analyze “time to decision” in warning letter processes by two enforcement divisions within the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. We find that nearly all criticism of these divisions revolves around the FDA's primary consumer protection responsibilities (i.e., underenforcement), thus questioning the validity of the FDA's unique rep…
Responsive Change
How do reputational threats affect agency outputs? We undertake quantitative and qualitative analyses of reputation and outputs data regarding the fight against welfare fraud by the main service delivery agency for the Australian government in the field of social policy. We find that an agency's response to reputational threats is endogenously differential both within the set of agency outputs and between agency outputs and other activities (a pa…
Reflection in the Shadow of Blame
Commissions of inquiry play an important role in the aftermath of crisis, by serving as instruments of accountability and policy learning. Yet crises also involve a high-stake game of political survival, in which accountability and learning pose a serious threat to incumbent politicians. The political decision of whether to appoint a commission of inquiry after a crisis thus provides a unique prism for studying the intense conflict between politi…
If They Get It Right
A number of arguments regarding the politics of UK public inquiries (PIs) suggest that the appointment of a public inquiry and its subsequent report affect public responsibility attributions in ways that could be beneficial to the appointing office holder. One claim refers to the effect of an appointment on responsibility attribution towards the appointer of a PI; another refers to the relative strength of the effects of PI reports on responsibil…
When Covid-19, constitutional crisis, and political deadlock meet
This article describes the efforts made by the Israeli government to contain the spread of COVID-19, which were implemented amidst a constitutional crisis and a yearlong electoral impasse, under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was awaiting a trial for charges of fraud, bribery, and breach of trust. It thereafter draws on the disproportionate policy perspective to ascertain the ideas and sensitivities that placed key polic…
Making a Difference
How does individual political efficacy affect the construction of policy preferences? This article presents a model of individual-level politicization of policy preference, which draws on psychological and political explanations and posits that greater external political efficacy results in a stronger effect of political ideology on concrete policy preference. Two empirical studies that test this hypothesis are reported: an original survey experi…
Explaining Self‐Interested Behavior of Public‐Spirited Policy Makers
Public choice theory (PCT) has had a powerful influence on political science and, to a lesser extent, public administration. Based on the premise that public officials are rational maximizers of their own utility, PCT has a quite successful record of correctly predicting governmental decisions and policies. This success is puzzling in light of behavioral findings showing that officials do not necessarily seek to maximize their own utility. Drawin…
Biased Judgment of Political Bias
Public-Sector Honesty and Corruption
This study presents a theoretical model of honest behavior in the public sector (public-sector honesty) and its relationship with corruption. We test this model empirically by utilizing and extending a unique data set of honest behavior of public- and private-sector workers across 40 countries, gathered in a field experiment conducted by Cohn et al. (N = 17,303). We find that public-sector honesty is determined by country-level societal culture a…
Policy and Blame Attribution
Can Institutions Make Voters Care about Corruption
Voters' punishment of corrupt politicians at the ballot box is oftentimes modest, at best. Recent studies suggest that this minor electoral sanctioning is due to limited corruption information and to the relative weakness of integrity considerations in voting behavior. We demonstrate that anticorruption measures taken by elite institutions—in this case, the Israeli Supreme Court—in close proximity to an election can increase electoral sanctioning…
A taste for government employment also rests on its political flavor
The global experience of political polarization, and politicians' attacks on democratic institutions, render individuals' identification with the governing coalition, or with its opposition, a likely antecedent of their attraction to work in government. This article examines to what extent individuals' partisan alignment with the governing coalition, and perceptions of its actions as a threat to democracy, shapes attraction to government jobs. Fi…
Unreliable Protection
The proportionality principle is an international humanitarian law requirement intended to constrain the use of military force in order to protect civilians in armed conflicts. This research experimentally assesses the reliability of its application by legal and moral experts (in 11 countries), by military officers (in two countries) and by laypeople. Reliability was evaluated according to three criteria: inter-expert convergence; sensitivity to …
Scything the grass
English The media salience trends of 40 events in the UK between 1984 and 2003 were examined to determine the validity of allegations regarding the agenda-setting effect of appointing public inquiries. Results show that, contrary to the ‘long grass’ argument, the attenuation in media salience following the appointment of a public inquiry is not different from that of non-inquired events. The findings are analysed and an alternative explanation is…
The reputational dividends of collaborating with a highly reputable agency
What reputational dividends in the media, if any, do federal agencies reap from collaboration with a highly reputable agency, such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)? Utilizing a dataset covering 30 U.S. federal agencies over a period of 34 years (1980–2013), we estimate the short and long‐term reputational effects of interagency collaboration. Collaboration is measured by the number of memorandums of understanding in effect between e…
Foregone and predicted futures
Deliberative democracy fosters greater involvement of the public in policymaking. However, psychological challenges involved in eliciting policy preferences receive little attention in this context. This study addresses the implications of opportunity cost neglect (OCN) and impact bias for policy preferences. Utilizing a survey experiment among residents of peripheral towns in Israel, we examine preferences regarding investment in rail infrastruc…
Facts, Preferences, and Doctrine
Legal proportionality is one of the most important principles for adjudicating among conflicting values. However, rather little is known about the factors that play a role in the formation of proportionality judgments. This research presents the first empirical analysis in this regard, relying on a sample of 331 legal experts (lawyers and legal academics). The policy domain addressed by the experiment is the antiterrorist military practice of tar…
Teacher's PAT? Multiple‐role principal–agent theory, education politics, and bureaucrat power
This article aims to contribute to current debates about political power and agency relationships in education and other public sectors. In a recent clarion call for a major redirection of political principal–agent theories (PAT), Terry Moe has argued that standard information asymmetries ought no longer to be regarded as the sole foundation of bureaucrat power. According to Moe, current theories largely overlook the direct electoral power of age…
The slippery slope of rights-restricting temporary measures
Times of emergency often serve as triggers for the creation of new policy. Such policies may involve restriction of human rights, and various mechanisms can be used to mitigate the severity of such restrictions. One such mechanism is the temporary measure. A series of three experiments examined the potential of temporary measures for increasing the likelihood of approval of rights-restricting policy and the role of time – both prospectively and r…
If They Get It Right
A number of arguments regarding the politics of UK public inquiries (PIs) suggest that the appointment of a public inquiry and its subsequent report affect public responsibility attributions in ways that could be beneficial to the appointing office holder. One claim refers to the effect of an appointment on responsibility attribution towards the appointer of a PI; another refers to the relative strength of the effects of PI reports on responsibil…
Scything the grass
English The media salience trends of 40 events in the UK between 1984 and 2003 were examined to determine the validity of allegations regarding the agenda-setting effect of appointing public inquiries. Results show that, contrary to the ‘long grass’ argument, the attenuation in media salience following the appointment of a public inquiry is not different from that of non-inquired events. The findings are analysed and an alternative explanation is…
Teacher's PAT? Multiple‐role principal–agent theory, education politics, and bureaucrat power
This article aims to contribute to current debates about political power and agency relationships in education and other public sectors. In a recent clarion call for a major redirection of political principal–agent theories (PAT), Terry Moe has argued that standard information asymmetries ought no longer to be regarded as the sole foundation of bureaucrat power. According to Moe, current theories largely overlook the direct electoral power of age…
Reflection in the Shadow of Blame
Commissions of inquiry play an important role in the aftermath of crisis, by serving as instruments of accountability and policy learning. Yet crises also involve a high-stake game of political survival, in which accountability and learning pose a serious threat to incumbent politicians. The political decision of whether to appoint a commission of inquiry after a crisis thus provides a unique prism for studying the intense conflict between politi…
The Effect of Salient Reputational Threats on the Pace of FDA Enforcement
Do reputational concerns affect the duration of enforcement decisions? We analyze “time to decision” in warning letter processes by two enforcement divisions within the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. We find that nearly all criticism of these divisions revolves around the FDA's primary consumer protection responsibilities (i.e., underenforcement), thus questioning the validity of the FDA's unique rep…
Making a Difference
How does individual political efficacy affect the construction of policy preferences? This article presents a model of individual-level politicization of policy preference, which draws on psychological and political explanations and posits that greater external political efficacy results in a stronger effect of political ideology on concrete policy preference. Two empirical studies that test this hypothesis are reported: an original survey experi…
Responsive Change
How do reputational threats affect agency outputs? We undertake quantitative and qualitative analyses of reputation and outputs data regarding the fight against welfare fraud by the main service delivery agency for the Australian government in the field of social policy. We find that an agency's response to reputational threats is endogenously differential both within the set of agency outputs and between agency outputs and other activities (a pa…
Biased Judgment of Political Bias
Form and Content
Crisis inquiries are intended to serve as instruments for restoring legitimacy. This intended goal has led to particular legitimacy-enhancing institutional choices in the design of these ad hoc institutions. This research utilizes a national panel study to test the effect of institutional attributes of a crisis inquiry and the content of its report on its legitimacy, and the effects of the inquiry findings on public opinion regarding the inquired…
Facts, Preferences, and Doctrine
Legal proportionality is one of the most important principles for adjudicating among conflicting values. However, rather little is known about the factors that play a role in the formation of proportionality judgments. This research presents the first empirical analysis in this regard, relying on a sample of 331 legal experts (lawyers and legal academics). The policy domain addressed by the experiment is the antiterrorist military practice of tar…
Explaining Self‐Interested Behavior of Public‐Spirited Policy Makers
Public choice theory (PCT) has had a powerful influence on political science and, to a lesser extent, public administration. Based on the premise that public officials are rational maximizers of their own utility, PCT has a quite successful record of correctly predicting governmental decisions and policies. This success is puzzling in light of behavioral findings showing that officials do not necessarily seek to maximize their own utility. Drawin…
Policy and Blame Attribution
When Covid-19, constitutional crisis, and political deadlock meet
This article describes the efforts made by the Israeli government to contain the spread of COVID-19, which were implemented amidst a constitutional crisis and a yearlong electoral impasse, under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was awaiting a trial for charges of fraud, bribery, and breach of trust. It thereafter draws on the disproportionate policy perspective to ascertain the ideas and sensitivities that placed key polic…
Unreliable Protection
The proportionality principle is an international humanitarian law requirement intended to constrain the use of military force in order to protect civilians in armed conflicts. This research experimentally assesses the reliability of its application by legal and moral experts (in 11 countries), by military officers (in two countries) and by laypeople. Reliability was evaluated according to three criteria: inter-expert convergence; sensitivity to …
The slippery slope of rights-restricting temporary measures
Times of emergency often serve as triggers for the creation of new policy. Such policies may involve restriction of human rights, and various mechanisms can be used to mitigate the severity of such restrictions. One such mechanism is the temporary measure. A series of three experiments examined the potential of temporary measures for increasing the likelihood of approval of rights-restricting policy and the role of time – both prospectively and r…
Can Institutions Make Voters Care about Corruption
Voters' punishment of corrupt politicians at the ballot box is oftentimes modest, at best. Recent studies suggest that this minor electoral sanctioning is due to limited corruption information and to the relative weakness of integrity considerations in voting behavior. We demonstrate that anticorruption measures taken by elite institutions—in this case, the Israeli Supreme Court—in close proximity to an election can increase electoral sanctioning…
Protecting Rights in the Policy Process
This paper provides an integrative analysis of legal proportionality and policy analysis, and identifies the inherent potential of integrating the proportionality principle in policy analysis for enhancing the protection of rights in the policy process. Our analysis entails three key recommendations: (1) Mandating the inclusion of a rights-impact criterion in policy analysis in order to increase the likelihood that the three proportionality tests…
Foregone and predicted futures
Deliberative democracy fosters greater involvement of the public in policymaking. However, psychological challenges involved in eliciting policy preferences receive little attention in this context. This study addresses the implications of opportunity cost neglect (OCN) and impact bias for policy preferences. Utilizing a survey experiment among residents of peripheral towns in Israel, we examine preferences regarding investment in rail infrastruc…
An empirical perspective on moral expertise
Considerable attention in bioethics has been devoted to moral expertise and its implications for handling applied moral problems. The existence and nature of moral expertise has been a contested topic, and particularly, whether philosophers are moral experts. In this study, we put the question of philosophers’ moral expertise in a wider context, utilizing a novel and global study among 4,087 philosophers from 96 countries. We find that despite th…
Public-Sector Honesty and Corruption
This study presents a theoretical model of honest behavior in the public sector (public-sector honesty) and its relationship with corruption. We test this model empirically by utilizing and extending a unique data set of honest behavior of public- and private-sector workers across 40 countries, gathered in a field experiment conducted by Cohn et al. (N = 17,303). We find that public-sector honesty is determined by country-level societal culture a…
Liberal–democratic values and philosophers' beliefs about moral expertise
In recent decades, the discipline of bioethics has grown rapidly, as has the practice of ethical consultation. Interestingly, this new recognition of the relevance of moral philosophy to our daily life has been accompanied by skepticism among philosophers regarding the existence of moral expertise or the benefits of philosophical training. In his recent article in Bioethics , William R. Smith suggested that this skepticism is rooted in philosophe…
The reputational dividends of collaborating with a highly reputable agency
What reputational dividends in the media, if any, do federal agencies reap from collaboration with a highly reputable agency, such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)? Utilizing a dataset covering 30 U.S. federal agencies over a period of 34 years (1980–2013), we estimate the short and long‐term reputational effects of interagency collaboration. Collaboration is measured by the number of memorandums of understanding in effect between e…
Conformity and Group Performance
This research provides evidence regarding the causal effect of group conformity on task performance in stable and variable environments. Drawing on studies in cultural evolution, social learning, and social psychology, we experimentally tested the hypotheses that conformity improves group performance in a stable environment (H1) and decreases performance (by hindering adaptability) in a temporally variable environment (H2). We compare the perform…
A taste for government employment also rests on its political flavor
The global experience of political polarization, and politicians' attacks on democratic institutions, render individuals' identification with the governing coalition, or with its opposition, a likely antecedent of their attraction to work in government. This article examines to what extent individuals' partisan alignment with the governing coalition, and perceptions of its actions as a threat to democracy, shapes attraction to government jobs. Fi…
Cross-national evidence for political philosophers’ civic behavior
The moral behavior of philosophers has gained notable attention in recent years as a robust means of exploring the relationship between moral reflection and behavior. These studies post that if philosophers, who are deeply engaged with moral reflection, do not act more ethically, we should not expect moral reflection to affect the behavior of lay people. Overall, these studies find no evidence that philosophers (including moral ones) behave in a …
Political science (24 works) · Law (19 works) · Law (19 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Economics (15 works) · Politics (14 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Social Psychology (11 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Public economics (8 works)