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, leveraging panel survey data collected before and after the government announced its plan to curtail the courts. Results suggest that support for the plan is strongly associated with dislike of partisan opponents and attachment to Prime Minister Netanyahu, and more weakly with a majoritarian understanding of democracy and negative experiences with the legal system. Populist attitudes are not associated with support for the government’s plan. Our study advances research in the field by disentangling theoretical accounts regarding support for democratic backsliding and demonstrating the pitfalls of analyses that rely on cross-sectional data.

This paper explores whether rules-based allocation is an effective tool for restraining political favoritism. We exploit a policy shift in distributing state lottery revenues to Israeli municipalities from discretion-based to rules-based allocation to estimate the extent of political favoritism. By comparing the likelihood of receiving grants by two types of localities before and after a policy reform, our approach offers a complementary empirical strategy for studying political favoritism that can be used even in the absence of exogenous variation in political connections; it likewise may reveal the overall impact of multiple political interests and social affiliations on favoritism. We find that political favoritism toward Jewish (versus Arab) and affluent (versus less affluent) municipalities diminished significantly after the reform but has not yet disappeared along the ethnic dimension. Our results suggest that adopting rules-based allocation might be effective in coping with political favoritism. 

Extreme crises hold the potential to unite societies, but also to deepen sociopolitical divisions. The ability of societies to choose unity over divide depends on political leadership, pre-crisis inter-group relations, and on the behavior – real and perceived – of these groups during the crisis. This paper asks how does social identity affect the perception of an outgroup’s situation under a common threat. We utilize the fact that the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic has hit Israel’s regions and social groups unevenly, and thus has created differences in groups’ morbidity rates – for studying perceptions of ingroup and outgroup morbidity. We find that minority groups tend to overestimate outgroup morbidity and underestimate ingroup morbidity, especially when they themselves are characterized by high morbidity rates. These perceptions are partly debiased when people are asked to reflect on their situation. In addition, we find that people support harsher policy toward implied non-compliers, but also that biased perceptions do not translate into biased policy preferences. The importance of our findings lies in suggesting that perceptions of outgroup’s situation can reflect intergroup relations, but may also trigger further deterioration in social divide at times of extreme crises.

Although there are various justifications for governments to subsidize vocational training for the unemployed, it is not entirely clear whether and when such programs are effective, and to what extent such programs can benefit participants in improving their performance beyond their historical earnings. This paper studies the long-term effects of training vouchers on the labor market outcomes of unemployed in Israel using a re-weighting-based matching. After 4 years from treatment, significant and positive effects are found for employment (+6%) and for earnings (+7%). The program’s effect is stronger for trainees who found a course-related job following training, pointing to the importance of achieving good matches between applicants and training. The effect is also stronger among women, Arabs, low-skilled workers and the long-term unemployed, suggesting that training vouchers are more effective for the least advantaged groups that are characterized by relative low attachment to the labor market. Assignment to subsidized training does not seem to increase survival rates in the labor market or to trigger an increase in wages beyond historical personal records. Thus, this paper suggests that short training for the unemployed is at most an effective tool for moderating the damage caused by unemployment and for restoring the previous situation but not as an opportunity to improve individuals’ performance to new levels.

This paper analyzes the response of different groups of workers and unemployed individuals to a change made in state subsidy to vocational training that created a discontinuity in the effective prices of training. I find that the reform enabled the government to lower per-participant costs but had no significant effect on earnings and employment. This result, however, masks a difference between Jews, that showed some moderate increase in labor market outcomes in the short-term, and Arabs, that showed negative or insignificant results in this regard. A possible explanation for this discrepancy is negative self-selection of potential Arab applicants that continued to opt-in to the program. The paper contributes in showing that minorities may be lagging in utilizing employment services, or social services more generally, due to weaker orientation in the labor market. It thus emphasizes that structuring services around choice must be accompanied by relevant counseling and information provision, that should take into account differences between groups in terms of adequate prior knowledge and labor market orientation at the outset.

This study examines the long-term effect of settlements evacuation on the income and the employment of individuals, based on the case the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip as part of the Disengagement Plan of August 2005. The analysis is based on comparing the outcomes of individuals who resided in the Gaza Strip Regional Council prior to the disengagement with the outcomes of settlers that in the same period reside in four regional councils in the west bank, serving as a control group. The analysis reveals that the disengagement had a negative, persistent, and significant effect on the level of employment among the evacuees, relative to the control group: a 9 percentage points drop in employment in the first two years and a 4 percent drop in the following three years. In addition, a stronger tendency for early retirement can also be seen. The population of self-employed among the evacuees was particularly affected, both in terms of employment and income. Finally, it seems that the impact of the disengagement was stronger among females relative to men, among unskilled- relative to skilled workers, and on older relative to younger workers.