Representation, elections and democracy, public opinion, nationalism, identity politics, and Israeli politics and society.
My work brings together theoretical conceptualizations and empirical research that seek to decipher the political meanings of elections, representation, and democracy in public opinion and the media.
This project focuses on how citizens perceive political representation and how these perceptions affect their support for democracy. In this work, in collaboration with Michal Shamir, Clareta Treger, and Naama Rivlin-Angert, we find that citizens' perceptions of representation are multidimensional and tiered, with some dimensions being more important than others, and in accordance with theoretical conceptualizations of representation. We further find that these patterns contribute to citizens’ overall feeling of representation and that multidimensional representation, especially by the parliament (where they feel less represented), promotes support for democracy. One paper based on this project is currently under review, and another is forthcoming in the "Election in Israel - 2019-2021" book. A third paper, on the democratic meanings of representation in the eyes of citizens, is in the making.
This project is part of the ISF Center of Excellence “Looking beyond the Crisis of Democracy: Patterns of Representation in Israeli Elections”
In this project, I study the role of time horizons in the creation of political meanings in news media and social media, using computational text analysis. In a solo published article in Journal of Communication I develop a theoretical concept, temporal plasticity, and show that time horizons are employed in the media in a dynamic way that constructs democratic and anti-democratic meanings of the 2016 election; that they vary before, during, and after the election; and that they differ across media platforms. In another paper, published in European Political Science, I develop a theoretical framework of four key facets of the People—political, national, spatial, and abstract, and their two dimensions—concrete and diffuse. Focusing on the 2016 U.S. election, I find that temporal dynamics in the media discourse connect the political facet with the broader political agency of the People. However, this connection holds only before the 2016 election, and not after them.