Research

My research grows out of a profound interest in cross-national and comparative analysis of political attitudes, policy preferences and voting behavior. In my studies I examine various factors affecting and shaping the way citizens in democratic countries form their political preferences and voting decisions.

On the explanatory side, I mainly focus on three factors affecting political attitudes and voting: institutions, group affiliation and events. First, I study how institutions affect voters’ decisions and the quality of representation. This research devotes special attention to elections as a democratic process through which the public’s policy preferences are translated into power sharing in legislatures and governments, leading ultimately to law-making and policy implementation. In my studies I examine how political institutions such as the electoral system, party-system and structure of government affect voters’ decisions. Second, I examine differences in voting behavior between different social groups and the mechanisms that lead to such gaps. Several of my studies deal with gender gaps in political preferences, and the psychological and economic factors which stimulate voting and attitudinal gaps between women and men. I also study differences between groups of birth-cohorts in political attitudes and voting behavior, and the socio-political factors leading to these inter-generational gaps. Lastly, I am interested in long-term and short-term effects of events on political behavior. In these studies, I examine structural changes in voting behavior which derive from constitutive events on one side, and the immediate effect of external shocks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, on political attitudes and parliamentary behavior on the other side.

I employ diverse methods to study these questions, including large scale cross-country surveys, original surveys and survey-experiments, and initial research employing automated text analysis. Geographically, I focus on comparative study of established democracies, with special attention to the study of Israeli politics within a comparative perspective.