Research

Does exposure to conflict displacement amplify support for far-right parties? This study investigates the political consequences of conflict-induced displacement in northern Israel by exploiting a natural experiment arising from government-ordered evacuations during military conflicts. Using a pre-registered survey and a regression discontinuity design (RDD) based on an exogenous 5 km threshold, I assess changes in retrospective and prospective voting behavior as well as self-reported political ideology. The analysis reveals no evidence that displacement increases far-right support or induces partisan realignment. Rather, evacuees demonstrate a modest rightward shift in ideological self-placement without corresponding changes in voting behavior. This divergence suggests that displacement influences symbolic political positioning while preserving established partisan loyalties. These findings occur within a broader pattern of political frustration and disengagement—pointing to heightened disillusionment with the existing political establishment. These findings reveal troubling implications for democratic accountability during external conflict: leaders may be shielded from electoral consequences of security failures even as civic engagement deteriorates, challenging models of wartime accountability.

Do electoral outcomes influence public support for the winning candidate’s policy agenda? While voters are often assumed to evaluate candidates based on policy alignment, research suggests that partisan identity frequently overrides rational assessment. However, the extent to which the identity of the electoral winner legitimizes policy positions – particularly in the field of foreign policy – remains underexplored. This article leverages the 2024 U.S. presidential election as a natural experiment, using a pre-registered two-wave panel survey to assess whether electoral victory influences public perceptions of the winning candidate’s platform. Results reveal a moderate ‘winner effect’: Democratic voters exhibited an increase in support for Trump’s foreign policy positions post-election, while support for Harris declined, even among her base. Nevertheless, winner effects produced shifts in foreign policy preferences commensurate with those on a highly salient domestic issue, challenging assumptions about greater volatility in foreign policy. Furthermore, pre-election candidate support conditioned post-election stability, with winning-party supporters maintaining greater consistency. While electoral victories enhance the perceived legitimacy of the winner’s platform, partisan identity remains the primary constraint, limiting large-scale ideological realignment.

Why does political ideology shape citizens' political trust responses to some crises but not others? Democratic backsliding is often driven by internal political conflict, yet we know little about how such crises reshape citizens' trust in governing institutions compared with externally driven ones. We argue that the answer lies in the attributability of responsibility: the degree to which a crisis lets citizens trace the threat it activates to the deliberate choices of governing actors. Where responsibility is attributable, ideology strongly conditions how threat perceptions translate into trust; where a threat's external origin constrains blame, this conditioning weakens. We test this using two original surveys of Jewish Israeli citizens spanning two contrasting crises within a single polarized democracy: the 2023 judicial-overhaul crisis, widely characterized as democratic backsliding, and the war following the October 7, 2023 attacks. During the internally generated crisis, economic threat perceptions sharply eroded trust, especially among opposition-aligned left-wing citizens. During the security crisis, this ideological filtering disappeared, but trust did not rise, qualifying rally-around-the-flag accounts. Internally generated crises, we conclude, threaten democratic legitimacy more durably than external ones, precisely because they activate the divisions that make trust hardest to rebuild.

Does exposure to threat produce uniform conservative shift, or does it polarize ideological camps further apart? Two long-standing traditions in political psychology give opposing answers, and recent work has refined but not resolved the debate. We contribute on three fronts. We bring evidence from outside the standard U.S. two-party setting, examining a multiparty system with a sharply different ideological baseline. We disaggregate the non-conservative bloc, distinguishing centrist from leftist responses that the existing literature typically conflates. And we examine support for state digital surveillance, a security policy whose ideological structure is less crystallized than the military responses on which the literature has largely relied. Drawing on two original surveys fielded in Israel during the Israel-Hamas war (N = 2,199), we find that personal exposure to terrorism produces convergence at the political center across both waves, consistent with defensive-conservatism. The leftist response is conditional: positive in 2024 but absent in 2025, suggesting that worldview-protective dynamics become operative for the left when the threat no longer maps onto the policy. We argue that the two traditions are best understood not as competitors but as conditional accounts that apply to different ideological subgroups under different political contexts.

How does exposure to violence shape foreign policy attitudes, and what happens to these attitudes as the intensity of conflict recedes? We argue that conflict intensity changes what exposure means politically, shifting it from threat to cost as hostilities recede. We test this argument using two survey waves (N=1,260) fielded in Israel across distinct conflict-intensity environments: Wave 1, a high-intensity wave fielded during the acute Israel-Iran escalation, and Wave 2, was fielded during a lower-intensity interval between escalations. This design allows us to assess whether the political effects of violence exposure persist once hostilities subside or attenuate as the threat environment cools. We examine support for coercive, diplomatic, informational, and economic foreign policy instruments, and assess how personal exposure to violence, psychological distress, and political ideology shape attitudes across contexts. The two waves reveal a central implication: exposure is not a stable engine of hawkishness. At peak intensity, preferences saturate and ideology crowds out individual experience; as intensity recedes, exposure shifts from a threat signal to a cost signal, generating restraint rather than escalation across coercive instruments. This reframes how mass politics enters the war-to-peace transition: the publics most shaped by violence can become constraints on continued coercion precisely when conflicts cool, altering the domestic foundations of both escalation and compromise. Unlike dominant accounts that treat violence exposure as a stable driver of hawkishness, we show that its political imprint is conditional on conflict intensity: exposure is muted when war is acute but becomes a cost signal that attenuates coercive demand as the threat environment cools.

When does exposure to war foster domestic political violence? We distinguish between endorsing violence against the government and personally being willing to act against elected officials. We argue that these two political responses follow different psychological pathways: exposure may be associated directly with endorsement, whereas the intention to use political violence is linked to an affective pathway through psychological distress. We test this argument with a two-wave panel fielded in the immediate aftermath of the June 2025 Israel--Iran war and during a later period of relative de-escalation. Greater exposure predicted higher distress at follow-up, conditional on immediate-postwar distress, which in turn predicted greater intention but not greater endorsement. This indirect pathway was concentrated among respondents lower in cognitive flexibility and was not explained by heightened threat perception. The findings suggest that the political consequences of war exposure are heterogeneous: the same exposure reaches different forms of domestic political violence through different psychological pathways.

How does exposure to political violence shape policy preferences toward different outgroups? We examine this question in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attacks. It focuses on the psychological mechanisms through which violent threat translates into exclusionary policies toward outgroups that vary in their perceived association with the conflict. Using an otiginal survey that leverages variation in geographic exposure to violence, we assess how direct and media-mediated exposure operate alongside social identity and threat perceptions. The results reveal that exposure to violence does not independently drive exclusionary preferences. Instead, psychological mechanisms fundamentally structure outgroup hostility. Social identity emerges as the primary driver of generalized exclusion across all outgroups, whereas threat perceptions predict targeted exclusion based on each outgroup's perceived association with the conflict. Media-mediated exposure also operates conditionally, interacting with pre-existing symbolic threat perceptions to amplify exclusionary attitudes. These findings suggest that political violence provides a context for exclusion, but the selection of the targets depends less on exposure itself than on the political and psychological orientations through which violence is interpreted.

The literature on the effectiveness of International Economic Organizations (IEO) assistance programs has in recent decades mostly relied on quantitative evidence to substantiate its claims; this trend can be expected to continue given the increasing wealth of data sources and methods. Large-N datasets are supposed to improve the generalizability of findings, but few studies if any probe the generalizability of their results, in part for lack of proper metrics. We begin to fill this gap by developing indicators of the generalizability of estimates in regression analysis, specifically those typical of IEO studies, to the entire nominal sample (internal validity), and to a target population (external validity). We use these indicators to study the literature on the effectiveness of IMF programs, a sub-field of the economic IEO research agenda, replicating results from 677 models in 43 related articles in peer-reviewed journals (all such articles for which we could obtain replication files). We find that many estimates across different studies are effectively based on a small set of countries or years, even when their nominal samples are large. We demonstrate that economic IEO scholars must trade-off high-precision treatment operationalization, model specification and careful causal identification against generalizability of their findings. Our indicators can help scholars manage and optimize this trade-off.