Episode 5: Noam Gidron on Public Support for Democratic Backsliding in Israel

Hi and welcome to the Political Science Podcast, no problem at all. In this podcast, we want to talk to political scientists about their research in the context of bigger developments in society and politics. We will have one guest per episode, and we base each episode around one or more papers that lie at the core of our guest's research interests. Us, that is the co-host, Julius Keltzer, and myself, Victor Bulgey. Hi Julius, welcome to the podcast. Hey Victor, welcome to the podcast. We are graduate students of Political Science based in Keel & Zurich, and the idea of the podcast is to provide a platform for the insights of Political Science can reach a broader audience. Today we talk to Noam Gidron, who is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Prior to that, he received his PhD from Harvard University and was a fellow at Princeton University. Noam's research lies at the intersection of political behavior, political sociology, and political economy, and is especially known for studies on so-called effective polarization and the link between social status and populism. In a new article, he and co-authors examined the roots of public support for the controversial judicial reforms in Israel, introduced by the Netanyahu government, which sparked massive protests in 2023. Just to be clear, in this episode, we don't aim to talk about the ongoing foreign gaza. Noam is not a military expert and he does not do research on these topics. Rather, we are interested in the state of Israeli democracy and his related research on populism and effect of polarization. Welcome now, I'm great to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for the invitation. So as Yulia said, last year, Benjamin Netanyahu's hard-ride liquid government plan to push through a controversial judicial reform. And this sparked nationwide mass demonstrations and national strikes in Israel. And these reform plans included several measures that would weaken the system of checks and balances on the executive branch by granting the ruling coalition authority over the selection of judges and the power to overturn Supreme Court decisions. Together these measures would contribute to democratic backsliding, which is a term used to describe the erosion of democratic institutions. In a new article, you and other co-authors are now investigating which attitudes explain public support for these plans. But maybe we can start with you giving us, like, an introduction, a broader picture. What are the origins and backgrounds of the judicial reforms? And what do they perhaps tell us about the state of Israeli democracy right now? Yeah, I can trigger some of the findings in the paper. You mentioned that we are looking at attitudes. We are also looking at emotions and affective evaluation. And that will turn out to be very important, but we'll get back to that in a moment. So just to put the last year in Israeli politics, a little bit in context, Israel entered a period of intense political unrest in 2019. And Israel is went to the polls five times between 2019 and 2022. Following all these elections, no party was able to form a stable government that would last for long in power. And then in 2022, the right-wing block, exactly as you mentioned, Victor, grew on a majority with 64 seats in the Knesset out of 120, and Benjamin Netanyahu returned to the office of the Prime Minister, supported by a right-wing government, and the most radical right-wing government that we had in the history of Israel. And then quickly after that, the government presented a comprehensive plan to reshape Israeli democracy to concentrate power in the hands of the executive and weaken the courts. And the government followed what we've seen in other countries where democratically elected governments make efforts to weaken the system of checks and balances, and we are now referring to that as democratic backsliding or democratic erosion. So what we've seen here is not unlike similar processes, or we've witnessed in other countries such as Hungary and Poland. And exactly as you mentioned, this reform effort was swiftly met with a very intense opposition. The loudest protest movement Israel has seen, and with Israeli taking to the streets week after week, month after month protesting against the judicial overhaul, that was all in all not that popular among the Israeli public. So together with my colleagues, and your Tamar Galit, your chef-fair, and Ita Maria Kier from Tel Aviv University, we were all interested in better understanding who supported the judicial overhaul, or broadly who supports this type of reform intended to advance democratic backsliding. And that was the research question motivating our book. Okay, so you're getting right into your paper. Maybe one could also say that normally democratic backsliding is often considered a process that is really driven by elite politicians and their decisions. But as you said, these reforms and these plans always require some support in the public to be implemented too. And the question you are investigating is really interesting in this regard. And I wonder if you can tell us broadly about the main findings you had in this regard. I mean, if I remember correctly, you had these five attitudinal dimensions that were important at explaining who supports actually, these controversial plans, so maybe you can give us a better look into that. So I think this is a crucial point that was recently emphasized by political scientists Larry Barthel. And the key issue here that the process of democratic backsliding is often initiated by political elites who seek to concentrate power in their hands. But because we are talking about democratic backsliding as a process that takes place within a democratic system, it also requires constructing some kind of support coalition for these types of reforms. And we wanted to better understand this support coalition without contesting the overarching argument that the process was initiated by political elites. OK, so I think this is crucial. And then we went back to the comparative politics literature on this issue. And we wanted to identify the key arguments, the key narratives that have been proposed by scholars to understand ruling the public support this type of reform. And what we noticed is that in different bodies of literature, American politics, European political behavior, etc., different scholars tend to emphasize different types of arguments. So we thought that it would be important to first try and bring together these different narratives, different arguments into a comprehensive framework that then could also be used by scholars of democratic backsliding, or more specifically scholars of mass support for democratic backsliding in other countries. So going over this larger literature, this is what these are the key arguments that we can identify first, we focus on how people feel, how strongly they are attached to the leaders who advance these types of democratic backsliding processes. And we know that voters tend to follow the leader, right? Voters tend to adopt the position of the preferred leaders. And we know that also many countries have undergone processes of personalization in which specific leaders carry more weight in the political arena. So our first argument is that people who are most strongly attached to the leader, in our people who are more strongly attached to Nathaniel, are more likely to support the reform all else being equal. Now then we also have a lot of literature, not just about how much the public is attached to the preferred leader, but also how much people dislike political opponents, right? So we are kind of like shifting into perspective. It may be not that I'm a huge fan of my side, but I really hate. I really strongly dislike and fear and resent my political opponents, right? And here walk by Milan Slavic is very influential, we have some evidence from the US suggesting that indeed people who are very strongly affectively polarized, that if they have a very negative feeling towards political opponents, will be more likely to support democratic transgression than in our case, the more strongly Netanyahu's voters or supporters dislike party of the center of the left, the more likely they are to support the judicial overall. So we have this emotional, effective evaluation type of variable. We all have to. to it using our variables, the first is populist attitudes, it's hard not to talk about populism when thinking about democratic backsliding, we know it is such an important feature of contemporary politics and many, it's not all of the government that have been accused in advancing processes of democratic backsliding, although also considered populist, think about examples in Hungary and Poland, right? So we wanted to see whether there's an association between populist attitudes that is the dislike of the elites, understanding politics more or better between the elites and the unified people and support for democratic backsliding. Okay, our fourth narrative is closely related to populism but also analytically and theoretically distinct populists talk about the people as a unified entity, right? A closely related concept is that of majoritarianism, those for whom democracy is decision by the majority of the people. So you don't have to think about the people as a unified entity but what matters here is that you have the support of the majority of the voters and what are they decide is democratic and that of course spends an opposition to a liberal conception of democracy that also considers checks and the balance on the will of the majority. And here it's also important to note that Netanyahu and his government presented and advocated for the judicial overall in majority terms, right? Making the case that this is what the majority of the people want and that's what we should care about, not what the courts decide. So that was part of the public discussion. Then we added the fifth and last narrative or argument which tends to people's personal experience. We know from research in political economy and political behavior more broadly that people's own personal experiences in the market or with other people around them can shape political attitude. And here specifically we wanted to examine whether people who had negative experiences with low and forthing authority will be more likely to support a plan that we can record. And here again we wanted to take seriously arguments made by proponents of the judicial argument and they were making the case that the judicial system is dysfunctional and that why according to the perspective it requires such a deep reform. And we wanted to examine whether it did people who had such negative experiences with the law would be more likely to support the judicial overall. So I was talking for a long time but it was important to bring together the five different narratives because of course we are focusing on a unique case from Israel. But we think that this framework could be helpful also in examining mass support for democratic backsliding in other countries. Of course. And does this framework prove to be effective in predicting this support? What do you find in the paper? So some of these variables turn out to be much more important than other in explaining support for their judicial overall. And maybe I can just say what about methodology without going into too much detail just to. That's fine. We're the podcasts for these things. Perfect. So we are in order to examine the predictive power or the explanatory power of these different arguments we are using panel data. And that's important for a research design because we measure these predictors before the judicial overall was presented to the public. And then we went back to the same people that is the same respondents of the previous survey and then asked them whether they support both the judicial overall. So we can say that concerns about reversed causality, whether people would provide answers regarding populism or majoritarianism based on the discourse that surrounded the judicial overall. That's less of a concern for. And so we are using panel data which I think provides us with a very strong for the logical framework to examine the explanatory power of the different arguments. So to the empirical findings. Okay. Now to the most important part, right? Yeah. So what we find is that the aspects related variables are the strongest predictors of support for the judicial overall. Specifically when we zoom in, when we focus on voters who supported the government, right, people who voted for coalition parties, there we find that the more they dislike political opponents, that is parties of the center and the left. And the most strongly they are attached emotionally to Netanyahu, the more likely they are to support the judicial overall. So affective evaluations do a lot of work in explaining who supports the judicial overall. Then we find that the majority and understanding of democracy that is an understanding of democracy as reflecting the will of the majority, most of the system of government shaped by a checks and balances that also predict to a certain degree and support for the judicial overall, though less than the affective evaluation. Entendlement with the law that is negative experience with the judicial system is also predictive to a certain degree and populist understanding of democracy. And that is the populist worldview that so many of us, including myself, have examined very closely, that is not predictive of support. It could be because we are not measuring it very well. And I can say more about it later on, but it is not highly predictive of support with the judicial overall. So all in all, another way of putting it is what we find is that there was no very strong mass level demand for the judicial overall. It is not like people had a very strong populist and majority worldviews and that is why they demanded from their leadership this type of reform. Instead, once the reform was presented, it was supported by people who very strongly likened and now and very strongly dislike the center and the left. I think it goes back to the point you made before about the role of the elites in initiating this process, but to once the proposal is on the table, the degree of affective evaluation, how much of this like opponent matters a lot. And just to go back to this methodological question before this to explain it to those who aren't so much into political methodology, maybe. So this is important. This is why it's important to have panel data right to track this change within a person over time and not just take a time point after the actual event and then measure different attitudes. This is very biased. Exactly because Victor, let's say that I'm asking you about your view regarding the judicial overall after it was already presented, right? And then I'm also asking you whether you think about democracy in majority or populist terms. And if I'm asking you these questions after the reform was already presented, maybe your views about democracy are already shaped by what you think about the plan, about the judicial overall. And here we are not concerned about it because we asked these questions before actually just hours before the plan was announced. So we were also a little bit lucky to run the panel just before the judicial overall was presented. No one knew, like many didn't know that this was going to be announced at this exact time. And so yes, it is useful to collect panel data and also it's helpful to be a little bit lucky. Yeah. I mean, as you said, the decisions of elites are really important forming public opinion. And parts of Netanyahu government that is in power are also two orthodox, ultra orthodox parties and smaller alliance of religious Zionist parties that occupies important cabinet positions. And as I would say, ideologically strongly in support of implementing the Jewish religion as a dominant religion in Israel, right? And also these parties have supported annexation and the settlement of the West Bank. And I mean, at least I had the perception that the Israeli Supreme Court was always sort of a defender of the democratic system as a whole. And was sort of blocking policies that was in the interest of these ultra-religious parties. For example, there were some decisions by the Supreme Court blocking certain parts of the settlement policy in the West Bank. And I was wondering, in regard of your paper, what role do these religious interests or religious identities have in explaining support or opposition to the judicial reforms? Yes, so that's a great question. There's a lot to unpack here. We do find when we look at support for the judicial overhaul by parties, we do find very strong support for the judicial overhaul among voters of the far right religious Zionism party and the ultra-autodox parties. Supporters are significantly stronger than among voters of the liquid. I think we want to be cautious about idealizing the Israeli Supreme Court. That being said, I do think that you are correct at pointing at this multiple motivated coalition or alliance of political actors who could potentially benefit from weakening the courts. We know that the settlement movement perceived the courts as a constraint on the effort of territorial expansion in the West Bank and we know that for the ultra-autodox party, the Supreme Court is again a constraint on the demand for preferential treatment in terms of welfare policies as well as the exemption from military service, this is something that is currently debated in the Supreme Court and we can also mention here Netanyahu, specifically in his inner circle, Netanyahu is facing criminal charges of robbery and breach of trust and he also has potentially something to benefit from weakening the courts. So we have here a coalition of the elite level of different actors who could benefit from weakening the Supreme Court and I guess it would remain for historians to better understand exactly how much each of these groups, you can think about them as intense policy demand of how much they influence the decision to put forward the judicial overall. Our emphasis is about mass support. If you historically look at countries which shifted from democracies to autocracies, there's often been emphasized in research the role of the big conservative parties and how they behaved towards the radical right extremists and now I was wondering a bit about the role of Lee Kud here, is it still a conservative party would you already classify them as being far right themselves and then with how do you see how do you see their role may be in general in terms of democratic backsliding in Israel? Yeah of course that speaks to an important body of literature and Daniel Ziblitz's work on conservative mainstream right party, of course, highly influential in this regard and here I can point to an interesting data point. So Israel was very recently added to the Chapel Hill experts survey for listeners who are not closely familiar with it. It's a highly useful data set that allows us to compare party positions the multiple dimensions based on expert scores. Of course it's not without limitation but it's very useful if we want to get a sense of how parties are located on different issues compared to parties abroad and again Israel was just recently added to the data set and so maybe we want to wait a little bit before we can identify long term trends but it's interesting to know that if we focus on the degree to which parties attack political elites and the establishment which is a proxy in my view for populism not a perfect measure but a proxy for how much populism matters in political parties, public appeal. Here we see that the liquid is a significant outlier when compared to European mainstream parties. It is much more populist or at least gives a much stronger role to attacks against elite and the establishment compared to mainstream center-right parties in Europe and it is in fact much closer to the populism of European far-right parties. So I don't think that would surprise people who closely follow Israel politics although they could have been in power for a very long time and Netanyahu is Israel's longest-serving Prime Minister. It's very clear that attacks against the elite play a prominent role in this party political discourse but now using the chest data we can actually compare it also to other countries and it's clear that the liquid is an outlier. It's much more similar to far-right parties than mainstream European party. But I was wondering this regard, of course it helps us to explain why Likud attacks at democratic institutions and saying they're highly populist but as you said this wasn't always the case. I mean there was a change over time and I was wondering what explains this change? Why did Likud shift so hard to the populist side? What are the takes on this? Yeah I think this is an issue that would be examined very closely in the coming years. I do think it's important to emphasize that there were populist segments or populist roots for the Likud that go way back in time, right? I don't think it's a completely new phenomenon and have been worked about populism and the Israeli right. For a while, Danny Phil has written extensively on this topic. I think the question is at what point it has become from one feature of the party to a dominant feature of the party and I think that's a very important question. One way of thinking about it is the degree to which Likud has become dependent on coalition partners such as the far-right religious dynamism party and the ultra-orthodox party that have the policy-based interest in weakening the course. And another direction for inquiry on the topic is focusing on the Likud itself and here I think it matters in which direction it now has pushed the party and since he's been implicated in legal accusations, I think we've seen greater attacks against the political establishment. It also matters who is the selector that is who participate in the primaries of the Likud party who selects the list of the members of the Knesset and I think these are all interrelated directions for future work on the topic. But I do think it's important to emphasize that rather than thinking about about populism as a new feature of the Israeli right we should ask at which point and why did it become more or less prominent. In regards to the literature you reference from Daniel Zibler then so on I mean as always said that conservative parties such as Likud Wars have sort of a gatekeeper function. I think Victor already mentioned this term and in this case I was wondering is this term really fitted because gatekeeper really implies that the conservative party protects or should protect attacks from outside the mainstream riot like for example in Weimar Republic in Germany and it's always said that back then the conservative parties lost the gatekeeping function because they were unable to protect the system from attacks from the National Socialists but in this case it's the conservative party themselves that they turned and the party themselves that attack the system and not the attacks not coming from outside right. Yeah well unfortunately I think both true both yeah in several European countries we've seen this debate about whether the mainstream rights should work with more populist parties and what we've seen in Israel is that the mainstream the main party of the right itself has become populist to the bone. Again there are also examples from other countries and I think the Republican party of course comes to mind right in the case of governing central party on the right that has become increasingly populist also other things becoming increasingly authoritarian, native Israel and so it's not the it's not a unique case in which conservative parties are transformed into populist populist party and to some degree also a movement but yes it's definitely not just a case in which they are cooperating in power with populist parties, populism itself. Now in the book The Tyrone of the Minority, Visible and Levitsky and when we're speaking about the US they propose some major institutional reforms because they say this is a big problem with in the US right now that the constitution basically does not fit the state of society. society anymore. And do you think this is transferable to Israel to some extent? Is this more like an institution problem or should we look in other directions there? I definitely think there is an institutional dimension here, although Israel is very different from the US in a way it's almost the opposite. So some are concerned that in the US it's too hard to change the constitution. There are too many veto points making it harder for the majority to rule. Israel institutionally is located perhaps on the other side of this imagined spectrum of veto points because there is no fixed constitution. No clear and final bill of rights. So I do think there's definitely an institutional component here that we can read a little bit to think more about this issue. But the type of solution that they propose for the US would not necessarily fit the Israeli context because the institutional terrain is so different. And I mean in your article you mentioned some reforms that could be implemented in order to protect the institutions better for example it's about the electoral law about federalism and so on. What are ways of what are steps that would work in the Israeli context? Yeah of course that's a very big question and currently the public debate is not necessarily focused on the specific issues with everything going on in the region. I think that there's definitely a place to codify the relationship between the Knessa the legislator and the Supreme Court. You don't have to support the judicial overhaul in order to support a law that would clarify the relationship between the different branches. There are also reforms in the electoral system that one can consider for instance bringing in a regional component to into the electoral system in order to create regional basis of power. All these different institutional changes to the system that I hope will be seriously considered and a lot of the table to consider. What I was wondering is about when now we spoke a lot about the mainstream right or the far right and yes also the institutional setup in Israel. What about the mainstream left the opposition how how do they behave in the current situation? Very poorly. The opposition is divided not again not unlike what we've seen in other countries where you had a very strong populist right in power. If divided between a more centrist faction slightly more leftist part more liberal and also parties who mostly represent the opposite of Israel who are part of the previous government. But the position within the Israeli party system is different. So the opposition has found it really hard to find the message which can bring it all together. Some part of the coalition are more willing of the opposition so we are more willing than others to work with me and Yahoo specifically since the Hamas attack on October 7th and the war that erupted in Gaza. The opposition is really struggling to speak in a unified voice and find the message that could bring it all its different factions together. Could you talk a little bit more about the role of the conflict since October. How did it again change the discussion also around the judiciary forms but also more generally in Israeli inner like politics. Yeah, so much has happened in Israel in 2023 and that it's almost impossible to cover it all not only in one podcast writing a series of podcasts. Currently we can say that the judicial overhaul is not formally part of or it's not formally hired the political agenda right it has been pushed to decide. But many believe including myself that while it's no longer in front and center different members of the government still try to incrementally advance different parts of the judicial overall in some cases also taking advantage of the fact that public attention is now focused on the war. Whether on this type of somewhat complicated intricate judicial matter. So if when the government was just established the goal was to push forward this huge and package of laws that would really very deeply restructure Israeli democracy it seems like now they shifted to more incremental approach. So I think that this issue is still some degree shaping Israeli politics although in more elusive ways. I just have the feeling that during the mass protests this whole protest went on only driven by people from the left side of the political spectrum and unions and so on but also people from the military protesting against these reforms. And I was wondering what you said that Lee Kud on maybe also Netanyahu specifically lost some electoral support some support in the public because of these reforms and maybe they regain sort of the support during the war. What would you say that Lee Kud has maybe lost some voters to the liberal parties because of this they have the plans to overhaul the system. Yeah again there's a lot to unpack here but we know that the reform was unpopular also among some Lee Kud voters. It had a support of about two thirds of the voters so it's still a majority of the good voters but there was also a significantly group of voters who didn't like the judicial overhaul and effective from the Lee Kud to more central party. Then following the Hamas attack on October 7th and the war in Gaza it's interesting not only what happened but also to notice what didn't happen and what didn't happen was a rally round the flag is like we didn't see mass support among opposition voters to Netanyahu following the attack. Which is perhaps a little bit surprising because following such catastrophic advance think about 9/11 right we often see a huge fighting support for those in power and we haven't seen that in fact the government has lost support. At least according to the current poll it does not enjoy majority it did gain some support back in the last few weeks but still we know that many voters have the fact that now it's important to say they may come back to the Lee Kud before the next election so we shouldn't jump into conclusion but we indeed saw that there was no this rally round the flag effect. Do you think Netanyahu specifically misunderstood the situation after the attacks in October and then was expecting yeah this rally around the flag effect to happen also in terms of support for the war. Honestly I don't know what he had in mind I am not in a position to comment on that I guess. I think that the Israeli public has been so effectively polarized on October that it was almost impossible to bring everyone together even after such a catastrophic event. What Netanyahu is like he had in mind I'm not I'm not a right person to. Could you elaborate maybe a little bit more on the effective polarization after last October. So maybe we want to put it in a broader context together with two colleagues here in the area I've been tracking changes in effective polarization in Israel society for a long time and what we've seen is that since netanyahu entered office in 2009 there was an increase in out party dislike among supporters of the two. main parties that what we have data for for a relatively long period of time. There was an increase in outparty dislike which reached a peak in the 2022 election. So put it differently by 2022, Israel was more highly polarized than at any moment before in the previous 30 year for which we have data. And then came the judicial overall, right, which sparked the largest protest movement and then the war. So there was this succession of highly polarizing events. According to data that I've seen, there was no significant decline in affective polarization following October 7th and the war together, which I think is interesting, but I think here we still need to collect more data in order to be really confident. But what a decline in affective polarization during the reform. So what after the reforms, because as you said, there were like a lot of people also from the Likut party supporters that were against these reforms. Yeah, according to what I've seen, there wasn't a significant decline in affective polarization with everything that was going on. But this is something that we would still need to examine in the future. And you said that even before the planned reforms society was so highly polarized or effectively polarized. So you would say you're drawing on many years now of research on the topic that you've done. This fits into the general picture, which we can see in other Western democracies too. To a certain degree, I think that Israel differs slightly from other countries. Actually, I have in mind the US rather than just the European case. Because here we've seen here in Israel, I mean, we've seen affective polarization increases, but also decreases in certain years. So we usually think about a particle resentment, dislike of something that has gradually increased across the globe in the last 30 or so years. And analyzing that from Israel, what we've seen is that affective polarization, that is like between political opponents, cross-party lines, it has increased in the 90s, which to most of the time period here in Israel with the assassination of Prime Minister of being and the Oslo course. But then interestingly during the first decade of the 2000, we've actually witnessed a decline in affective polarization. And that was a period of coalition bringing together the main parties on both the left and right. And here we also have evidence from European countries that serving together in government can help reduce affective polarization between supporters of parties that are together in coalition. And indeed, we've seen a decline in affective polarization in the first decade of the 2000, but then since Netanyahu re-entered the Prime Minister office in 2009, we've seen an increase in outparty dislike. Interestingly, so affective polarization is often measured as the difference between how much I like my own party and how much I dislike the opposing party. And the increase in affective polarization we witnessed since 2009 is mostly driven, not by greater inparty, positive feeling, but by greater outparty dislike. And we also have that specifically on affective polarization, affective evaluations of Netanyahu. And here again, we can see that feelings have really polarized regarding Netanyahu specifically as a leader since 2009. Okay, maybe coming to an end, I was wondering if you could give us an outlook sort of what is going to happen with the toll reform of the judicial system about democratic backsliding of all you believe this issue is going to be less discussed if the war will end in some time. Or do you think that this is going to be an ongoing issue that's also going to be part of discussions in 10 years or something? I definitely think it's going to be an ongoing issue. I think that many of us who protested against the judicial overhaul should be aware that it is still on the table, even if presented differently. And I think that social scientists will examine this process for many years to come. 2023 was an extremely intense year in Israeli politics. And its implications we can now see across the region to a certain degree. So I think this is definitely something that we will still be talking about in 10 years. Okay, thank you very much for this outlook at the end, Noem. And thank you for speaking about your research. It was very insightful. And thank you very much. Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you. It was a pleasure. This was the fifth episode of no problem at all. If you're interested in Noem's work more generally, we post a link to the papers we talked about in this episode in the podcast description. You can also follow him on social media. If you enjoyed this episode, please share the podcast and write it on Spotify or wherever you listen to this. This helps us to promote the podcast. We are also happy to receive feedback, so consider following us on Twitter via the links in the podcast description or send us an email. Thanks for listening and see you next time. Bye.