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This article describes two opposing types of political personalization: centralizing and decentralizing personalization. The first implies the centralization of political power in the hands of a few leaders, while the latter indicates a diffusion of group power among its components: individual politicians. We start by proposing definitions of the types and subtypes of centralized and decentralized personalization and review the literature in search of evidence of their occurrence. We then demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed typology by examining personalization trends in various aspects of Israeli politics and conclude with a discussion of the challenges that personalization set for liberal democracies.

Previous research on political representation mainly focused on representatives but has overlooked individuals' sense of inclusion within the greater group: the nation. Building on narrative theory, we propose a novel mechanism that fosters a feeling of political representation—a similarity between individuals' personal-national stories and the collective-national metanarrative of the polity. Metanarratives are shared dominant stories that present a community with desirable social conventions. While they seek to represent the nation, metanarratives are not entirely inclusive and do not appeal to all citizens. We argue that individuals who do internalize the metanarrative feel more represented. To demonstrate our theoretical expectations, we use election surveys and constitutive texts to capture national stories and metanarratives. We find that indeed respondents whose national story is closer to a nation's metanarrative feel more represented by the political system.

When the past is contested by political actors, it can play a notable role both in present and in future politics. This is especially true when it comes to the memory of dominant parties, which are part and parcel of political and national history. Focusing on dominant parties in parliamentary democracies, this article examines the memory dynamics of a dominant party after its demise and highlights the importance of memory modes in understanding these dynamics. Using theories of collective memory, it identifies four possible modes of memory in a post-dominance era, suggesting discursive and power-related indications for each mode. The article then utilizes this framework to examine the memory of Mapai, the once-dominant party in Israel. On the basis of this analysis, the authors propose hypotheses concerning the comparative cases of Sweden, Italy, and Japan.

This article presents a new method and open source R package that uses syntactic information to automatically extract source–subject–predicate clauses. This improves on frequency-based text analysis methods by dividing text into predicates with an identified subject and optional source, extracting the statements and actions of (political) actors as mentioned in the text. The content of these predicates can be analyzed using existing frequency-based methods, allowing for the analysis of actions, issue positions and framing by different actors within a single text. We show that a small set of syntactic patterns can extract clauses and identify quotes with good accuracy, significantly outperforming a baseline system based on word order. Taking the 2008–2009 Gaza war as an example, we further show how corpus comparison and semantic network analysis applied to the results of the clause analysis can show differences in citation and framing patterns between U.S. and English-language Chinese coverage of this war.

Media attention accorded to foreign countries constitutes a crucial facet of public diplomacy. Studies have shown that proximity in values is a key factor that determines such media attention. Models of media interest generally assume that the impact of value proximity is universal across countries with different societal value orientations. Yet this study shows that the effect of societal value orientation on media attention to foreign countries is more complex. It is argued here that the societal value orientation in different countries primes different sets of values, which are then applied as a criterion for assessing the importance of foreign states. Our empirical examination is based on the visibility of foreign countries gauged by searching web portals in 57 countries. It shows that in line with our theoretical argument, countries systematically differ in recognizing proximity, such that democracies base their judgment on similarity in shared democratic principles, whereas authoritarian countries focus on the affinity in religious culture. We discuss the strategic implications of this finding for the study of mediated public diplomacy.

Does an ongoing stalemate in a peace process affect the international agenda toward the conflict and international perceptions about policies that should be adopted to resolve it? We provide a tentative answer to this question by drawing insight from analysis of developments and trends in international media attention to key terms and concepts in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict during cycles of violence, as well as periods of rapprochement and peace negotiations, in the last two and half decades (1996–2021). We find that although attention to the Israeli–Palestinian peace process has been declining over the years, much of the international discussion continues to be devoted to relaunching a negotiation process leading to a two-state solution. The ongoing stalemate in such "process," we show, provides ample opportunities for alternative approaches to emerge advocating alternative endgames (e.g., one-state), international pressure (e.g., Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions), or unilateral steps (e.g., annexation). Each of these approaches promotes an alternative vision and provides a different path and employs its own terminology and vision of the future. The Israeli–Palestinian case study helps illustrate what may happen to peace when the process is stalled, and how a stalemate can produce change in the international debate on the conflict and push for the emergence of new policy directions and agendas.

AbstractThis article contends that an important driver of turnout is the national stories embraced by citizens. We suggest the notion of 'story incentive,' whereby adopting a group's story components – those that connect the past, the future, and prominent national characters – motivates individuals to participate in that group's political activities. Leaning on narrative theories and studies on voter turnout, we develop and test hypotheses regarding the effect of story components on the likelihood of voting. Our measurements of story incentives are based on election surveys and encompass Denmark, Israel, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US. The results support the main story-incentive hypothesis. We discuss the theoretical ramifications of the connection between adherence to national stories and voter turnout.