[MUSIC] Hello again, and welcome back. In our previous lessons, we learned about the Israel parliamentary political system, and about the major political challenges this system encounters. Internal conflicts and cleavages, a continuous state of war, constant tension between democracy and religiosity, growing equality, and so on. In today's lesson, we will try to understand the system from the voter's point of view. How do the Israeli voters navigate this troubled political water? How do they decide what party to follow, and why is it so difficult to predict election results in Israel? Political scientists, Professor Tamir Sheafer, will help us to understand this puzzling reality. Sheafer is a professor in the Department of Political Science and Communication here at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He's among the founders of the Hebrew University' s Political Communication Program. His research focuses on three main areas. The first is an Actor Centers perspective. Specifically his studies look into charismatic skills and personalization in political communication arena, and beyond. The second is the exploration of the role of political values proximity between actors in political communication processes. The third Is a media effect in elections with particular interest in the impact of events in agenda setting and priming. >> Hi, everybody. My name is Tamir and our goal today is to understand electoral behavior. So understand what effect our behavior in electoral decisions will make in election and the role of the media in affecting our behavior and to look at all of that in the Israeli conflicts. To see how these models that we know from other places work in the Israeli system. So let's start from the broad picture. To see, to understand how the Israeli electoral system looks like. First, we can talk about two general motives of electoral systems. The first one is majority plurality model in which the winner takes all. And you can see everything behind me. In that system and the best conference to represent this model in the United States. The winner in each state, the candidate that gets the majority of the votes gets the whole state, get all the votes, so if 1 candidate for instance in California gets 51% of the vote and the other candidate get 49% of the votes all the electors of that country, of that state, of California will go to the candidate who got the 51% of the votes. The second system, another system is the Proportional Representation, the PR system, which translates votes into seats proportionally. And that's the system that is present in Israel and in actually most western democracies. In that system, each party gets or each candidate gets the exact amount of seats in the parliament, according to the percentage of the vote it got in the elections. So in Israel what we have 120 members of parliament, the Knesset. It translates into usually something like 10 or 12 sections of parties in the Knesset. And the size of each party is exactly according to the percentage it got in the elections. We have in Israel a 3.25% qualifying threshold, meaning that any party that get in the election less than 3.25% of the votes is not entering into the parliament. Actually this threshold bar has been Increased in the last election, in the 2015 election, and this sometimes has effect on the way politics align. For instance, in the 2015 elections, because of that threshold, the three largest Arab parties had decided to run together to form a single party for the elections in order to make sure that they will pass this threshold. Party size in Israel, in Israeli Knesset is highly unstable. Meaning, that we see between elections quite large changes in the size of the parties, we seen Parliament so the Likud might, the Likud which is the main right wing party might sometimes get 30 seats in the Knesset and sometimes 20. And this really changes and we have a major central block party, Kadima, which was formed in the 2006 elections. Get over the 1st century, the first decade of the 2000s. Sometimes 29 seats or 26 seats in the class. And then, now it completely disappeared. So we see high volt of volatility, high instability on the parties and I think you have discussed this issue in an earlier class. And this is due to low volt of loyalty to parties. Yet what we do see in Israel is that the political blocks are quite stable. And you can see that here, you can see that the blue line is the right block, the green line is a left block. And the other block is a center block where the central block is not always clear which party it belongs to the center block but generally, we can see the blocks, there are changes but blocks are much more stable than the parties within each block. So there is a quite low loyalty to parties But a much higher loyalty to political blocks. When we try to understand what makes a voter vote or be in a certain party or to be in a certain block. There are various major models that explain our electoral decision, and I would like to focus now on the main models of electoral behavior. The first one Is what we call the sociological model that was presented in the 1940s by a group of scholars from Columbia. And that's why it's called the Columbia School. And the idea is that Lazarsfeld and his colleagues wanted in the election of 1940 in the US. They wanted to study, to understand the impact of the campaign and especially of the media in the campaign on voters. They believed, at that point that the media is having a very strong impact on voters and we will return to the effect of the media in election the way we understand it today later on in this class. However what Lazarsfeld and his colleagues found is that the campaign effect, the median campaign effect are very low, is very low. But the most important factor that effect our decision, our electoral decisions are social demographic factors. Who we are, they found, is the most important predictor of how we vote. So what they found, for instance, in the US that race is extremely important. White voted much more to Republican, Blacks much more to Democratic. Religiosity is extremely important. Catholic voted for Democrat, Jews voted for Democrat, while Protestants much more for Republican. Being rich or poor, they found that it's important, rich voted more for Republican, poor more for a Democrat. So you get the idea, they found that those factors that are present very early in our life and are affected by our family and our social group affect, it's a long term effect on the way we make our electoral decision. So looking at this model, our electoral decision is a social act. Today when we look at that, when we try to understand the role of this model, we look at social cleavages. What we see is that various socio-demographic factors are aligned together, to affect, and affect our identity, our political identity, and let me try to explain you how it works while looking at the Israeli case. In Israel, there are, the Israeli society, we can see several major splits. Social splits, political splits that are central. One of them is Arab-Jewish split, between Arabs and Jews. Another one is between Ashkenazi and Sepharadi. Ashkenazi Jews are Jews that came to Israel from the West from European countries from the US. Sephardic came from the Middle East from Arab countries. We see a split between Secular Jews and Religious Jews, between poor and rich. And the most important split is between Leftist and Rightist, between doves and hawks. This is the ideological split, that is related to the Israeli Palestinians conflict, to the questions mostly of the territories. How the splits play out in elections? We see that there are two groups, two cleavages that are created based on these social demographic factors. The left one, the left cleavage is formed mostly of Ashkenazi Jews, more reach and higher educated. The most important factor here is religiosity. We see that in Israel being a religion or a secular can predict to a large extent the way we will behave in elections. We know that by knowing simply if a person is traditional or religious or secular, on the other hand, we can predict almost 70% correctly the way we would vote. Not to a party, but to either the right or left block. So based on these factors, on these variables that you can see, the green variables, I can predict quite well whether a person will vote for the left and we see that the right wing cleavage is formed of Jews most of course religious, poor, again not necessarily poor but Less wealth than the Leftist and lower education. All these are come together. Again it's important to explain something but these are of course stereotype, of course they are Secular Jew. Who voted for right-wing parties, they're very wealthy, rich Jews who voted for right-wing parties. But, generally these cleavages are well represented. The prototype of the voter for each block. And these blocks, again, are generally quite stable over time. So this is the first model, the sociological model, and it is still very, we can see it's still working very well in the Israeli Electoral System over elections. The second model, is a psychological model. It was developed in the US by scholars from Michigan. That's why it's called The Michigan School In the 1950s and 60s. Those quarters are looked at the psychological model and what they saw that it's the power of the psychological model in the US to predict, it's ability to predict, to forecast. Electoral behavior was not strong enough. So they were looking for something more and what they saw that those sociological, socio-democratic variables, they affect the way we form attachment to parties. What they found out very early in life, we formed a psychological attachment to a party, it's like a psychological scar. That it's something that goes without throughout our lives, it's like being a football fan as you see can see in this photograph. So, it's something that it's not rational. It's not really necessary rational, but it’s attachment that go with us. And according to their finding, it is the most important determinants of our lexical behavior regardless of ideological changes within the party. So, just a funny anecdote of that. I remember one of the elections back in the 1990s in Israel, there was an interview with Likud voters or Likud activists during the elections and he was on TV. He said something like that. He said, I'm a Likudnik. I'm a strong Likud party member. And even if Yassar Arafat, then the Palestinian leader even if Yassar Arafat will lead the Likud, I'll still be a Likudnik. That means that it's a very strong party attachment that affects our behavior regardless of any changes of personal changes in any party and even of ideological changes in the parties. There is today, a very strong debate about this variable and I won't get into it, but the question is does it worth in PR in proportional representational system? And the question is this, in a two party system like in the US, the differences between parties are much clearer. And therefore, party identification can work with. But in PR systems, in Proportional Representation systems, we always get a larger number of parties. And when you get the larger number of parties, the ideological differences between these parties usually are smaller. So if you have parties in the left blocking Israel, the ideological differences between them are much smaller. And therefore, party identification is likely not to work as well and we see that this variable is not working very well in proportional presentation. What I think, what we do see in Israel, this variable is represented much better by a block identification. So if someone is a leftist, he's a dove. It's again, it's a kind of psychological scar that makes us feel like a dog all our our lives or being a hook. It's kind of telling like it's this part identification or block identification variable, I'm sometimes call it when I'm talking to my students about the shaking hands effect. What it means, the shaking hand effects when you go to the voting booth and you have to pick up the party that you want to vote for. You find out that it's very difficult for you to pickup the sign of a party from a different block, from the block that you never voted before. And therefore, we see people that during the election think that they will vote for another block, for a different party. But on election day, there are many times the turns that the parties work for all the life. And many times, parties try to take advantage of this. Feeling of this psychological scar and used it in their elections and we do see, we did see in Israel parties saying, it's time to go back home, to go back to your real roots and to vote for the parties that he has home for you and we will talk about other strategic factors in elections later today. So we have by now discussed two major models of voter behavior, the psychological model and the psychological model and we have, prior to that discussed the Israeli electoral system. So, several questions that you should know by now and you should think about by now. First, explain the idea of social cleavages and the role in voter's decision making in Israel. This is something that is important to understand that you have cleavages and how they play out here in Israel. Try to think about that following our discussion. And try to think what are the social cleavages in your own country base on your understanding of elections and part of behavior in your own country? Try also to think why party identification, party ID is expected to have a lower power in predicting voting behavior in Israel, a multi-party system compared to the US a two-party system. We have been discuss that several minutes ago. Go back to that, make sure that you understand the argument that I have discussed here. And try to think if it really, if you agree with that or if you can see, think of other explanations for differences between countries. If you have time, of course, you can read about the debate about this important variable, the party identification, which is really a central model in political intellectual behavior. Let's go on. Another important factor, and I say it's a factor. I would not say that it's a model of peripheral behavior because there isn't really kind of a known model of that. But it's a factor that is very important, which is of candidate traits. We expect, generally, candidate traits to be more central in countries in which there is a personal vote like in the United States you vote for a president. In Israel on the contrary you don't vote for a person but you vote for a party. But yet we do see that over the years, and I will elaborate on that in a moment, but over the years we see in many western democracies, a process of personalization. A process in which persons, candidates, political leaders become more central while groups like parties are becoming less central in politics. And I will not discuss now the reasons for that. But it's a process, it's a phenomenon that we see in many western democracies and the process of personalization affect the centrality of the leader in elections. And when we look at the centrality of leader in election, or when we look at how the person affects our voting behavior, or how the candidate affects our voting behavior, electoral behavior. We see that voters are looking at several main traits that you can see here behind me. They are looking at whether the candidate is someone that they can feel empathy toward. Does he, a person that behaves or thinks like me. They look for leadership. They look for trustworthiness. Is this a person that I can believe in, that they can trust? And they look for something like charisma. It's something that is not easy to study, but we know for an instance in my own studies, I found out that this vague variable of charisma explains a lot of political media success and political success of candidates. In Israel, although again, it's a parliamentary system in which the vote is for parties. We do see, a very strong personalization process. Here, what you can see it's findings from, I would like to show you a several finding from studies with my colleagues Gideon Rahat, Shaul Shenhav and Meital Balmas. And here what you see is a personalization in media coverage of election. What you can see here in the dark blue line is a focus on the relative focus on a party leader on or on the leaders of the parties in media coverage of elections from the formation of Israel or from the first elections in 1949 until the beginning of the 2000s. The light blue line represents a focus on a party. So is media coverage focused more on leaders or more on parties in the election? And what we see is a clear trend, a clear trend that began in the late '70s and got stronger. And we know that even after 2003 it's getting stronger and stronger in which the focus is getting more and more religious and much, much less on parties. So again, it's a very clear finding in Israel that leaders are becoming much more important despite the fact that the vote is for a party. And we have other examples of that. For instance, here we see is media coverage of the work of the Israeli government. When the media cover the government, do they refer to the government as the Israeli government? Or ask the government of the prime minister for instance, ask Netanyahu's government, or Sharon government, or Barack government, or Orman government? And what we see again is a political trend that over the years there are much less references to the Israeli government and much more references to the personal, to the Prime Minister's government. Again, a clear example of personalization. Same here we see What you can see here is a personalization in the behavior of Israeli Prime Ministers. We simply look that there are speeches in the Knesset, the speeches of Prime Ministers in the Knesset. Over the years, since the early '50s since the first Knesset to the 2000s. And what we looked for is the use of words like I, my, me, vice versa ours or the party, or the country. And we see that the usage of words like I or mine is getting much more frequent since late 70s, 80s. So again, a clear process of personalization. What is the effect of all these forces on electoral behavior? Well, we don't have good enough data for that because our electoral force over the years did not have, I would say, did not have good enough questions for that. But what you can see here in this graph is based on a question, on one question that we do have In our electoral polls, that asked the following things. What is the most important factor that affect your electoral decision? Is it the party? Is it ideology? I don't see ideology here. Or is it the person? Or might your identification with the party's candidate for a Prime Minister or the party's leader. And this last question is represented here by the black line, while the question regarding identification with the party is the thinner black line. Let's focus on both line. And we see that over the years generally, the identification with the party as the main factor, that affecting our electoral decision, is becoming lower according at least to what voters say. This is a thin line, while the dark black line, which represents identification with the leader, increased. The increase is not major. But we do see an increase, and that also affected by, many times by the identity of leader, so we see that in 1996, there was a bump in identification with the leader, and that was the first year that Benjamin Netanyahu was elected for Prime Minister. Anyway, we see that in the late 2000s, in 2006, 2009, this variable has increased, the identification with party leaders has increased. And we know that also since then, it probably has increased in the vote for a candidate like Yair Lapid, for instance that really represents his party. People that are voting for Lapid's party are voting for Lapid, and not for his party. We think that it's getting more and more important, this personalization process that meaning that the leader characteristics is playing a greater and greater role in Israeli elections. Another central model, on the last central model of electoral behavior that we will discuss today, is a Proximity Model that was put forward by Anthony Downs in the mid 50s of the last century. The idea is that, and let me read this. The closer the individual's position to the position of the party or candidate, the more favorably the individual would rate the party, and the more likely she is to vote for that party. If you look at this graph, in a certain dimension, and this the Proximity Model, is working on election or on dimensions, on ideological or issue dimensions. For instance in a security dimension or the dimension of left right in Israel the regarding the peace process or the relationship with the Palestinians or the territories. It's the same dimensions. If you place yourself ideologically, on this dimension, closer to the position of the Likud than to any other party, then according to this model you are most likely to vote, to choose for the Likud, and vote for the Likud while if, in another dimension, you place yourself closer to labor, to the position of labor on that dimension. For instance, religious in state for example, then you are most likely to vote for labor. Now of course, this raises a big question. Which is the dimension, the issue dimension that you would vote according to? And this is a major question, and this is a major strategic issue, that affect the way parties are behaving in elections and the way voters are behaving in elections. And we will return to that a little bit later. This is our discussion about electoral models of voting behavior models. And let me raise several question that we should think about by this point. The first one, we've seen evidence for a process of personalization, in which individual leaders are becoming more and more central in elections. Assuming this is the case, what does it suggest about the impact of the other models of electoral behavior? If the individual is becoming more important? What does it say about the importance of the group or of cleavages or of psychological attachment to parties? Think about it, from the 100% that effect are the way we behave in elections. Second question, there is a continuous discussion regarding the impact of the media in political campaign. Some talk about strong effects other about limited effects. If the model discuss about above that we have been discussing until now, explain a big portion of a portal electoral decision. What can it tell us about the impact of the media? This is a forward question because we are now getting to talk about the media. But try to think about it. If the sociological model, psychological model, which are established early in life, if they are central, is the media coverage of elections important? For us to think about it. And think of the main issue dimensions that the influence your electoral decision in the last elections. We have been talking about the importance of issues dimensions in the proximity model. Try to think, what were these issue dimensions that were important for you, and that were important maybe for other voters in your own country. Let's now go to think about the media, because we have been discussing about various impacts on our electoral behavior, but the big elephant in the room is the media because everybody is talking about the important Role of Media in Election. That our campaigns, that media advertising, that the appearance of candidates of parties in elections is so important, and the question is why? Is it really so and why? And I would like first to remind you that. Rutherford and his group, the Columbia group who did the study in 1940, and thinking that they will find very strong media effects, they found out that according to them, the media effects were very modest or minimal. The minimal model or limited effect model, this is the way they are remembered. But today we look a little bit differently on media effect. And I think that, we know that politicians also look differently at it because politicians believe that the media are having a strong effect on elections. And we know that because we see that politicians are making so much effort to make it into the media, to effect the way the media cover elections. Let's try to think why. First of all, let me pose the question of media bias because everybody that is talking about the media role in elections are always discussing about other media fair. Is media cover unfair, are they biased? And we know that there is a lot of discussion about a leftist field in or leftist bias In media coverage of election this is a very strong discussion in Israel that politicians believe usually the media is leftist. Therefore it's preferring the coverage of the left over the right. And we see exact same discussion in the United States. Many time Republican candidates for presidency argue that the media coverage is working against them because of the leftist tilt of the mainstream media. So here are some findings from studies that I have conducted with my colleague Gabrielle Vienman and and what we see here is simply attention to the major parties in the elections. The bar represents the number of television items during elections that include the coverage of the main parties. And what we see during several elections, the lighter blue is the code, the darker blue is Labor Party and the red is Kadima Party which was the central party, the government party in mid-2000s and the first decade of 2000s. And what we see that generally, there is no bias in Israel. What do I mean? In order to prove that the media are bias, we should see a systematic preference for one of the parties. And we don't see that. We see that generally, the coverage, it's quite balanced. And if there is advantage, one party, like there is, for instance, in 2006, for Kadima it was because this was the party of the prime minister. Usually, we see a small advantage of the party of the prime minister thought there is no political bias, but there is a bias toward the party of the prime minister, which is, which only make sense because it's more news-worthy. So there is, again, no clear political bias in terms of media attention. What about media bias in terms of framing or in terms of how parties are covered? And what we can see here is again from the same studies, we ask the question we analyze media coverage television coverage and ask whether the coverage is present any party in a negative way. Does it attack parties or simply present negative dimensions of that party or its leaders? And again, we can't say that we see a clear political bias. In the 90s we do see that Likud got a little bit more negative coverage than Labor. You see that the lighter blue of the Likud bias is higher or are higher in 96 and 99 compared to the darker blue of labor, meaning that the code was more criticized in media coverage, but following that into 2001, you can see that the labor party was more heavily politicized compared to Likud. Again, generally, you don't see clear systematic differences. Meaning the Likud is not systematically more criticized than labor or vice versa. And similarly when Kadima entered the game. So again, there is no clear political bias in media coverage in elections according, at least according to what we found in television years coverage of elections. So let's now go and try to understand the main models that explain, or at least, two main models that try to explain the role of media, in elections, and how that relates to voter behavior. And I'm presenting here findings from a study with my colleague Gabriel Weimann, a few concepts are important because of the models that are relevant here. The first one is the agenda-setting hypothesis. According to the agenda-setting hypothesis, the media influence the public opinion by emphasizing certain issues over others. So this is very simple. According to this model, this is what happened. During elections, if the media choose to emphasis, to focus most of its attention to, a certain issue, say security problem in Israel. The idea of that, the understanding of that, because of media focus on that the public would think, or majority of public would think, that security is the most important problem, while, on the other hand, if the media will focus mostly on the economy, for instance, a majority of the public would think that the economy is the greatest problem. That should be discussed in elections, that the government should deal with. Now, why that happened? What is the theoretical rational of that? Again, it's rather straightforward. The media provides for us the information environment. We learn most of our news, most of the things that we learned is from the media It's not versus direct knowledge but from the media. And therefore, if we hear time and time when we open television, when we look at the internet or the newspapers, about a certain problem. Admitting that our information environment is full with that problem and simply, it causes us to think about that problem more frequently. And to think that is is a problem that is more important, that needs to be taken care quicker. This is the idea of agenda setting. And a study after study and few hundreds of studies that are done, since the 70s, and this is hypothesis that was put forward by McCombs and Shaw in the early '70s in the US. Several hundred studies since then find that it works. That indeed media coverage effects public opinion in that way. Agenda-building is a process in which we try to understand why do the media focus on a certain issue and not another. How media agenda is built. The influence of actors and of real-world events on media agenda. This is something that is very important to us, because it has strategic issue. It is trying to understand what are the forces that mold media content. And what do we know that for parties this is a strategic question because they are putting a lot of effort to try to impact media coverage, media content. Why? We'll get to that in a minute. But of course the first reason is to effect public opinion because politics want the public to think of certain issues and out of other issues and we'll get to the reason of that now which is Priming. This is an effect known by Priming and it goes like that by making some issues more salient than others, the media influence is standards by which governments and candidates are judged. So the meaning is that if the public thinks that security is most important. Then the public tends to evaluate parties and candidates based on their performance on the security dimension. While if the public thinks that economy is most important, they evaluate candidates and policies based on their performance on the economy. And this might have a lot of effect and we'll get to that in a moment. But let's first look at this model. So if we look at it we have first real world events. I don't know, there is a war. If there is a Southern war in Israel. It goes without saying that the media agenda will be filled of or dominated by security, by war coverage. While if there is the 2008 economic crisis in the world, it goes without saying very logical that the media will be full with items on the economy, will be dominated by the economy. So what's real world development also strategic acting. Or performance of political actors affect media coverage. This is the first one, this is agenda building. The first process of the agenda setting process. The second process or second stage is agenda setting that we have been talking about, that the media agenda, the hierarchy of issues on the news effects public agenda which is the hierarchy of issues among public opinion, what the public says is most important. And the second stage in that process is priming. The issues that we think of the issue that we think that it's most important. That is the greatest problem. This becomes a standard according to which we evaluate the performance of the parties. We evaluate the suitability of the parties or the leaders. This is the whole agenda-setting process, and that's why it has a lot of, we think effect, a lot of effect on our electoral behavior. Let's look at one example from Israel, from my study with Gabriel Weimann. The way we look at it, we analyzed media coverage of several elections, television coverage of several elections, and we divided the agenda to two groups. We looked at whether the item, the television item focused on, generally, on security and peace issues. Or whether it focused on domestic and economy issues. And we look also in a same way at real-world indications. Not everything is affected by public opinion. It's not affected only by media, but we must control, take into account what happened in the world. We look at again on security and economy. On security, we look at the number of civilians and IDF soldiers who were killed six months prior to each election. This is a proxy for the security condition in Israel. And for the economy, we'll look at the GDP change. We'll look at how the economy is doing, does it getting better, or does it getting worse in prior to the election. And we look for media during the, which is based on, as I said, current analysis of television used in a similar way. Regarding the public, we ask the public what everybody is asking the public in the elections, the traditional agenda setting question is What is the most important problem that is facing your nation? This is a question that is being included in all of the election studies around the world, and also here. And again, we divided the answers of the public, of the people. To answers that are relevant to security and peace or to other domestic or economic issues. All right, let's look at our findings regarding agenda building and agenda setting in the Israeli elections. What you see here is the agenda building graph. What do we see? We see the green line is the state of the economy. While the blue line is the media coverage of elections. The blue line represents the percentage of the coverage of the elections, the TV coverage of the elections, that is focused on the security. So if for instance, here in 96. To the right hand you can see the percentages of the coverage of the elections. So if in 96 about 80% of the media coverage of elections was focused on security. It means that the other 20% was focused on the economy. And, while in 99, only about 30 something, 35% of the coverage was focused on security. Meaning that the majority of the focus, 65%, was focused on the economy. This tells us what was media coverage of the elections. The green line represents the state of the economy, the GDP change. So we see that in 96 it was higher than in 99. Meaning that in 96 the state of the economy was relatively good. In 1999 was bad. In 2001, the beginning of the 2001 elections, it was good. And in 2003 it was bad. So another thing that we should take into account here is the state of security. So if the green line is the state of the economy, the state of security we can see here below the graph. And the good thing, by the way, about this form of presentation is that you can freeze. Or you can look specifically at the presentation and look at it more deeply than the way we talk now. Because I understand that it might be a little bit too fast. So here we can see the number of fatalities down here. So we see that in the 96 elections there were many fatalities during the elections. There was a terror attack during the elections. There was a small war, or a military operation in Lebanon. And 147 soldiers and citizens were killed. So it means that security was a big problem. Because many people died during the months before the elections. While in the green line we see that the economy was rather good. If you think about it, it means that from a media perspective, and a media perspective that when it bleeds, it leads. If the economy is good while security is bad we expect that the media would focus on the bad thing. On security. And we see that in 96 elections 80% of media coverage was on security. In 99 security was much better. Only 95 people died before elections. Much better than the 147 in the 96 election. While the economy was rather slow. We see that the green line, there is a decrease in the green line. Meaning the economic growth was much lower. So economy is bad, security is better. Therefore, we can expect that the media would focus much more on economy than on security. And we see in the blue line that this is exactly what happened. So I will not elaborate, I can't elaborate more on that in this course. But we can see that generally, regarding agenda building, media follow events. The media follow the events. So this is a first step in the agenda setting process. Now what happened to the public? Do the public follow the events and mostly the media? And we can see in the next graph that they do. So, if you look at the purple line, the purple line represents public opinion. Represents the percentage of the people, of voters in the election poll. That said that security is the most important problem facing the nation. And what do we see? Look at how the public move together with the media. In 2003 there is something even more interesting. And I will not elaborate on that here. But generally we can see that the public behaves very closely to the media. So when the media emphasizes security the public is following that. When the media emphasizes economy the public follows that. And of course this is also related to what happens on the ground. But it is quite clear and we elaborate on that in the article. The close alliance between the agenda of the media and the agenda of the public. Now, why is this important? Let's go back from an electoral point of view, strategic point of view, why is this important? Let's go back to the graph that you saw before, the proximity model. The idea is that what is the main dimension that is present in our thoughts when we are coming to the voting booth? This is extremely important from a strategic point of view. Because if you think about dimension A, if you think about, for instance like here >> On security. And on that they mention, you are closer to Likud. And in that they mention, you think that the performance of Likud is good, then you are more likely to vote for Likud. But if you think that the most important dimension is the economy, like you can see here. And on that dimension, you're closer to labor or in that dimension, you think that the current prime minister is not doing well and the current prime minister at least now is Benjamin Netanyahu from the Likud while the Labor Party and its leader are doing much better on that dimension. Then you are more likely maybe to vote for labor or at least to switch parties, or maybe even to switch political blocs. So the important dimension in our thoughts, the important dimension, the main problem that we think, we the public think is the most important one might have a lot of electoral consequences and this is why parties are putting so much effort in trying to effect media coverage and we can see that over the years. Look, for instance, at several examples here. In 96 elections, in 1996 elections, the Likud was very successful in affecting media coverage by their advertising campaign of [FOREIGN]. Peres will divide Jerusalem. They started with that and the media followed suit. The media started to emphasize on the issue of Jerusalem, relatively speaking to other elections. Because of that, we saw that public opinion changed. More people said that question of Jerusalem is important for them and why that was important for Likud? Because Netanyahu who competed against, Netanyahu was a good leader and he competed against his main competitor Shimon Peres, the Labor Party leader. And that 1996 election, we have a direct election for prime minister. Netanyahu was against dividing Jerusalem, which is a major issue in Israel while he blamed Peres for favoring territorial agreement in Jerusalem. Netanyahu that by then a majority of Israel, a huge majority of Israelis opposed that. So he wanted that voter are coming to make the decision who to vote for Nathaniel or Peres, he wanted the public to think about the issue of Jerusalem. Because he believed that this way, they would vote for him and not for Peres and he managed to affect media coverage. We know this had effect on public opinio and Netanyahu eventually won the elections. And we have other examples like that, for instance, no loyalty, no citizenship. This is something that Avigdor Lieberman, but they tried to do in the elections, one of the elections in, I think 2006 and he was also quite successful about that and his party did quite well in the elections. So, this might have a lot of electoral consequences and this is the idea of priming. Because when people think about certain issues, they evaluate parties and individuals in a different way. Look at what happened in the last elections in 201, there were two competing agenda. Netanyahu, the Likud leader, the acting prime minister wanted the public to think about the Iranian threat. Why? Because he is known as the Iran person, he's known as Mr. Security person. And he thought on you that if people will think about security and particularly about the Iran threat, they would vote for him and for his party. While other parties, parties from center and left like labor and [FOREIGN] that the Laila Petch Party, they wanted people to think about the economy. And about the problem of cost livings, which was a major issue also in 2015 in Israel, because they knew that the public hold Netanyahu's parties, the Netanyahu government are responsible for that. For the economic problem and they thought that this way, they will evaluate that they could not as favorable as if they would think about Iran. However, what you see here is this is the media coverage of the two issues during the 2015 election. And you saw in that sense, in the war on the media, Netanyahu won. There were much more items on the Iran issue than on housing and cost of living. And this, we think had also an effect on the results. So, people who thought about Iran were more likely to vote for Netanyahu where people who thought about housing and cost of living were more likely to vote for or to evaluate better our parties from center and left. At the end of the elections, Netanyahu won. Of course, there are many other variables that affect voting behavior. These are the variables that we were talking earlier in this meeting. But definitely, the media played also an important role. The warmth the media and the media coverage had a lot of affect, also we think an at least some of the voters. So, this is it for now. This is our discussion of electoral behavior, motives of electoral behavior and media coverage of the election. Few more questions to think about. Try to think or to explain the strategic role of agenda setting in elections. Bring example for strategic behavior that demonstrate this role of agenda setting in your own country. So one question to think about is try to explain and think of this strategic role of agenda setting in elections, and try to implement it in your own country. Try to think what were parties or candidates, main candidates fighting about? How did they try to affect the media coverage of the election? What agenda each one of them tried to push forward and why, and try to think what effect did it had of the results? This is a very fun thing to think about and it's a major strategic issue in elections. That's it for now. That's it for our discussion of electoral models and the media role in election. Thank you. >> In today's lesson and throughout most of our course, we have seen how conflicts and cleavages shape identities and political affiliations in Israel. We have kept hearing about what keeps Israelis apart. What makes them different from one another. However, we have also heard about what keeps Israelis together, about the ways in which collective identity has been constructed and collective memory has been designed top-down over the years. In our next class, we will continue to explore the delicate strings that tie Israelis together despite the many cleavages that drove them apart.
