The Electoral Implications of Conflict Gridlock: Lessons from Israel, 2006-2015

• In Event: Elections and Conflict

Abstract

How do violent conflicts shape voter behavior in democratic settings? Recent research finds that personal exposure to violence increases voting for right-wing parties with hawkish agendas whereas lower direct exposure increases voting for left-wing parties supportive of diplomacy. This growing literature, however, focuses primarily on the short-term electoral implications of terror attacks and intensified violence. Yet, active conflicts often include longer periods of stalemate with neither peaks of violence nor diplomatic progress toward resolution. Focusing on Israel, we argue that such conditions have reshaped the voting patterns of a notable subset of voters since the mid-2000s, contributing, in turn, to the fractionalization and dealignment of the country’s party system. Using survey data from the past two decades, we show that the prolonged gridlock in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has formed a substantive share of dissonant voters who, like the left, support territorial compromise in principle, but, like the right, distrust negotiations with the Palestinians in practice. This dissonance, we find, is a key explanation for the recent electoral success of new, short-lived, and ideologically vague centrist parties at the expense of the right and the left. Despite their high internal turnover, these centrist parties now form a stable and politically significant partisan bloc. Our findings, therefore, demonstrate that prolonged gridlock in conflicts can have long-lasting implications on voter behavior and on party systems, and, accordingly, deserves more scholarly attention.

Authors

• Alon Yakter, Tel Aviv University

• Mark Tessler, University of Michigan