Rival Nationalisms and the Conflict over Democracy

• In Event: Peace, War, and Social Conflict Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Peace, War, and Social Conflict Roundtable #1: Conceptualizing and Measuring Conflict

Abstract

Democratic backsliding has become a defining concern of contemporary politics, yet its trajectories vary widely across societies. Similar institutional reforms—particularly executive-led efforts to weaken courts—sometimes provoke mass mobilization framed as democratic defense, and elsewhere are embraced as democratic restoration. This paper argues that these divergent outcomes reflect not only institutional design or partisan alignment, but internal social conflict within national majorities. When competing national belief systems encode rival understandings of sovereignty, legitimacy, and membership, institutional reform becomes a symbolic struggle over the moral ownership of the state.

The analysis examines Israel’s 2023 judicial overhaul crisis and the subsequent October 7 attack and war as intersecting episodes of internal and external conflict. Drawing on original national surveys and a three-wave panel of Jewish Israelis (May 2022; March–April 2023; October 2023), I use latent class analysis to identify five nationalism types—ardent, ethno-religious, ethnocentric, ethno-republican, and critical—and assess how they structured conflict over democracy, partisan realignment, and attitudes toward the Arab-Palestinian minority.

The findings reveal the crystallization of a durable democratic divide rooted in intra-majority conflict. During the judicial overhaul crisis, concern about democratic erosion increased sharply among ethno-republican and critical nationalists, while confidence in democracy rose among ardent and ethno-religious nationalists. The same institutional initiative was thus experienced as either democratic breakdown or democratic renewal, depending on the national project through which it was interpreted. The outbreak of war moderated some attitudes but did not dissolve the divide, indicating that internal symbolic conflict over democratic authority persisted even under acute external threat.

More broadly, the paper advances a framework for analyzing democratic backsliding as a form of internal social conflict structured by rival nationalisms. It shows how institutional crises become durable when they activate competing national projects, transforming legal reform into struggles over collective identity and legitimate rule. By integrating research on nationalism, democratic erosion, and social conflict, the study highlights how intra-majority boundary disputes shape not only polarization and party realignment, but also the conditions under which democracy erodes—or is defended—from within.

Author

• Yuval Feinstein, University of Haifa