Voter’s policy preferences in the time of democratic backsliding in Israel

Principal investigators will use a survey experiment in this project to attempt to analyze the causes of Israel's governance dysfunction in terms of the political party support structure of its citizens. Israel held four national elections in the three-year period 2019-21. The reason for the repeated elections in a short period of time was the continued failure of the first parliamentary party to form a cabinet. The current government is a policy- and ideologically broad coalition led by the second parliamentary party, but it is evenly split with the opposition in terms of numbers, making it a highly unstable cabinet. Although conventional public opinion polls have attempted to elucidate the party support structure of the Israeli public, they have yet to fully elucidate what policy areas actually attract the attention of the public in their choice of party. Using a conjoint experiment, this study will elucidate that security policy, which is commonly regarded as the most important issue, is no longer a substantive axis of conflict but a given one, and that policy preferences over redistributive policies and Jewish nationalist legislation are becoming increasingly important.