Engagement and Likeability of Negative Messages on Facebook during Israel's 2013 Elections

To contribute to the mapping of negative campaigns effects, this study examines the engagement (shares and comments) and likeability (likes) effects of negative campaigning strategies on Facebook during Israel's 2013 elections. The analysis shows that attacks, contrasts, and responses to negative messages are highly shared and commented on, illustrating the engaging nature of negative campaigning in Israel. In terms of likeability, results were mixed, as responses to negative messages were more liked than other messages, but attacks and contrasts were not. The 20 most-liked posts were analyzed and responses of the leader of the religious party Habayit HaYehudi to alleged attacks against modern orthodoxy attracted likes in dramatic numbers, riling followers who objected to the growing tensions between religious and secular Jews in Israel. The study provides the first mapping of the effects of an online negative campaign in Israel and illuminates the relevance of its political and religious context, particularly Israel’s polarized multi-party system and religious, democratic nature. 

Psychological Correlates of Public Support for Reconciliation: The Israeli-Jordanian Case

This study examines psychological correlates of Jewish-Israeli support for post-conflict political reconciliation with Jordan. An analysis of data from a public opinion survey conducted with a representative sample of Israeli-Jews (n=1000) indicated that appraisal of outgroup collective threat, as well as hatred and (lack of) sympathy towards Jordanians, predicted Jewish-Israeli decreased support for peaceful reconciliation with Jordan. Our findings point to the crucial role of threat perceptions in hindering post-conflict reconciliation and to the importance of sympathy towards the other side in increasing support for such reconciliation

Polarization of coalitions in an agent-based model of political discourse

Political discourse is the verbal interaction between political actors in a policy domain. This article explains the formation of polarized advocacy or discourse coalitions in this complex phenomenon by presenting a dynamic, stochastic, and discrete agent-based model based on graph theory and local optimization. In a series of thought experiments, actors compute their utility of contributing a specific statement to the discourse by following ideological criteria, preferential attachment, agenda-setting strategies, governmental coherence, or other mechanisms. The evolving macro-level discourse is represented as a dynamic network and evaluated against arguments from the literature on the policy process. A simple combination of four theoretical mechanisms is already able to produce artificial policy debates with theoretically plausible properties. Any sufficiently realistic configuration must entail innovative and path-dependent elements as well as a blend of exogenous preferences and endogenous opinion formation mechanisms

Political Contest and Oppositional Voices in Postconflict Democracy:The Impact of Institutional Design on Government–Media Relations

The media are considered to play a crucial democratic role in the public sphere through representing political issues to the public (Gelders et al. 2007); facilitating deliberation, public opinion formation and political participation (Habermas 1989); acting as the 'watchdog' of powerful societal institutions (Norris 2000); and in assisting in the development of civil society in politically fragile and divided contexts (Taylor 2000). Journalists are expected to perform their news reporting within the framework of public interest values, such as objectivity, impartiality, public service, autonomy, and a critical questioning of power (Street 2001). Yet, it is acknowledged that political, cultural, organisational, economic, and relational factors affect this journalistic ideal (Davis 2010). In deeply divided, post-conflict societies, ethno-political antagonisms are fundamental to almost all aspects of civic life, yet there is limited research into how government-media relations operate in such contexts. Most media-politics studies focus on Western majoritarian parliamentary or presidential systems - that is, any system that has clear ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ after elections - and where institutional factors are considered, the focus is largely on how party systems impact on journalism (e.g. Çarkoğlu et al. 2014; Hallin and Mancini 2004; Sheafer and Wolfsfeld 2009). This focus however, neglects important institutional variables, such as mandatory coalition, proportionality and special cross-community voting arrangements, which pertain in more constitutionally complex democracies and which may have a significant impact on media-politics relations

Moving media and conflict studies beyond the CNN effect

After the ‘CNN effect’ concept was coined two decades ago, it quickly became a popular shorthand to understand media-conflict interactions. Although the connection has probably always been more complex than what was captured in the concept, research needs to be updated in order to better understand the multifaceted contemporary environments of both media and conflict. There are growing numbers and types of media sources, and multiple interactions between media and conflict actors, policymakers and engaged publics from the local to the global and back. We argue that understanding the impact of media reporting on conflict requires a new framework that captures the multilevel and hybrid media environments of contemporary conflicts. This study provides a roadmap of how to systematically unpack this environment. It describes and explains how different levels, interactions, and forms of news reporting shape conflicts and peacebuilding in local, national and regional contexts, and how international responses interact with multiple media narratives. With these tools, comprehensive understandings of contemporary local to global media interactions can be incorporated into new research on media and conflict

A shifting enemy: analysing the BBC’s representations of “al-Qaeda” in the aftermath of the September 11th 2001 attacks

This article seeks to explore how the BBC made sense of the al-Qaeda phenomenon in its flagship “News at Ten” bulletin during the aftermath of the September 11th 2001 attacks. Using Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis, it shows how the BBC’s representations function as a dynamic and continually shifting site upon which a range of fears, identities, discourses and forms of knowledge and power struggle and contend, and through which a number of different “al-Qaedas” manifest themselves. In particular, three shifting modes of visual and verbal representation are identified within the BBC’s coverage which each correspond to a separate understanding of al-Qaeda: the “Islamic” mode, the “Personalised” mode and the “Elusive” mode. These representations both draw upon and challenge the dominant discourses surrounding Islam, non-state terrorism and the identities of terrorist suspects, providing audiences with a variety of often conflicting ways of seeing and speaking about this entity. As such, the article provides insight into the complex nature of the BBC’s representations of al-Qaeda during its coverage of the September 11th 2001 attacks, and shows how such complexity serves, albeit inadvertently, to legitimise the far-reaching counterterrorism policies that were enacted in the aftermath of these attacks

Overthrowing the dictator: a game-theoretic approach to revolutions and media

A distinctive feature of recent revolutions was the key role of social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube). In this paper, we study its role in mobilization. We assume that social media allow potential participants to observe the individual participation decisions of others, while traditional mass media allow potential participants to see only the total number of people who participated before them. We show that when individuals’ willingness to revolt is publicly known, then both sorts of media foster a successful revolution. However, when willingness to revolt is private information, only social media ensure that a revolt succeeds, with mass media multiple outcomes are possible, one of which has individuals not participating in the revolt. This suggests that social media enhance the likelihood that a revolution triumphs more than traditional mass media

Electoral Punishment and Protest Politics in Times of Crisis

This chapter links the political consequences of the Great Recession on protest and electoral politics. The economic voting literature offers important insights on how and under what conditions economic crises play out in the short run. However, it tends to ignore the closely connected dynamics of opposition in the electoral and protest arena. Therefore, this chapter combines the literature on economic voting with social movement research. It argues that economic protests act as a ‘signalling mechanism’ by attributing blame to decision-makers and by highlighting the political dimension of deteriorating economic conditions. Ultimately, massive protest mobilization should thus amplify the impact of economic hardship on electoral punishment. The empirical analysis to study this relationship combines the data on protest with a dataset of electoral outcomes in thirty European countries from 2000 to 2015. The results indicate that the dynamics of economic protests and electoral punishment are closely related and that protests contributed to the destabilisation of European party systems during the Great Recession

All Quiet on the Protest Scene? Repertoires of Contention and Protest Actors During the Great Recession

The choice of specific action repertoires allows protesters to increase their visibility and eventually their success. A rise in protest, i.e. a protest wave, often comes with a qualitative expansion of the conflict, which can take two forms: changes in the action repertoire and a growing diversity of involved actors. In this chapter, we examine the types of protest and the types of actors over time. In so doing, we ask whether and how the Great Recession transformed customary action repertoires in southern, north-western, and eastern Europe. Hence, we show variations in the use of commonplace action forms, i.e. demonstrations, strikes, and confrontational and violent actions. We find that demonstrations and strikes remain the dominant form of protest across regions and time periods, while transformations in the action repertoire of contention, in the form of violent events, took place only in some parts of the south and were short lived. Lastly, we turn to actors and we show that protest events increasingly feature social groups without formal organizational structures. We conclude by arguing that contention repertoires remained largely unaffected by the Great Recession; demonstrations were and remained the prevailing form of protest in all three regions during the whole period under study