Asher Arian

Threat and Decision Making

This article explores the relationship between threat and information processing in various conflict situations and extends the analysis to an examination of the relationship between affective and cognitive components of decision making about policy under conditions of high and low threat. Elements of threatening situations are measured using public opinion surveys done mainly in Israel regarding the Arab/Israeli conflict and the conflict between religious and secular Jews. Some data from surveys done in the Palestinian Authority regarding support for the peace process and support for armed attacks against Israeli targets, and in the United States regarding the social crises of neighborhood crime out of control and the threat of loss of Social Security and Medicare benefits are included as two other illustrations of the relationship between threat and policy. The article focuses on how feelings of threat relate to decisions about how to deal with the situation and under what conditions those decisions will either be inflammatory or conciliatory. Data are presented demonstrating that feelings of threat correlate with policy choices regarding the threatening situation or group, and often at very strong levels. Specifically, the more threatened people feel, the more their policy choice tends to maintain or intensify the conflict—that is, the more incendiary the policy choice is—and vice versa—the lower the threat the more subdued the policy choice is. Our data analysis leads us to the proposition that when people feel very threatened—the decision making process about policy is dominated by emotion—not by logic or rational considerations. On the other hand, under conditions of low threat, both emotions and logic have a role in the process of deciding policy.

Political and Economic Interactions with National Security Opinion

Public opinion drives policy, and public opinion is driven by policy. These propositions are explored using economic developments, government budget policy, national security policy, and public opinion variables in two sets of conditions using routine or crisis conditions as a control variable. The relationships are examined during the Gulf War crisis in Israel (1990-1991). Different sets of significant statistical relations were found for routine and crisis conditions. The findings show that the relationships between public opinion and politics are not direct, but to a large extent, recursive. The intensity of the relationships varied according to the state of national security, with greater intensity in the crisis situation. The relationship was more direct under normal conditions. In the crisis situation, the influence of politics on public opinion was greater than the influence of public opinion on politics.

The religious experience as affecting ambivalence: the case of democratic performance evaluation in Israel

Religiosity increases both criticism and instability in democratic performance evaluations, and accordingly decreases reliance on these assessments in the construction of political self-efficacy, trust in institutions, and patriotism. This is due to the conflicting experiences that religious citizens of democracies live through; while their personal religious environment often adheres to many undemocratic characteristics, their experience as citizens contains assorted democratic attributes. These results, from heteroskedastic maximum likelihood models using data from a 2006 representative survey among Israeli Jews, augment the exclusive focus of the literature of democratic attitudes on the strength of attitudes, and shift attention from policy attitudes to other evaluative judgements.

Balancing Executive Power

The twin trends of executive governance in Israel since the establishment of the state are expansion and consolidation. Executive dominance throughout the policy process has expressed itself through elected and nonelected officials and has come to be accepted as a norm with the inevitable evolution of modern, big government. The Knesset is in a decidedly inferior institutional position in terms of national policy-making, and while the judiciary asserted itself in the late 1980s and 1990s, its posture was more reactive than proactive.

Prime Ministers and Policy-Making

The political reality of Israel is that of a highly centralized executive along with a highly fractionalized Knesset. Ordinarily policy-making is firmly in the hands of the prime minister. The legislature can attempt to influence the substance of policies primarily through coalition politics but it rarely initiates policies. Israel has turned into an instructive example of a polity in which the electorate is divided and highly polarized, thus making elections virtual lotteries as the two contending political blocs cancel each other out leaving policy-making squarely in the hands of the leadership (Rabinowitz, MacDonald and Listhaug, 1991). Since the 1992 electoral reform increased the fragmentation of the Knesset the question of what price will have to be paid to line up the necessary support for parties became even more pronounced. The Knesset’s power in the policy processes has remained in the vote of confidence it grants or fails to grant the executive, in ratifying when required its decisions, occasionally amending them, and in overseeing the work of ministries.

Transition of Government Power

The peaceful transition of governmental power constitutes the very essence of the democratic regime. Although the constitutional principles, institutional arrangements, and the governance culture that characterize such transitions differ from country to country (Finer et al., 1995), their common objective is to implement the most fundamental right of voters to change the political leadership while maintaining order, stability, and the proper work of government.

Elections, Coalitions, and Governance

The constitutional reform of 1992 targeted the chief executive in the erroneous belief that the proposed reform would remedy the inherent problems of governance related to the electoral tie between those parties associated with the ‘left’ and those affiliated with the ‘right.’ In Israeli usage of that period, the left tended to be more conciliatory regarding the future of the territories taken in the Six Days War of 1967 and toward the Palestinians, and was perceived to support secular, liberal policies that were often opposed by orthodox Jewish groups. The right advocated policies that were more militant and it was more likely to support demands made by religious parties. Religious parties were always prominent in coalition calculations. All governing parties in varying degrees acquiesced to religious legislation and budget appropriations for religious schools and institutions to assure the continued support of the religious parties in their rule.

Power-Sharing with Nonelected Authorities

Since the establishment of the state the executive branch has been at the center of Israel’s political development. Foreign and domestic policy-making has been almost exclusively executive-centric with the legislature taking on primarily oversight roles. As we argued in Chapter 2, the institutionalization of executive governance in western democracies has been closely associated with the very evolution of the modern state, its ever-increasing state-encompassing activities, its large size, and the extensive and intensive penetration of the political-bureaucratic machinery into most areas of collective behavior. Although in Israel the more recent trends towards multicultural-ism, individualism, economic liberalism, and progress towards a relatively autonomous civil society have eased the grip of the state, political power has remained highly concentrated in the executive with nonelected authorities exercising considerably more power than in the past. The appointed heads of nonelected policy-making institutions, including the top civil servants in defense, intelligence, and finance, the governor of the Bank of Israel, and the attorney general (who also serves as the attorney general to the government) have become an integral part of the Israeli core executive. The state comptroller has emerged as the Knesset’s institutional reaction to executive governance.

Prime Ministerial Power: Resources and Constraints

Prime ministers are the central political actors in Israel. While they may share power with party allies and coalition partners, or be stymied by these same actors at critical moments, the agenda is there to be set by prime ministers, and the pace of events is theirs to attempt to control. A prime minister is more likely to be overwhelmed by the power of office than restrained by the checks and balances on it. Prime ministers have been pivotal throughout Israel’s history, and the electoral reform which instituted the direct election of the prime minister fortified this reality. The position of the prime minister is of supreme political importance, and the various networks of political contest and dispute usually end up on his desk or close to it. The prime minister is head of the executive branch and the cabinet, and as such has enormous influence on the coalition that dominates the Knesset. Prime ministers are also the heads of their parties, a formal position that enhances their political power.

Designing the Executive Branch

Political memory seems to be inversely related to the heat of political battle. When the adrenaline of conflict is flowing and immediate goals are phrased as if they were long-term values, it is perhaps inevitable that each situation is considered unique and familiar patterns and comparative generalizations are disregarded.