Israel Waismel-Manor

Exploring the Association between Israeli Legislators’ Physical Attractiveness and Their Television News Coverage

This study develops and tests the hypothesis that physically attractive politicians receive more news coverage. The physical attractiveness of Members of the 16th Israeli Knesset (MKs) was assessed by students abroad, who did not know they were evaluating Israeli politicians. The number of times each member appeared on national television news at the time of study was obtained and used as a measure of television news coverage. Multivariate analysis demonstrated that, over and above controls for a host of factors, the physical attractiveness of the MKs was associated with their coverage in television news.

When endocrinology and democracy collide: Emotions, cortisol and voting at national elections

Faced with stressful experiences, such as uncertainty or novelty, the adrenal glands secrete glucocorticoid hormones to help us cope with stress. Since many decision-making situations are stressful, there is reason to believe that voting is a stressful event. In this study, we asked voters in Israels national election (N=113) to report on their general affective state immediately before entering the polling place using the Positive Affect Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) and to provide us with a saliva sample through which we could evaluate their cortisol levels. Compared to a second sample of voters who reported their affective state on election night (N=70), we found that voters at the ballot box had higher positive and negative affect. Moreover, our voters at the polling place exhibited cortisol levels that were significantly higher than their own normal levels obtained on a similar day, and significantly higher than those of a second control group sampled the day after the elections (N=6). Our data demonstrate that elections are exciting, yet stressful events, and it is this stress, among other factors, that elevates the cortisol levels of voters. Since elevated cortisol has been found to affect memory consolidation, impair memory retrieval and lead to risk-seeking behavior, we discuss how these outcomes of elevated cortisol levels may affect voting in general and the field of electoral studies in particular.

What Does National Resilience Mean in a Democracy? Evidence from the United States and Israel

Given various challenges to national security in democracies, such as terrorism and political violence, a growing need for reconceptualization of the term “resilience” emerges. The interface between national security and resilience is rooted in individuals’ perceptions and attitudes toward institutions and leadership. Therefore, in this article, we suggest that political–psychological features form the basis of citizens’ perceived definitions of national resilience. By comparing national resilience definitions composed by citizens of two democratic countries facing national threats of war and terrorism, the United States and Israel, we found that perceived threats, optimism, and public attitudes such as patriotism and trust in governmental institutions, are the most frequent components of the perceived national resilience. On the basis of these results, a reconceptualization of the term “national resilience” is presented. This can lead to validation of how resilience is measured and provide grounds for further examination of this concept in other democratic countries.

Network in Progress: A Conference Primer for Graduate Students

Conferences are an integral part of academic life. They generate focal points for intellectual exchange and encourage professional socialization. They help scholars working on similar issues to identify others who might be part of their specialist community while also creating opportunities to learn about research that colleagues are doing in different areas of the discipline. In other words, conferences provide an opportunity for scholars to present their work in progress, to see what others are working on, and to network with their peers. The authors would like to thank PS s anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

Voting at Home Is Associated with Lower Cortisol than Voting at the Polls

Previous research finds that voting is a socially stressful activity associated with increases in cortisol levels. Here we extend this research by investigating whether different voting modalities have differential effects on the stress response to voting. Results from a field experiment conducted during the 2012 presidential elections strongly suggest that traditional “at the polls” voting is more stressful, as measured by increases in cortisol levels, than voting at home by mail-in ballot or engaging in comparable non-political social activities. These findings imply that increased low-stress voting options such as mail-in ballots may increase political participation among individuals who are sensitive to social stressors.

Politics in Motion: A Personal History of Political Science

The American Political Science Review (APSR) centennial provided us an occasion for the examination of the political science profession as reflected from its pages. Employing a citation analysis of 220 major political scientists published in the APSR and probing deeper into the citation record of some of its prominent scholars, this paper charts the dynamics of political science history. Since its birth over a hundred years ago, the profession has been in a state of constant flux, where new movements surge as previous ones decline once their integration into the fund of professional knowledge was completed. The paper argues that the surge and decline pattern is not a “tragedy of political science,” but a sign of a healthy and vigorous profession.

Waismel-Manor and Lowi's Reply

We begin with Review #1, “Politics Denied: Comments on Waismel-Manor and Lowi’s Politics in Motion.” We like very much the politics of this author. He has us fairly well categorized, but he slips, like us, into areas not really pertinent to our argument. We like his comments because, together with ours, they will trigger off more thorough and effusive analyses of the nature and tendencies of our discipline, and we take pride in the length of this reviewer’s comments, because he should take his critique as the beginning of a fully fleshed-out argument, whether a later article or, we hope, a book. Yes, touché, we don’t touch on the corporate dimension. And, touché again, we don’t delve into the significance of the structure of APSA as an oligarchy. This was the entire focus of the Caucus for a New Political Science, of which Alan Wolfe was leader. Wolfe, by the way, will be relieved to be corrected here that he was not a student of Lowi. The oligarchic influence on political thought was the essence of Wolfe’s being, forty^ years ago, and the reason why Lowi withdrew altogether from the Caucus because it became a war against the American Political Science Association rather than a war against political science itself. We can cite this here in the text and not in a footnote: Alan Wolfe, “Practicing the Pluralism We Preach: Internal Processes in the American Political Science Association” (Fall 1969, n.b., emphasis added). Wolfe denounced the oligarchy of APSA (but failed to recognize oligarchy in all “voluntary associations,” so spoke Michels, the source). This author then turns also away from the oligarchy factor directly into Stephen Toulmin with Max Weber, whose philosophic approaches have drawn Toulmin and this very good review directly into virtual anthropology, “not just as a changing population of concepts . . . but as a changing population of scientists, linked together in . . . formally organized institutions” (Barrow, p. 83). This puts us back into the universal tendency of oligarchy, the product of the institutionalization we chose to avoid. We have tried to stick rather narrowly to individual scientists gaining recognition despite the institution while exploiting it, thanks to “the kindness of interventions” of state institutions (thanks to Tennessee Williams’ “the kindness of strangers”). Further, just like a drop of blood can tell much about the health of a patient, we have argued in the paper that our sample, while not being “the” profession, is still indicative of the health of our profession. In sum, the two of us plus all three reviewers could surely make a book out of our differences!