Shaul R. Shenhav

Two routes to personalized politics Centralized and decentralized personalization

This article describes two opposing types of political personalization: centralizing and decentralizing personalization. The first implies the centralization of political power in the hands of a few leaders, while the latter indicates a diffusion of group power among its components: individual politicians. We start by proposing definitions of the types and subtypes of centralized and decentralized personalization and review the literature in search of evidence of their occurrence. We then demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed typology by examining personalization trends in various aspects of Israeli politics and conclude with a discussion of the challenges that personalization set for liberal democracies.

Political Narratives and Political Reality

This article develops directions of thought for evaluating how faithfully political narratives represent “political reality,” and suggests several strategies for performing this evaluation. Based on a discussion of these strategies it claims that the concept of political narrative can be used by scholars with an entire range of perspectives or “basic views,” and not only by those who adhere to a radical relativism. Studying the role of these basic views in the political domain can also facilitate our understanding of the possible coexistence between different political narratives.

Mediated Public Diplomacy in a New Era of Warfare

The new era of warfare is characterized by the increased visibility of war. The changing strategic, social and cultural environment has forced governments and armies to modify their strategies. Public diplomacy is one strategic policymaking response to this changing environment. This article reviews current research in this field, focusing on mediated public diplomacy, which is a central part of public diplomacy that has not been greatly researched. We discuss the central role played by cultural resonance in mediated public diplomacy, elaborating on immanent tensions between the centrality of cultural resonance and the needs of public, and mediated public diplomacy.

Relative Political and Value Proximity in Mediated Public Diplomacy: The Effect of State-Level Homophily on International Frame Building

This article applies the homophily thesis to public diplomacy and offers an empirical examination of a countrys success in its mediated public diplomacy efforts. It analyzes international frame building, the process of creating or changing media frames in the international communications arena, by applying it to the case of Israeli mediated public diplomacy efforts during the war in Gaza in the winter of 2008–2009. The article claims that one way to use the homophily thesis in empirical analyses of international frame-building campaigns in conflicts is to measure the political and value proximity of a country promoting frames to other countries. Yet, proximity should be measured relatively rather than in absolute terms. Therefore, one should look not only at the dyadic proximity between two actors (i.e., Country A that attempts to promote its frames to Country C), but at the relative proximity between Countries A and C considering the proximity between the rival Country B and the target Country C. The study proposes a model and a method to facilitate empirical analysis of this claim. Using sophisticated computerized content analysis, our analyses demonstrate that relative proximity is related to successful international frame building in the hypothesized direction: The closer the relative proximity between Israel and a foreign country, the greater the acceptance of Israels views.

Once Upon a Time there was a Nation: Narrative Conceptualization Analysis. The Concept of ‘Nation’ in the Discourse of Israeli Likud Party Leaders

In this article, I claim that some of the miscommunications between political and academic discourse are caused by differences in constructing key concepts. I suggest that, whereas academic discourse tends to use ‘stable concepts’ in which the ‘signifier’ of the concept links constantly with a timeless ‘signified’, politicians tend to use ‘narrative concepts’, which are special signs in which the ‘signifier’ links with a ‘signified’ story. In the first part of the article, I present a methodology called ‘narrative conceptualization analysis’ that can help in tracing the narrativity within concepts. The second part implements the methodology by analyzing the concept ‘nation’ in speeches given by leaders of the Israeli center-right ‘Likud’ party. Studying the narrative meanings of the concept ‘nation’ can show significant changes in national perceptions by the Likud leaders over the years. Moreover, it can provide new insights regarding the role of the ‘nation’ as a key concept in the political discourse.

Promoting stories about terrorism to the international news media: A study of public diplomacy

Antagonists’ images in the international news media can play a significant role in determining their level of political success in the international arena, which explains why so many political actors invest considerable resources in public diplomacy. The goal of the present study is to explain the level of success that various actors (countries and non-state actors) have in promoting their preferred frames about terror to the international news media. Four types of explanatory variables are proposed, divided into context and focal event factors. Context factors include the political values and policy proximity between the country attacked (the victimized country) and a country whose news media have been targeted for influence (the target country), as well as the target country’s experience in dealing with terror. Focal event factors refer to the nature of the trigger events that generate news coverage of terrorism. Apart from one exception (the policy proximity), all of the hypotheses were confirmed. The findings indicated that focal event factors have the most significant effect on the way foreign media covers conflicts and that, when it comes to coverage of terrorism, journalists are more interested in constructing a dramatic story than putting the events into a more general political context.

Concise narratives: a structural analysis of political discourse

The article suggests a new framework for the structural analysis of political narratives using the concept of ‘concise narrative’. These are segments of a speech that contain its entire temporal range in a few paragraphs. Based on the analysis of Israeli ministerial discourse during the early years of the state, the article argues that these ‘concise narratives’ can shed light on the infrastructure of political narratives. A study of ‘concise narratives’ can also illuminate how political values, identities and ideologies are combined with day-to-day politics while being transferred from the speaker to his audience. The epilogue examines the intertextual relations between different political narratives, focusing on the transition of ‘concise narratives’ from the early days of Israeli politics to contemporary political discourse.

The Conditional Nature of Value-Based Proximity Between Countries Strategic Implications for Mediated Public Diplomacy

Media attention accorded to foreign countries constitutes a crucial facet of public diplomacy. Studies have shown that proximity in values is a key factor that determines such media attention. Models of media interest generally assume that the impact of value proximity is universal across countries with different societal value orientations. Yet this study shows that the effect of societal value orientation on media attention to foreign countries is more complex. It is argued here that the societal value orientation in different countries primes different sets of values, which are then applied as a criterion for assessing the importance of foreign states. Our empirical examination is based on the visibility of foreign countries gauged by searching web portals in 57 countries. It shows that in line with our theoretical argument, countries systematically differ in recognizing proximity, such that democracies base their judgment on similarity in shared democratic principles, whereas authoritarian countries focus on the affinity in religious culture. We discuss the strategic implications of this finding for the study of mediated public diplomacy.

Voting for Our Story: A Narrative Model of Electoral Choice in Multiparty Systems

Based on narrative approaches, the authors develop an empirical technique to gauge the match between stories told by political actors and voters and assess its effect on voting behavior. Even with other fundamental attitudinal and demographic factors held constant, they hypothesize that voters should prefer parties that hold and communicate similar national narratives. Using data gathered during the 2009 elections to the Israeli Knesset, the authors gauge voter attitudes about fundamental national narratives in Israel and conduct a systematic analysis of parties’ discourse in parliamentary speeches to gauge parties’ stories. Controlling for demographics and ideology in a series of logistic regressions, the authors find that voting behavior for most parties is significantly affected by the narrative proximity between voters’ stories and parties’ stories.

Is the world getting flatter? A new method for examining structural trends in the news

In this article, we propose a new method to analyze structural changes in networks over time and examine how the representation of the world in two leading newspapers, the New York Times and Der Spiegel, has changed during the past 50 years. We construct international networks based on the co‐occurrences of country names in news items and trace changes in their distribution of centrality over time. Supporting previous studies, our findings indicate a consistent gap between the most central and the least central countries over the years, with the United States remaining at the center of the network and African countries at its peripheries. Surprisingly, the most dynamic changes in the past 50 years occurred in what we call the “middle range”. In both outlets, we identified a trend of convergence, in other words, a more equal centrality of European, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries in the news. The implications of these findings are discussed.