פרסומים

Recent studies analyse bureaucrats’ responses to politicians’ engagement in unprincipled and illiberal policies, which are integral to democratic backsliding. Yet, in polarized societies, bureaucrats, due to their dual identities as government professionals and as citizens, are likely to hold divergent perceptions of the threat that politicians’ policies and actions pose to democracy. This, in turn, likely shapes their response, and thereby the extent to which they are likely to hinder or facilitate democratic backsliding. We examine this proposition in the context of Israel’s extreme right-wing coalition government’s attempt to curtail the powers and independence of the Supreme Court and replace government legal advisors selected on merit with political appointees (hereafter: the Legal Overhaul). We employ a mixed-methods design, combining a survey, interviews, and a focus group with civil servants in the Israeli central government. We find that civil servants who perceive the Legal Overhaul as a threat to Israel’s democracy report a higher inclination to exit government, and lower intentions to exercise their voice and to exert effort at work. Underlying these findings are respondents’ association of the Legal Overhaul with future politicization, and the threat posed to their conception of their role as civil servants.

We provide an elementary mathematical description of the spread of the coronavirus. We explain two fundamental relationships: How the rate of growth in new infections is determined by the “effective reproductive number”; and how the effective reproductive number is affected by social distancing. By making a key approximation, we are able to formulate these relationships very simply and thereby avoid complicated mathematics. The same approximation leads to an elementary method for estimating the effective eproductivenumber.

Authorities and managers often rely on individuals’ and businesses’ self-reports, and employ various kinds of veracity statements, honesty pledges or oaths to ensure they do not over-claim payments, benefits, or other resources. While some research show honesty pledges can reduce dishonesty, others have provided mixed, and sometimes even contradictory, findings. We argue that understanding and predicting when honesty pledges are effective has been obstructed due to variations in the operationalizations of honesty pledges in previous research. Specifically, we identify that previous studies varied in whether and how the pledge asks individuals to identify (e.g., by ID, signature or name) and how much involvement, if at all, the pledge requires from the individual. In four pre-registered studies (N>5,000), we systematically examine these elements of a pledge to find that increasing involvement of pledgers (by having them copy the text of the pledge) is often more effective than those that only require identification. In contrast, pledges that only require individuals to read and agree are mostly ineffective. Moreover, we find that the effects of high-involvement pledges persist both over time and both after a short delay between the pledge and the opportunity to cheat. Together, these results contribute both theoretically to the understanding of the mechanisms underlying different honesty pledges as well as offer practical advice to managers and policymakers on how to effectively prevent or reduce dishonesty in self-reports.

This paper studies the long-term effects of politically motivated violence on individuals’ political attitudes focusing on the Second Intifada (2000 – 2005). We conduct a large-scale survey that measures Israelis’ attitudes today and elicits their places of residence since 1985. The survey allows us to measure individuals’ direct exposure to terrorism and to account for potential selective migration. This, in combination with the fact that individuals’ characteristics are balanced with respect to their exposure to terrorism, enables us to overcome identification concerns and provide credible estimates of the causal effects of the Intifada on attitudes. The results indicate that exposure to terrorism during the Second Intifada caused a persistent and substantial shift toward right-wing attitudes that is still observable two decades later. Thus, our analysis provides systematic empirical evidence supporting the view that the Second Intifada soured a generation of Israelis on the idea of peace.

After decades of using mostly college students, researchers in psychology and social sciences gradually moved online to more cost-effective and flexible audiences. First, to samples of online convenience (CraigsList, Facebook), and then to sophisticated markets like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Now, advanced platforms (such as CloudResearch and Prolific) promise researchers higher data quality using ex-ante vetting and controls on their participants’ pool. We systematically examine the impact of these ex-ante controls, and their effects on various measures of data quality, and compare them to standard ex-post approaches of attention checks (in randomized positions). We find that ex-ante controls outperform ex-post checks both on process measures of attention, honesty, and reliability, as well as on outcome measures of replicability. Additionally, while samples from platforms with ex-ante vetting show key differences in representation from the general population, they are still more representative than a major university lab pool, and no less representative than samples that are not ex-ante vetted. We conclude that pre-vetting of participants on the platform level should become the desired standard for online psychological and behavioral research, and could serve as a sufficient condition for ensuring a sample’s data quality ex-ante.  

How does the anticipation of bias change the behavior of affected agents? This paper provides evidence on this question by studying the decisions of referees and coaches in football (soccer) leagues in Israel over 15 years. We first provide robust evidence that referees exhibit ethnic (Arab/Jewish) in-group bias in penalty card decisions, which affects aggregate game outcomes. We then show that coaches respond to anticipated bias by increasing the number of players matching the ethnicity of the referee in the starting lineups of their teams and that the response is stronger when the anticipated bias is larger.