Assessing Policy Priorities and Democratic Integrity in Israel

What are the policy priorities of Israelis and how do they evaluate the policies and policy priorities of the Israeli government? An extant body of work demonstrates the importance of public opinion to understand political action and policy priorities of democratic governments. This effect, however, is mostly at the margin – when opinion changes. When public opinion changes, governments rise and fall, elections are won or lost, and old realities give way to new demands. Similarly, policy outputs "feed back" on public inputs, serving like a thermostat; when the actual policy "temperature" differs from the preferred policy temperature, the public sends a signal to adjust policy accordingly, and once sufficiently adjusted, the signal stops.

Given the importance of identifying change in public opinion, one needs to examine longitudinal trends. This requires time-series data about policy priorities of Israelis and policy evaluations of existing policy programs. Such data, remarkably, simply does not exist yet in Israel. Scholarly public opinion data in Israel are sparse and there is no systematic collection of longitudinal, time-series public opinion data on policy. Existing longitudinal series include the Israeli National Election Survey (INES), which focuses on Israeli elections and is conducted before and after each election cycle. This is the most extensive survey in Israel, yet it is bounded by election cycles and focuses on issues that rise during elections. The focus is on political behavior, not public policy options. The Israeli Democracy Index focuses on current events as well as a series of questions about democratic sentiments. Yet it does not address concrete policy initiatives and priorities. With no systematic time-series data, existing work are limited to case studies, or occasional surveys that are heavily influenced by sporadic events.

We seek to change this limitation in existing work. Specifically, this project launches a recurring semiannual survey of policy sentiment in Israel, a measure of the heartbeat of the Israeli democracy. The survey will include questions about the policy mood in Israel, about the policy priorities of Israelis, and policy evaluations of main government departments and political actors and their policy initiatives and personal reliability. Specifically, the project will generate data to test the following overarching questions:

1. What are the policy priorities of Israelis? In policy priorities we refer to the preferences of Israelis about the problems and issues they want their government to address.
2. How Israelis view the competence of the political actors to address the policy priorities? In competence we refer to the confidence Israelis have in the ability of various political actors and institutions to handle problems and issues the public prioritizes.
3. How Israelis evaluate existing policy initiatives and to what extent they have confidence in the political actors and institutions that manage them?
4. How Israelis perceive and evaluate the political and policy actions of various political actors and institutions?