Does electoral competition increase affective polarization? Can inter-party cooperation depolarize voters? Addressing these questions is challenging since both competition and cooperation are endogenous to political attitudes. Building on social identity theory and leveraging a natural experiment unfolding over seven Israeli election studies, we demonstrate that the enhanced salience of electoral competition increases affective polarization. We then consider whether inter-party cooperation can depolarize the electorate. To do so, we further build on theories of coalition ambivalence and party brands and leverage the ambiguity around coalition building following elections of Israel’s 22nd Knesset, to implement a survey experiment where we credibly shape respondents’ perceptions regarding the likelihood that a unity government will form. We find that priming party cooperation in the form of a unity government promotes tolerance across partisan lines. Our studies contribute to the affective polarization literature by identifying institutional causes and remedies of polarization in a comparative context.

The international investment agreement regime (IIA Regime) is composed of thousands of IIAs and a system of investor–state dispute settlement. Historically, high-income developing countries (HIDCs) were part of the global South and thus ‘hosts’ of foreign direct investment (FDI). Increasingly, however, these countries have become ‘home’ to investors who are hosted and exposed to political risk abroad. Representing both home and host country interests simultaneously, how do HIDCs balance these crosscutting pressures? We argue that as the position of an HIDC shifts from mostly a recipient towards a sender of significant amounts of FDI, it will be more willing to provide protection to foreign investors at the expense of state regulatory space in its IIAs, thereby increasing its exposure to the IIA Regime. Employing an original data set that measures this exposure for sixty-four HIDCs over six decades, we first show that the degree of HIDC exposure to the IIA Regime varies a great deal. Using a general method of moments (GMM) analysis and controlling for a host of confounding factors, we demonstrate that, indeed, higher levels of FDI outflows as a share of the national economy result in greater exposure to the IIA Regime.

Theories of international relations (IR) typically make predictions intended to hold across many countries. Nonetheless, existing experimental evidence testing the micro-foundations of IR theories relies overwhelmingly on studies fielded in the U.S. We argue that the nature of what constitutes a theory of IR makes it particularly important to know whether theories hold across countries. To examine the generalizability of IR experimental findings beyond the U.S., we implemented a pre-registered and harmonized multi-site replication study, fielding four prominent IR experiments in seven countries: Brazil, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Nigeria, and the U.S. We find that all four experiments replicate in nearly all of the countries, a pattern likely due to treatment effect homogeneity. Our study not only reveals that findings from the U.S. are similar to findings from a wide range of countries, but offers important implications for the design and interpretation of future experimental research in IR.

Does electoral competition increase affective polarization? Can cross-party cooperation depolarize voters? Addressing these questions is challenging since both competition and cooperation are endogenous to political attitudes. Building on social identity theory, and leveraging a natural experiment unfolding over seven Israeli election studies, we demonstrate that enhanced electoral competition, measured by interview date proximity to an election, increases affective partisan polarization. We then consider whether party cooperation can depolarize the electorate. To do so, we leveraged the ambiguity around coalition building in Israel’s 22nd election and implemented a survey experiment where we credibly shaped respondents’ perceptions regarding the likelihood that a unity government will form in the near future. We find that priming party cooperation in the form of a unity government, promotes more tolerance across partisan lines. Our study contributes to the affective polarization literature by causally identifying institutional causes and remedies of polarization in a comparative context.

State and non-state actors often try to provoke moral emotions like guilt and shame to mobilize political change. However, tactics such as `naming and shaming’ are often ineffective, suggesting that policy makers engage in norm violations in ways that minimize moral emotions. We argue that when violating norms, decision makers deal with guilt and shame through coping mechanisms that allow them to pursue policies that contradict their moral standards. We conceptualize guilt and shame as two separate phenomena that provoke distinct reactions. Shame is more likely to provoke immature defenses like denial and distortion, while guilt provokes a more mature and reparative reaction. We provide empirical evidence for this theory by examining two crucial issues on the state of Israel’s political agenda during the first decade of its existence. We analyze political debates over the return of the Palestinian refugees and the reparation agreement between Israel and West Germany, using a series of primary sources from three different political forums.