Project Director: Professor Tamar Hermann
Research Staff: Mr. Yuval Lebel and Ms. Hila Zaban

In the past few years, Israel has been experiencing massive and rapid political-social changes, such as:

• A continual decline in voter turnout
  
  
• The public's decreased identification with political parties
  
  
• An unprecedented upsurge in social civilian organizations, of which many call into question the fairness, effectiveness, and even the legitimacy of the entire political system, or parts thereof
  
  
• An increase in public protest, and in public discourse that criticizes the integrity and abilities of elected officials

Now more than ever in the history of the State of Israel, politics and the political profession is tainted with corruption, inefficiency, and self-interest. Public dialogue on these issues is intensified by extreme media coverage: The more severe the criticism, the more coverage it receives. All of these changes point to the fact that the public has less and less faith in the political system, in the government, and in government officials.

Many citizens are opting to "exit" from public discourse and from the political sphere. This is evidenced, for example, by the low voter turnout, the diminishing amount of people who read the political sections of daily newspapers, and the reduced audiences of radio and television shows that address political issues. In many sectors of the population a reduced affinity with the State, its symbols, and with its officials is felt, often to the point of repulsion.

The development of the above anti-political tendencies could have detrimental, long term consequences on the functioning and stability of democracy in Israel. Thus they might lead to a destructive rift between the Israeli public and its elected officials and the increased abhorrence of political processes to a point that would undermine democracy. Alternatively,  further deterioration in this climate of opinion could lead the public and its leadership to a major turning point where from self-inflection a new social-political understanding would emerge.

This project has four main goals:

1. To ascertain the reasons for the emergence and acceleration of these anti-political tendencies
   
   
2. To assess the prevalence and formations of the current anti-political state of mind in Israel and to categorize and rank its manifestations according to severity
   
   
3. To document and analyze the ways in which political institutions in Israel perceive these developments and contends with them
   
   
4. To try and assess the influence the above-mentioned trends will have on the political system in Israel in the future and to offer ways to cope with this problem

The task of assessing anti-political processes in Israel will be undertaken by comparing these processes, from the public's and the government's perspective, to those in other representative democracies, assuming that anti-politics in Israel results from a combination of internal circumstances and vast external, perhaps even global, influences.