Publications

CEE countries faced significant political, economic, social, and technological transformations over the last four decades. Democratic processes, after relative stabilization, tremble again around polarizing values, populist leaders, or nationalistic ideologies. Online communication, especially social media platforms, play a vital role in shaping how citizens interact with the state, political actors, media, and other citizens. The collection of manuscripts focuses on some of the challenges democratic institutions in the region face, in transforming and sustaining civil society and attempts to capture how the digital media environments mitigate or exacerbate those challenges. Included manuscripts focus on the role that online platforms play in the satisfaction with democracy in the CEE region, the interactions between journalists and political actors, the strategic media coverage of elections, affective polarization and political antagonism, and discursive attempts to discourage young people from civic engagement.

How do religious citizens’ election projections influence voter turnout? While previous studies have demonstrated the significant impact of religious orientation on individuals’ general future outlook, little is known about the influence of religion on voters’ electoral expectations and how these expectations affect voter turnout. In this paper, we employ a nuanced conceptual framework of election projections and examine the impact of religion on both the affective and probabilistic aspects of citizens’ expectations regarding election outcomes. Our analysis draws upon original panel survey data collected in two countries, focusing on the 2021 Israeli general elections and the 2022 French presidential elections. The findings reveal a mobilizing effect of religious citizens’ election projections in both Israel and France. Specifically, religious voters tend to have more positive affective forecasts about their projected election outcomes, consequently resulting in increased voter turnout. While affective forecasting plays a significant role in religious citizens’ turnout, probabilistic certitude does not have a similar effect. We discuss the contribution and implications of these findings for research on religion and political behavior.

How do hard economic times affect countries’ foreign policy and, specifically, their international commitments? Although a large body of literature assumes that economic crises lead to the prioritization of domestic politics at the expense of international cooperation, these claims are rarely subjected to systematic empirical tests. This study examines one important aspect of these relationships: the consequences of economic crises for the survival of international organizations (IOs), a question that attracted only scant scholarly attention to date. Theoretically, we argue that even though economic crises can weaken member states’ commitment to IOs, they also underscore their ability to tackle the root causes of such crises and mitigate their most pernicious effects. As such, economic crises are actually conducive to IO longevity. We expect this effect to be especially pronounced for currency crises, IOs with an economic mandate, and regional IOs, given their particular relevance for international cooperation during hard economic times. These conjectures are tested with a comprehensive sample of IOs and data on currency, banking and sovereign debt crises from 1970 to 2014. Using event history models and controlling for several alternative explanations of IO survival, we find ample empirical support for the theoretical expectations.

Journalists and experts play a pivotal role in communicating risks and helping the public navigate uncertain futures. This study examines the co-construction of projections by journalists and experts across news and social media during the Covid-19 pandemic. Unlike traditional news production, where journalists exercise agency by transforming expert knowledge into news narratives, hybrid media environments involve multi-platform, multi-directional, and non-linear processes of knowledge production. In light of these characteristics, we introduce and develop the concept of “predictive agency,” referring to an actor’s active participation in predictive knowledge-making and encompassing journalistic, civic, and epistemic forms of agency in shaping and navigating future-oriented knowledge. We analyse the trajectories of 400 projections in Israel and the US, tracing the interactional and informational dynamics between journalists and experts. Through qualitative textual analysis of the various iterations of each projection, four types of co-constructed projection systems emerge: Amplify, Distill, Elaborate, and Contest. We explore the complexities of predictive agency and accountability in these systems, shedding light on how collective futures are contested and co-constructed in hybrid media environments.

Engineered metallic nanoparticles, which are found in numerous applications, are usually stabilized by organic ligands influencing their interfacial properties. We found that the ligands affect tremendously the electrochemical peak oxidation potentials of the nanoparticles. In this work, identical gold nanoparticles were ligand-exchanged and carefully analyzed to enable a precise and highly reproducible comparison. The peak potential difference between gold nanoparticles stabilized by various ligands, such as 2and 4-mercaptobenzoic acid, can be as high as 71 mV, which is substantial in energetic terms. A detailed study supported by density functional theory (DFT) calculations aimed to determine the source of this interesting effect. The DFT simulations of the ligand adsorption modes on Au surfaces were used to calculate the redox potentials through the thermodynamic cycle method. The DFT results of the peak potential shift were in good agreement with the experimental results for a few ligands, but showed some discrepancy, which was attributed to kinetic effects. The kinetic rate constant of the oxidation of Au nanoparticles stabilized by 4mercaptobenzoic acid was found to be twice as large as that of the Au nanoparticles stabilized by citrate, as calculated from Laviron’s theory and the Tafel equation. Finally, these findings could be applied to some novel applications such as determining the distribution of nanoparticle population in a dispersion as well as monitoring the ligand exchange between nanoparticles.

In this work, a pronounced ultrashort pulse contrast enhancement was realized via the utilization of the nonlinear Transient Grating technique with a fiber-chirped pulse amplifier system in the 1μm regime. A YVO4 crystal with significantly enhanced nonlinearity relative to glasses yielded a distinct advantage in pulse cleaning by inducing Transient Grating with intensities that are nearly order of magnitude lower compared to, e.g., fused silica. In addition, the clean beam was inherently separated from the generating beams, eliminating the necessity for supplementary filtration, potentially compromising the final contrast. Up to 40 dB contrast enhancement was observed with ∼1μJ of energy. The absolute measured peak-to-noise contrast was 80 dB, albeit full verification might be masked by the noise floor limit. Setup modifications for higher pulse energies and corresponding higher efficiencies are underway, with the aim of evaluating their suitability for large laser systems.

We introduce and implement a novel dimension-reduction method for high-dimensional time-varying contingency-tables: the Evolutionary Correspondence Analysis (ECA). ECA enables a comparative analysis of high-dimensional, diachronic processes by identifying a small number of shared latent variables that shape co-evolving data patterns. ECA offers new opportunities for the study of complex social phenomena, such as co-evolving public debates: Its capacity to inductively extract time-varying latent variables from observed contents of evolving debates permits an analysis of meanings shared by linked sub-discourses, such as linked national public spheres or the discourses led by distinct political camps within a shared public sphere. We illustrate the utility of our approach by studying how the Greek and German right-, centre-, and left-leaning news coverage of the European financial crisis evolved between its outbreak in 2009 until its institutional containment in 2012. Comparing the use of 525 unique concepts in six German and Greek outlets with different political leaning over an extended period of time, we identify two common factors accounting for those evolving meanings and analyse how the different sub-discourses influenced one another over time. We allow the factor loadings to be time-varying, and fit to the latent factors a time-varying vector-auto-regressive model with time-varying mean.

The essay demonstrates the relationship between specific figures of discourse dominant in particular novels and the thematic concerns or plot patterns of each individual novel. The figures discussed are (1) enthymeme, prominent in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and important also in Joyce’s Ulysses; (2) hypallage, part of the rhetoric of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, reflecting its plot pattern and its cluster of concerns; and (3) blazon, which helps to convey the implied author’s critique of the attitudes of the first-person narrator of Lolita.

Disadvantaged residents in contested cities often mistrust and resist official authorities due to historical deprivation. However, their urgent needs compel them to approach municipal bodies, both formally and informally, exhibiting "flexible compliance." Through interviews with Palestinians and a public opinion survey in Jerusalem, we analyzed the preferences of Jewish- Israeli and Palestinian residents for public goods provision. Results indicate that Palestinian residents prefer unofficial institutions, but this varies by location. Inner-city and outer-city East Jerusalem residents prefer the municipal government, while those beyond the separation wall favor the community councils. We elucidate flexible compliance and propose municipal tools to address it.

This study investigates how elected representatives make promises to the electorate as part of their routine, everyday parliamentary discourse. Departing from the dominant focus on pre-election pledges in existing scholarship, we examine how representatives’ practices of making promises vary systematically over time (before/after elections/mid-term), by government role (government/opposition), party membership (catch-all/identity-based parties), and addressed electorate (inclusive/exclusive). Drawing upon research in speech acts, political discourse, and corpus pragmatics, we employ manual and computational text analysis on session transcripts from the Israeli parliament to identify variations in representatives’ use of direct or indirect action promises (N = 709), expressing different orientations of commitment. Documenting that promises continue to be prevalent after elections (especially among coalition members), we argue that the practices of making promises fulfill a critical role in representation that extends far beyond the election campaign, maintaining continuous accountability throughout the electoral cycle.

The generation and control of large amplitude plasma gratings and other plasma structures is of paramount importance for the realization of plasma photonics. Autoresonant excitation of such structures by means of chirped amplitude-modulated lasers has been recently discussed and analyzed theoretically. Here we discuss the parameter space for the realization of such a scheme and describe the laser system that was built towards this goal. We also expand our earlier theoretical study to account for the more realistic case of a moderately focused laser beam, instead of the simplified plane wave approximation.