To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pops.12072/abstract Byline: Shaul R. Shenhav, Odelia Oshri, Dganit Ofek, Tamir Sheafer Keywords: narrative; political narratives; narrative theory; narrative analysis; coalition formation; national stories; story coalitions; Israel This article explores the potential of incorporating narrative theory into the study of coalition formation. Following a discussion of the role of narratives in group-formation processes in a coalition-driven dynamic, we offer a theoretical framework to examine the ways political stories espoused by people are mirrored by the partisan system. We integrate theoretical assumptions of narrative studies with coalition-formation theories in an attempt to frame coalition-formation models in terms of voters' political stories. We test our theoretical framework by simulating various possible coalitions in the Israeli 2009 elections and as

The premise of the cultural congruence hypothesis is that the level of congruence between democratic values among the public and in political institutions of a country is an important indication of political stability: the greater the congruence, the greater the stability. Though this hypothesis was proposed almost fifty years ago, it has never been fully examined. A crucial weakness of the hypothesis is that it is blind to the direction of incongruence: instability increases if the public has either more or less freedom relative to their expectations. But based on what we learn from Prospect Theory, one may expect to find different behaviors in these two situations. The empirical analyses that follow confirm this expectation. The article also evaluates the congruence hypothesis in light of the institutional hypothesis. Rather than seeing these hypotheses as competing, the authors claim that it is more productive to focus on the interaction between them, thus improving their understanding of political stability.

In this article, we propose a new method to analyze structural changes in networks over time and examine how the representation of the world in two leading newspapers, the New York Times and Der Spiegel, has changed during the past 50 years. We construct international networks based on the co-occurrences of country names in news items and trace changes in their distribution of centrality over time. Supporting previous studies, our findings indicate a consistent gap between the most central and the least central countries over the years, with the United States remaining at the center of the network and African countries at its peripheries. Surprisingly, the most dynamic changes in the past 50 years occurred in what we call the 'middle range'. In both outlets, we identified a trend of convergence, in other words, a more equal centrality of European, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries in the news. The implications of these findings are discussed.

The growing interest in the relation between language and politics brings new assumptions and theoretical frameworks to the study of politics. This study presents a simple empirical test of a major assumption of the critical discourse analysis school: that power is a major factor in political discourse. It examines whether the discourse of Israeli members of parliament (Knesset) represents a view of the world through the prism of power or whether parliament members refer to the experience of similar democracies. We demonstrate that power is a strong and significant factor in Israeli legislative discourse through time and across issues while relevance plays no role. L'interet grandissant que suscite le lien entre langage et politique, genere de nouvelles hypotheses et de nouvelles theories de l'etude du politique. Cette etude propose de tester l'une des principales hypotheses de l'analyse critique de discours, a savoir que le pouvoir serait un facteur essentiel du discours politique. Le discours des membres du parlement israelien (la Knesset) est analyse afin de determiner s'il reflete une vision du monde a travers le prisme du pouvoir, ou si au contraire les membres du parlements se referent plutot a experience d'antres democraties sous differents angles, en particulier celui de la similarite de leur travail parlementaire. Cette etude demontre que le pouvoir constitue un facteur important et significatif du discours legislatif israelien, a la fois sur la longue duree et concernant une variete de sujets, alors que le facteur de la pertinence ne joue aucun ro1e. doi: 10.1017/S0008423911000965

Based on narrative approaches, the authors develop an empirical technique to gauge the match between stories told by political actors and voters and assess its effect on voting behavior. Even with other fundamental attitudinal and demographic factors held constant, they hypothesize that voters should prefer parties that hold and communicate similar national narratives. Using data gathered during the 2009 elections to the Israeli Knesset, the authors gauge voter attitudes about fundamental national narratives in Israel and conduct a systematic analysis of parties' discourse in parliamentary speeches to gauge parties' stories. Controlling for demographics and ideology in a series of logistic regressions, the authors find that voting behavior for most parties is significantly affected by the narrative proximity between voters' stories and parties' stories.

Israeli public diplomacy surrounding the disengagement from Gaza and the general elections in the Palestinian Authority (PA) in 2005 reflects a problematic misconstruction of Israel’s messages in English regarding its relations with the Palestinians. Based on content analysis of official documents, such as official announcements, press releases, and speeches by Israeli government officials (the PM and the foreign ministry), we point to the incompleteness of Israeli public messages aimed at non-Hebrew speakers in terms of major framing functions. Incorporating narrative analysis, we further claim that the problem of missing framing functions is part of a larger problem of misconstruction of the state’s foreign policy narrative. At the core of this problem lies a discontinuity between the definition of the problem faced by Israel, the characterization of those who are responsible for the problem, and the proposed solutions to the problem. While the definition of the problem tends to rest quite heavily on internal disputes within Israel, namely the dispute between the government and the settlers, the Palestinians are those who are held responsible for the problem, and the solution is defined as a confrontation with the Palestinians. This incoherence between the definition of the problems and the solutions offered has damaged the internal logic of Israeli public diplomacy. The article discusses these findings against the backdrop of the traditional Israeli approach toward public diplomacy as reflected by the concept of “explanation” (hasbara). It suggests that these incoherencies played a key role in the explanation of why Israel failed to achieve significant improvement in its international image following the disengagement.

The article examines the Israeli leadership's attempts to explain and justify the harsh outcomes of deployment of force on behalf of the state. It analyzes Commemoration Day Letters sent by representatives of the State of Israel to the families of soldiers killed in action from 1952 onwards, focusing on significant changes in the relation between the individual and the collective. The major turning point is expressed in Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's letters from the mid-1980s, in which the sanctity of life appears as an ideal guiding the state's political establishment. Applying Roman Jakobson's model of communication, the article claims that this turning point marks a shift from a collective, story-oriented approach in which the national narrative was offered as consolation for the loss to a communication-oriented approach, in which those undersigning the letters are presented as personal communicators rather than national narrators. Against the background of problems of legitimacy embedded in this approach, the article analyzes how recent letters refrain from taking either an individualistic or a collective standpoint.

In this article, we analyse the media coverage of party disputes during the first 16 Israeli election campaigns, i.e. in the period 1949 to 2003. Based on a content analysis of newspaper coverage of the two main parties (Labor and Likud) and a qualitative discourse analysis, we maintain that the media coverage of party disputes has undergone major change. From 1949 to 1959 the vast majority of reported disputes reflected external, inter-party debates. From 1961 the level of external debates decreased, while the level of internal, intra-party debates sharply increased. These findings reflect a significant change in the role of 'the party' as a category in the Israeli media's political discourse. The party ceased to be a unitary actor in the political arena and became an arena for political disputes. The dynamic change in party coverage has gone through three main phases: an ideological and collective phase of an external-partisan era during the first decade; an interim phase led by a combination of disputes by persons and factions affiliated with former parties; and, finally, the phase of personal polemics. The dynamic is closely related to historical changes in the Israeli party system and in the political communication climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]Copyright of Party Politics is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article suggests a theoretical distinction between two types of parliamentary discourse, based on the classic narratological distinction between `showing' and `telling'. Based on this distinction, it studies the influence of interjections and heckling on parliamentary discourse, in particular on the speeches Yitzhak Rabin made to the Israeli parliament as Prime Minister from July 1992 until his assassination in November 1995. Using the distinction between showing and telling, the article claims that exaggerated amounts of interjections and heckling are a dangerous formula for the demise of a discourse of telling which would enable the onus of constructing political images and values to be transferred to the listener's mind through the shaping of political narratives. As a result, the function of parliaments as an arena in which political leaders can publicly shape new national narratives in their speeches is significantly damaged.

The article argues that notwithstanding politicians’ desire to conceal from the public parts of the content of their indoor discussions, we nevertheless find ‘traces’ of their closed door debates in their public addresses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]Copyright of Journal of Language & Politics is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article develops directions of thought for evaluating how faithfully political narratives represent “political reality,” and suggests several strategies for performing this evaluation. Based on a discussion of these strategies it claims that the concept of political narrative can be used by scholars with an entire range of perspectives or “basic views,” and not only by those who adhere to a radical relativism. Studying the role of these basic views in the political domain can also facilitate our understanding of the possible coexistence between different political narratives.