Doron Shultziner

Hadassah Academic College · Politics & Communication

The concept of human dignity is a central concept in many legal systems. Yet the increasing and sometimes excessive use of this concept has generated a number of serious problems which have only recently become clear in empirical research and court rulings showing that the meanings of dignity have become contradictory and can no longer advance huma...

This study advances a new explanation of the Montgomery bus boycott, the constitutive event of the U.S. civil rights movement. It introduces new findings to demonstrate that Montgomery, Alabama, was unique in its segregation system, and that unrest among blacks emerged in the narrow time period between late 1953 and 1955. I trace the motivational o...

Are there shared psychological factors that propel social and political change? This book argues that there are and proposes an interdisciplinary theory to the study of social and political change toward more democratic structures. A strong case in made for the vitality of understanding human psychology as the first step to understanding complicate...

The notion that mass mobilization has analytically important stages is underappreciated in the literature. This paper proposes an approach that decomposes mass mobilization into three main phenomena: origins, protest and outcome. Each stage is characterized by unique factors and mechanisms. Accordingly, the research questions pertaining to each sta...

Integrating scholarship from several fields of study, this paper proposes a new model for understanding how partisan bias operates and how to measure its effects. We chart the factors that influence partisan bias over news production within news organizations that are simultaneously constrained and conditioned by factors of market competition, cont...

The movement against democratic backsliding in Israel was perhaps the most powerful social movement that Israel has seen, spanning over three months. It is credited with halting the right-wing coalition’s anti-democratic constitutional and judicial reforms. The paper analyzes and highlights key factors in the origins, protest, and outcome stages of...

Dataset including details of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's list of demands that appear in the appendix to his formal indictment by the state prosecution of the State of Israel.

Media storms are surges of intensive story coverage for an unusual news cycle. As such they are an important phenomenon to study in democracies. News ideology is the tendency to bias media coverage based on partisan interests or ideological orientation. This research is the first to explore the causal nexus between the two phenomena. This article a...

Date set on the media coverage of the French Yellow Vests Movement in 2018-2019 in Le Figaro, Le Monde, Libération, and L'Obs.

Israel Social Justice Movement, Full Media Coverage Database, Mass Communication and Society

Notions of partisan media bias and ideological influences on the news have become much more prevalent since Gans wrote Deciding What’s News. We propose a framework to explain what partisan media bias is and how it operates. We argue that partisan bias occurs in two ways. First, editorial decisions influence the share of positive, neutral and negati...

Instructions for Coders in research on Partisan Media Coverage of the Social Justice Protest Movement in Israel, 2011

Appendix A: the political orientations and interests of Israel's main newspapers concerning the 2011 Social Justice Protest Movement

The Yellow Vests movement in France was the most widespread and violent protest movement France has seen since 1968. This research highlights the resemblances and dissimilarities between the Yellow Vests and other Occupy movements. We find similarities in movement origins around suddenly revealed economic issues and relative deprivation. We also fi...

Code used for logistic regression in DISTORTING THE NEWS? THE MECHANISMS OF PARTISAN MEDIA BIAS AND ITS EFFECTS ON NEWS PRODUCTION

Data used in DISTORTING THE NEWS? THE MECHANISMS OF PARTISAN MEDIA BIAS AND ITS EFFECTS ON NEWS PRODUCTION

Instructions for coders in DISTORTING THE NEWS? THE MECHANISMS OF PARTISAN MEDIA BIAS AND ITS EFFECTS ON NEWS PRODUCTION

This paper develops the idea that a focus on historical events is a useful and more accurate way to understand why democratization occurs when it does compared to theories that rely on macro factors and processes alone. I explore the psychological, political and structural nature of four types of unique events and their relation to democratization...

The Social Justice Protest movement in 2011 was the largest social movement in Israel’s history. The movement received media coverage for almost two months and in all news outlets, despite the protest’s broad demands and its overall radical indictment against the economic system and the status quo. This study explores the causes for this extraordin...

Human dignity has become a central legal concept worldwide and has been increasingly employed in judicial decisions in many jurisdictions, including in countries that do not incorporate it into their constitutions. However, due to the acknowledged vagueness of the concept, scholars and judges alike have identified many difficulties in its applicati...

This paper reintroduces the Handicap Principle theory as an explanation of altruism. Handicap Principle is a general theory which has been increasingly applied in various disciplines and topics, though strangely it has been missing from both debates and empirical research on altruism in biology. We clarify the logic and principles of HP regarding a...

Human dignity has become widely utilized in national constitutions since WWII. This Article explores the scope of this increased appearance in constitutions worldwide, and the increased frequency of appearance within individual constitutions, as well as the different functions that the term serves at present. Our research demonstrates that human di...

This article offers a new explanation for the results of twin studies in political science that supposedly disclose a genetic basis for political traits. I argue that identical twins tend to be more alike than nonidentical twins because the former are more similarly affected by the same environmental conditions, but the content of those greater tra...

In this reply I emphasize three points: Hatemi and Verhulst’s (2013) failure to address the main argument regarding the fatal flaws in twin studies and their wrong framing of my article as focusing on gene-environment interaction; their critical concession to my argument about the inability of twin studies to test the most plausible alternative bio...

This article reviews issues pertaining to representation in Kuwait with a focus on the tension between democratic representation and political exclusion. We will discuss how a democratically elected parliament had thwarted the enfranchisement of women until 2005 whereas an unelected ruling elite was the major force driving for women's political rep...

This chapter discusses the movements that supported improving women's status in Kuwaiti society, beginning in the 1950s, spearheaded by young Kuwaiti men who were deeply influenced by Arab nationalist ideology and a strong desire to modernize Kuwaiti society. It also discusses the socioeconomic changes that were brought by oil wealth and the social...

This paper analyzes the struggle for women’s suffrage in Kuwait to determine how and why it was successful. The research highlights two paradoxical findings: first, democratic progress occurred despite the pacifying and hindering effects of modernization; second, it was supported more strongly and effectively by Kuwait's autocratic executive than t...

This paper reviews and synthesizes emerging multi-disciplinary evidence toward understanding the development of social and political organization in the Last Glacial. Evidence for the prevalence and scope of political egalitarianism is reviewed and the biological, social, and environmental influences on this mode of human organization are further e...

Writing about contemporary Israel is a difficult matter. It seems that before a paper or a book about the topic goes to print yet another meaningful event occurs and makes previous analyses quickly outdated. The book Contemporary Israel: Domestic Politics, Foreign Policy, and Security Challenges suffers from a similar fate. Not long after the book...

The "Six Day War," as Israel coined it in 1967, constituted a major transformative event in the history of Israel and the Middle East at large. Tom Segev's book about this war provides an up-to-date historical account of the Israeli domestic setting before the war, the political dynamics leading to and through the war, and the new realities and dil...

The concept of human dignity has several possible linguistic functions, which imply different and quite distinct meanings in various contexts. As Wittgenstein notes in his Philosophical Investigations, in order to understand the meaning of a word or a concept ‘one cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that.’ B...

This paper depicts the meanings of human dignity as they unfold and evolve in the Bible and the Halakhah. I posit that three distinct features of a Jewish conception of human dignity can be identified in contrast to core characteristics of a liberal conception of human dignity. First, the original source of human dignity is not intrinsic to the hum...

This paper depicts the meanings of human dignity as they unfold and evolve in the Bible and the Halakhah. I posit that three distinct features of a Jewish conception of human dignity can be identified in contrast to core characteristics of a liberal conception of human dignity. First, the original source of human dignity is not intrinsic to the hum...

This paper critically examines the state of the literature in evolutionary biology regarding theories of altruistic behavior. The shared theoretical problems of Kin-selection and Group-selection are examined. Theoretical and severe methodological problems of Reciprocal Altruism theory are also discussed. We offer new conceptual clarifications of th...

במדינת ישראל מושרשת ההנחה כי 'כבוד האדם' הנו זכות אדם, זכות שממנה עשויות אף להיגזר זכויות אדם נוספות. לכאורה, הנחה זאת זוכה לביסוס לאור ניסיון העמים השונים המתייחסים אף הם לכבוד האדם כאל זכות אדם. במאמר זה אני מערער על ההנחה הזאת וטוען כי היא מהווה תקדים משפטי חריג ביותר בנוף המסמכים הלאומיים והבין לאומיים. אמחיש כי קבלת הנחה זאת יוצרת תסבוכת נורמט...

The concept of Human Dignity has become more and more prevalent in legal, moral and philosophical discourses. However, as much as linguistic functions of the concept have become widespread, its meanings have become ambiguous and blurred. This paper seeks to map and depict the main functions and meanings that the concept of human dignity encompass,...

Are there shared psychological factors that propel social and political change? This book argues that there are and proposes an interdisciplinary theory to the study of social and political change toward more democratic structures. A strong case in made for the vitality of understanding human psychology as the first step to understanding complicate...