Omer Yair

• PhD
• Research associate and coordinator at Reichman University

Research suggests that partisanship interferes with people’s ability to distinguish between factually verifiable statements and opinion statements. We investigate the degree to which observed partisan bias in fact-opinion discernment is due to expressive responding: partisans may claim that congenial opinions are facts, and that uncongenial facts a...

Honest behavior of public sector workers is an important quality of governance, impacting the functioning of government institutions, the level of corruption, economic development and public trust. Scholars often assume that honesty is inherent to public sector culture, however empirical evidence on the causal effect of public sector culture on hon...

Recent research reveals the association between conspiracy thinking, i.e., one’s predisposition to believe in conspiracy theories, and trust in elections and election outcomes. This research, however, has thus far only examined single election cycles. In this letter, we examine whether citizens’ conspiracy thinking, across electoral winners and los...

In a backsliding democracy, antidemocratic politicians often vilify nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and impose restrictions that make it harder for them to form, advocate, or obtain funding. Do citizens consider NGOs as a threat? Do they support regulatory measures to restrict NGO activities? We focus on two factors that may influence citizens...

International rankings push governments to adopt better policies by providing comparative information on states' performance. How do citizens respond to this information? We answer this question through a preregistered survey experiment in Israel, testing the effect of rankings in the fields of human rights and the environment. We find that citizen...

Do surveys measure sincere belief in Donald Trump’s “big lie” that fraud decided the 2020 election? We apply a comprehensive approach to detecting expressive responding: three honesty encouragements, a list experiment, two opportunities to express related sentiments, and two opportunities to bet on related predictions about the future. We find that...

A growing literature finds that social identity attachments to ideological and partisan groups often generate mistrust, hostility, and prejudice toward opposition groups. Yet, there are no studies of whether attachments to ideological groups (i.e., left, right, liberal, and conservative) contribute to political intolerance—defined as an unwillingne...

Forthcoming, Review of International Organizations Despite growing scholarly interest in international rankings, we know little on how the public perceives them. Do rankings bring citizens to favor compliance with international standards? Or do citizens simply dismiss the rankings? We examine these questions through the Israeli public's response to...

There is growing interest in the study of expressive responding in public opinion surveys, with scholars seeking to determine whether partisan differences in response to survey items attest to genuine differences in perceptions or to insincere responses meant to signal in-party approval or out-party disapproval. This study focuses on partisan gaps...

This study presents a theoretical model of honest behavior in the public sector (public sector honesty), and its relationship with corruption. We test this model empirically by utilizing and extending a unique dataset of honest behavior of public and private sector workers across 40 countries, gathered in a field experiment conducted by Cohn et al....

Rival partisans tend to perceive ostensibly balanced news coverage as biased against their respective sides; this is known as the "hostile media phenomenon" (HMP). Yet complaints of hostile bias are common in many other contexts besides the media (e.g., law enforcement and academia). Can something like the HMP occur outside the context of news cove...

In this research, we examine the role of attachment to an ideological group as a source of stability in a volatile multi-party system. In two studies conducted in Israel (N=1,320), we show that a multi-item Attachment to an Ideological Group (AIG) scale is strongly tied to vote choice and political engagement, and its effects are independent of, an...

Teaching social sciences frequently involves politically and ideologically fraught issues. This study examines the effect of students' perceived ideological distance from their professors on their academic experience, drawing on a survey of 1,257 students from Social Science and Law faculties in Israel across five different universities. Congruent...

Hostility between rival political partisans, referred to as affective polarization, has increased in the United States over the last several decades generating considerable interest in its reduction. The current study examines two distinct sets of factors that potentially reduce affective polarization, drawn respectively from a group-based and a po...

Affective polarization, or outparty animus, has been studied extensively in recent years, as this animosity is said to have grave negative political and non-political consequences. This note offers two critiques of the affective polarization literature. First, it argues that, despite claims that affective polarization has negative consequences, to...

Voters' punishment of corrupt politicians at the ballot box is oftentimes modest, at best. Recent studies suggest that this modest electoral sanctioning is due to limited corruption information and to the relative weakness of integrity considerations in voting behavior. We demonstrate that anti-corruption measures taken by elite institutions – in t...

Are public sector workers more honest than their private sector counterparts? While conventional wisdom might suggest so, no direct evidence has been offered to address this question, as most public administration research has utilized indirect designs and measures. Furthermore, most studies on this topic have been conducted in a single country, th...

Partisans often offer divergent responses to survey items ostensibly unrelated to politics. These gaps could reveal that partisanship colors perception or, alternatively, that in answering survey questions, individuals communicate partisan proclivities by providing insincere or, “expressive” responses, to send a partisan message. This study tests t...

Claims and accusations of political bias are common in many countries. The essence of such claims is a denunciation of alleged violations of political neutrality in the context of media coverage, legal and bureaucratic decisions, academic teaching etc. Yet the acts and messages that give rise to such claims are also embedded within a context of int...

Datasets and codes. This file contains all datasets and codes necessary to replicate the statistical analyses reported. (ZIP)

Supplementary materials. This document contains further information about the three studies as well as additional analyses. (DOCX)

Perceptions of political bias are common in many democracies. Still, there are different explanations for these perceptions with the current literature providing findings that are at odds with each other. In this paper we synthesize findings from several intersecting literatures and provide a theoretical framework which situates partisans' percepti...

Scholars agree that young men carry out most acts of political violence. Still, there is no consensus on the link between relatively large youth cohorts and the onset of violent, armed intra-state conflicts. In this paper, we examine the effect of youth bulge, a measure of the relative abundance of youth in a country, on the onset of two different...

A central question in the study of courts' legitimacy pertains to the extent to which the specific court decisions affect their institutional legitimacy – an issue of both theoretical and empirical concern. The scholarly literature (centered almost entirely on the US Supreme Court) typically distinguishes between diffuse and specific support – the...

Accusations of political bias in the mass media, academia, the courts and various other institutions are common in many democracies. However, despite the prevalence of these accusations and the public attention they have received, research on the effects of perceived ideological distance on perceptions of political bias is lacking. Focusing on perc...