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Struggles Over the Electoral Agenda The Elections of 1996 and 1999
... As a new election campaign is unveiled, the political system faces a crucial trial: all players' behavioral patterns become more critical and significant. This holds all the more valid in an age in which candidates are required to conduct themselves as if in a 'permanent campaign': a campaign that stretches from one election to the next, rather than being confined to the formal election campaign (Blumler & Kavanagh, 1999;Dunaway & Stein, 2013;Iyengar, Norpoth, & Hahn, 2004;Weimann & Wolfsfeld, 2002). For the most part, media studies have focused on two fields of activity: aspects of election propaganda and news coverage of election periods. ...
... The last few decades have seen a significant increase in media and election research in Israel. This increase is partly due to the country's complex political reality, the series of governments that failed to reach full tenure and ended in early elections, and the constantly changing media landscape (Sheafer & Wolfsfeld, 2009;Sheafer & Weimann, 2005;Shamir & Shamir, 2000;Shamir, Shamir, & Sheafer, 2008;Weimann & Wolfsfeld, 2002). ...
This study investigates the effects of the two leading prime ministerial candidates’ personal Facebook and Twitter accounts and the effects of exposure to the general social media and web discourse in Hebrew on voters’ agendas during Israel’s April 2019 election. All the posts that appeared on the contenders’ accounts at a point in time in each of the four pre-election campaign weeks were analyzed to identify prominent issues. Social media and web content in Hebrew were also analysed over the same period. The data was compared with 2,217 responses to questionnaires completed on the four dates. The questionnaires also surveyed voters’ political orientations and the likelihood of their following the candidates’ accounts. The results revealed a significant correlation between contenders’ and voters’ agendas. However, significant differences were identified in agendas between those respondents who followed both leading candidates, those who followed a single candidate, and those who followed neither.
... The fear orientation in Jewish-Israeli society serves as a convenient and available basis for messages aimed at political persuasion, as occurred in the fear-arousing election campaign of 1996 by the Likud Party and its candidate for prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who led the opposition to the Oslo Agreements (Torgovnik 2000;Weimann and Wolfsfeld 2002). Marmur and Weimann (2001) show the similarity between candidates from both sides of the political divide in Israeli election propaganda in 1999 and in 2001, in exploiting the sense of fear. ...
The emergence of new media, primarily social networks, raises questions about the interactions at play between 'new' and 'old' media in terms of the media and the public agendas. This topic is particularly relevant during elections. By analysing news from three Israeli television channels and using an online monitoring system to analyse user discourse over six weeks preceding Election Day, this article seeks to trace the shaping processes of the media agenda and public agenda along the axes of 'new media/old media' and 'free user discourse/professional media discourse' .
Elections are a prime topic of research for political scientists and political communication scholars, with most studies focusing on electoral behavior and election campaigns. Our interest lies in the construction of meaning of elections, and in particular electoral mandates—defined as policy directives sent from electorates to their elected leaders. Mandates emanate from the electorate, but assignment of meaning to elections is a typical political communication process, and this is the focus of our study. Here we propose a model with several necessary conditions for mandate election interpretations. Our empirical case study is Israel between 1992 and 2003, a period characterized by numerous turnabouts in government and policy, landslide election results, and significant public opinion shifts, when mandate elections could be expected. Making use of a rich set of data on the five elections during this period, we explore the necessary conditions for mandate election interpretations and actual post-election interpretations. We find that in no election were all conditions fulfilled and none were defined as a mandate election. Our results reiterate that mandate elections are hard to pin down and, above all, rare. The literature on mandates has focused on the difficulty of such a construal of the electorate and of the achievement of the structural conditions of mandates in multiparty systems. We focus on the political communication characteristics of modern democracies as a major factor in this process and discuss the implications of our study for democratic politics and the legitimacy of governments in their enactment of bold policy moves.
This article examines the influence of the new ratings culture and multi-channelled reality on the 2006 Knesset elections in Israel. Prior to 2006, the tightly controlled one hour prime time campaign commercial on major television stations was one of the most important factors in Israeli national elections, if not the most important one. The 2006 campaign demonstrated that these commercials no longer have this effect. The increase in talk shows, varied programming during non prime time hours and informal interview styles has made the campaign commercials obsolete.
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