Yaeli Bloch-Elkon’s research while affiliated with Columbia University and other places

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Publications (14)


How Far-Right Extremism Changed American Body Politic
  • Article

July 2024

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6 Reads

Political Science Quarterly

Brigitte L Nacos

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Yaeli Bloch-Elkon

Aggressive rhetoric was part and parcel of the rising Tea Party and the related anti-Obama conspiracy theories. The argument here is that Donald J. Trump, as the leading public promoter of Birther rumors, first-time presidential candidate, and U.S. president, played a starring role in bringing hate speech, violent threats, and political violence into the political mainstream. As a result, political violence increased significantly and several violent far-right extremist groups, domestic terrorist entities, were newly founded after Trump announced his presidential campaign in mid-2015. As ex-president and once again presidential candidate, Trump glorified the criminally convicted participants in the violent breach of the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2021 and honored violent far-right fringe groups that were active in the late 20th century while threatening revenge against his political enemies. To assess, whether Trump, as 47th U.S. president, would be able to have his political foes investigated and jailed upon his return to the highest office, we looked for answers in the Heritage Foundation's “Project 2025,” the most detailed blueprint for the dismantling of the “deep state” and the best-laid plan for a takeover by Trump and vetted conservative “Make America Great Again” loyalists in January 2025.1 Although the sole focus here is on the rhetoric of far-right extremism and violence in the past 15 years, there were no similarly extreme far-left hate speech patterns and violent extremism related to the Democratic Party during the same time.



US Media and Post-9/11 Human Rights Violations in the Name of Counterterrorism
  • Article
  • Publisher preview available

June 2018

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194 Reads

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2 Citations

Human Rights Review

This article adds to earlier research revealing that the American news media did not discharge their responsibility as a watchdog press in the post-9/11 years by failing to scrutinize extreme and unlawful government policies and actions, most of all the decision to invade Iraq based on false information about Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction arsenal. The content analyses presented here demonstrate that leading US news organizations, both television and print, did not expressly refer to human rights violations when they reported on the torturing of foreign detainees during “enhanced interrogations” in US-run prison facilities abroad and the killing of civilians, including children, in US drone strikes overseas and outside theaters of war. Moreover, by framing torture and the “collateral damage” caused by drone-launched missile attacks episodically rather than in the context of human rights, the news media failed to alert the American public to the grave humanitarian violations in the so-called war on terrorism during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.

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Free hand abroad, divide and rule at home

September 2011

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2 Reads

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2 Citations

The end of the Cold War and subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union resulted in a new unipolar international system that presented fresh challenges to international relations theory. Since the Enlightenment, scholars have speculated that patterns of cooperation and conflict might be systematically related to the manner in which power is distributed among states. Most of what we know about this relationship, however, is based on European experiences between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, when five or more powerful states dominated international relations, and the latter twentieth century, when two superpowers did so. Building on a highly successful special issue of the leading journal World Politics, this book seeks to determine whether what we think we know about power and patterns of state behaviour applies to the current 'unipolar' setting and, if not, how core theoretical propositions about interstate interactions need to be revised.


The Polls--Trends: Public Perceptions and the Threat of International Terrorism after 9/11

June 2011

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92 Reads

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22 Citations

Public Opinion Quarterly

This article reports on the American public's perceptions of terrorist threats in the post-9/11 era. It presents poll data from September 11, 2001, to the early months of 2010. The report addresses issues including the importance of terrorism as an issue facing the country; concern about terrorist attacks over different time horizons and in different places; the effect of terrorism on respondents personally; and approval of the President and his administration's handling of terrorism. © 2011 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. All rights reserved.


The Media, Public Opinion, and Terrorism

January 2011

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200 Reads

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2 Citations

This chapter studies the links between public opinion, terrorism, and media. It discusses counterterrorism, specifically how the responses to terrorism become a part of the propaganda and demand schemes of governments and terrorists, and looks at how the media puts up with them. The chapter then reviews and evaluates the important literature of different research strains in four categories on media and terrorism.


The Polls--Trends: Preventing Terrorism After The 9/11 Attacks

August 2009

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35 Reads

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10 Citations

Public Opinion Quarterly

This article reports the American public's assessment of the U.S. government's post-9/11 efforts to prevent further terrorist attacks. It presents poll data from September 11, 2001 to December 31, 2005 and addresses issues such as the degree of confidence Americans have in their government's ability to protect them from further terrorist strikes; the public's evaluation of the effectiveness of actions at home and abroad as a means to prevent terrorism; and the perception of Americans regarding President Bush's and his administration's performance in the area of homeland security.


Free Hand Abroad, Divide and Rule at Home

January 2009

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55 Reads

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55 Citations

World Politics

Under unipolarity, the immediate costs and risks of war are more likely to seem manageable for a militarily dominant power like the U.S. This does not necessarily make the use of force cheap or wise, but it means that the costs and risks attendant on its use are comparatively indirect, long term, and thus highly subject to interpretation. Unipolarity, combined with the opportunity created by September 11, opened a space for interpretation that tempted a highly ideological foreign policy cohort to seize on international terrorism as all issue to transform the balance of power both in the international system and in American party politics. This cohort's response to the terrorist attack was grounded in ideological sincerity but also in the routine practice of wedge issue politics, which had been honed on domestic issues during three decades of partisan ideological polarization and then extended into foreign policy.


Do the Facts Speak for Themselves? Partisan Disagreement as a Challenge to Democratic Competence

March 2008

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130 Reads

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115 Citations

Critical Review

The partisan and ideological polarization of American politics since the 1970s appears to have affected pubic opinion in striking ways. The American public has become increasingly partisan and ideological along liberal-conservative lines on a wide range of issues, including even foreign policy. This has raised questions about how rational the public is, in the broad sense of the public's responsiveness to objective conditions. Widespread partisan disagreements over what those conditions arei.e., disagreements about the factssuggest that large proportions of the public may be perceiving the facts incorrectly. The facts in question are important enough that these partisan disagreements may translate into sub-optimal policy preferences and electoral decisions.


Prevention of Terrorism in Post-9/11 America: News Coverage, Public Perceptions, and the Politics of Homeland Security

January 2008

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90 Reads

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20 Citations

This study finds that the issue of preventing terrorist attacks has received surprisingly little attention by decision-makers and the news media, and only sporadic interest by pollsters. When it comes to homeland security, how to protect the nation and its people from actual attacks takes a back seat to press coverage of threats and other aspects of terrorism, particularly the administration's arguments for fighting the “war on terrorism” abroad as a means to prevent further terrorism at home. This inattention to the difficult task of preventing further catastrophic terror attacks by taking measures at home may affect the nation's vigilance as time has passed since 9/11.


Citations (11)


... Yet, the debate remained largely inconclusive as to the behavioral consequences or US oreign policy and its global leadership role: Under unipolarity, hegemonic powers might become satised with the status quo or revisionist, they might provide global public goods (or not), they might have more control over outcomes or be more constrained (ibid., 13-18). Last not least, domestic politics might matter more under unipolarity, precisely because the constraints o the international system are less signicant or the hegemonic power (ibid., 18-20; see also Snyder et al. 2011). ...

Reference:

Is America Back? Contestations, US Foreign Policy, and the Liberal International Order
Free hand abroad, divide and rule at home
  • Citing Chapter
  • September 2011

... 9). With this diagnosis of increasing partisanship come dire predictions about the possibility of a "coherent" foreign policy (Wiarda and Skelly 2006, pg. 1). 2 1 For similar claims, see (Beinart 2008;Wiarda and Skelly 2006;Kupchan 2003Kupchan , 2002Trubowitz and Mellow 2005;Mellow and Trubowitz 2005;Leach 2006;Daschle 1996;Shapiro and Bloch-Elkon 2008). Others challenge these claims (e.g., Busby and Monten 2008;Parent and Bafumi 2008). ...

Foreign policy, meet the people
  • Citing Article
  • January 2008

... The existing literature (Nacos 2016;Nacos and Bloch-Elkon 2011; O'Loughlin 2016) has widely described how the media and terrorism are in a "symbiotic" relationship (Schmid 1989;Spencer 2010, 5). Margaret Thatcher (as quoted in Spencer 2010, 5) famously argued that the media provide terrorism with the "oxygen of publicity". ...

The Media, Public Opinion, and Terrorism
  • Citing Article
  • January 2011

... These effects include but are not limited to increased anxiety, anger, fear, and sadness. 16 Additional studies have found that terrorist attacks can create and enhance posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, affect substance abuse issues, create work disruptions, and generate fear regarding public safety and public spaces. 17 Prior scholarship has also demonstrated that terrorist attacks that are carried out against symbolic targets (i.e., targets that are considered sacred or important) can elicit more profound emotional responses by leaders and citizens. ...

The Polls--Trends: Public Perceptions and the Threat of International Terrorism after 9/11
  • Citing Article
  • June 2011

Public Opinion Quarterly

... the Republican Party will expectedly drive the partisan conflict to the higher levels (Balcilar, Saint Akadiri, Gupta & Miller, 2019 Generally, the role of partisan conflict in the United States has been examined within the concept of stock market volatility (Gupta, Pierdzioch, Selmi & Wohar, 2018), investment (Azzimonti, 2018), income inequality (Balcilar, at al., 2019), and other government policies (Shapiro & Bloch-Elkon, 2005;Cheng, Hankins & Chiu, 2016). ...

PARTISAN CONFLICT, PUBLIC OPINION, AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
  • Citing Article

... In the last few decades, however, there now appears to be one exception to these parallel publics. On many issues, public opinion among Democrats and Republicans has begun to diverge over time, potentially indicating differential partisan responses to the ongoing flow of events and information (Shapiro & Bloch-Elkon, 2006). ...

Political Polarization and the Rational Public
  • Citing Article
  • January 2006

... Nuriyev (2015) suggests the South Caucasus faces a choice between historical models of cooperation, impacting relations with the West and regional powers like Russia, Iran, and Turkey. Even a decade ago, Azerbaijan showed interest in diplomacy for Nagorno-Karabakh conflict resolution, aiming to prevent regional conflicts and provide the EU access to energy resources (Bayramov, 2020;Shiriyev, 2013). This highlights the significance of security and energy in EU-Azerbaijan relations, underlining the need for a contemporary assessment of crisis management and political agenda-setting in EU external governance. ...

Crises: The United States and the Bosnian Crisis, 1992�1995 Studying the Media, Public Opinion, and Foreign Policy in International
  • Citing Article
  • October 2007

The International Journal of Press/Politics

... The literature in political science shows that partisans have both confirmation bias (bias for the information that is consistent with their political leanings) and disconfirmation bias (bias against disconfirming information) (Taber & Lodge, 2006). Therefore, the biased information processing may cause individuals with different partisan preferences to view the same information differently (Gaines et al., 2007;Jerit & Barabas, 2012;Shapiro & Bloch-Elkon, 2008). The impact of partisan biases also extends to financial markets, influencing financial decision-making processes (Kempf et al., 2021). ...

Do the Facts Speak for Themselves? Partisan Disagreement as a Challenge to Democratic Competence

Critical Review

... After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, people were worried about further terrorist activities inside the U.S. They were highly concerned about the physical threat to themselves and their families (Nacos, Bloch-Elkon & Shapiro, 2008). ...

Prevention of Terrorism in Post-9/11 America: News Coverage, Public Perceptions, and the Politics of Homeland Security
  • Citing Article
  • January 2008

... Focusing largely on the behavior of members of Congress, some studies highlight a rise in polarization on international issues over the past several decades that mirrors the broader changes in American politics (McCormick and Wittkopf 1990;Kupchan and Trubowitz 2007;Lapinski 2013;Alduncin et al. 2017;Jeong and Quirk 2019;Friedrichs 2021). Other work points to particular inflection points that involved an erosion of bipartisan consensus, such as the Vietnam War or the end of the Cold War (Meernik 1993;Prins and Marshall 2001;DeLaet and Scott 2006;Lee 2009;Snyder et al. 2009). Scholars have also documented how polarization and partisanship affect the foreign policy actions, appointments, and rhetoric of lawmakers and the president, contrary to the old adage that politics stops "at the water's edge" (Howell and Pevehouse 2007;Flores-Macías and Kreps 2013;Hildebrandt et al. 2013;Flynn 2014;Kriner 2014). ...

Free Hand Abroad, Divide and Rule at Home
  • Citing Article
  • January 2009

World Politics