Israeli political attitudes and income in the 2006–2015 elections

ABSTRACT

It is commonly assumed that in Israel, higher income groups tend to hold more liberal views and vote for center-left parties while poorer segments of the population support rightwing parties. This article analyzes political attitudes and voting in four parliamentary elections by income groups, using the European Social Survey (ESS) data. By relying on transition matrices and mobility analysis, the article examines which income group is more loyal to the parties and political blocs. The results suggest that the percentage of rightwing voters within all classes is higher than that of leftwing voters. In addition, the poorest individuals are the most loyal voters while the richest are the most likely to switch parties and blocs. Finally, logit estimation shows that rightwing and ultra-orthodox voters are more likely to remain loyal to parties.

KEYWORDS:

• Political attitudes
• income groups
• loyalty
• Israel
• voters
• mobility
• elections

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Shalev, “The Welfare State Consensus,” 193–213; Yuchtman-Yaar and Peres, Between Consent and Dissent; and Shamir and Arian, “Collective Identity,” 265–77.

2. Hermann and Yuchtman-Yaar, “Divided yet United,” 597–613; Shalev, “The Welfare State Consensus,” 193–213; Smooha, “Class, Ethnic,” 309–42; and Shalev and Kis, “Social Cleavages,” 67–96.

3. Rubinstein, “Two Peoples in One Land,” 220.

4. Al-Haj, “Ethnicity and Political Mobilization,” 83–100; Doron, “Right as Opposed to Wrong,” 29–53; Getmansky and Zeitzoff, “Terrorism and Voting,” 588–604; and Gould and Klor, “Does Terrorism Work?’ 1459–510.

5. Edlund and Pande, “The Political Gender Gap,” 917–61; Edlund, Haider and Pander, “Unmarried Parenthood,” 95–119; Wolfers, “Are Voters Rational,” 1–20.

6. Franck, “The Political Consequences,” 57–82.

7. Round 5 is named ‘Survey 2010’ but was actually conducted in 2011 year while round 7 was named ‘Survey 2014’ but carried out in 2015.

8. Note that the datasets include only individuals that answered all the relevant for the study questions, so that their sizes differ from those of the original data.

9. The adjustment was done according to the standardization accepted in Israel and defined by the national Central Bureau of Statistics.

10. This definition is based on the ‘people-space’ as exemplified by Levy (1987), where the middle is taken to be the 50th percentile, and the range from the 30th to the 70th percentile is identified as the middle class. In this case the size of the middle class is fixed and can neither shrink nor expand.

11. Since there is no ESS survey that relates to voting in the 2013 elections, the analysis in this period is based on the answers to the question ‘Which party are you closer to?’ asked at the end of 2012 (about a month before the elections).

12. If the right and ultra-orthodox parties are defined as the same bloc, the share of the loyal to the bloc voters is very similar for the poor and middle class (about 54%) but is considerably larger than among the rich (25%).

13. The results for Tables 13–15 were obtained using the combined panel dataset that includes all the individuals who participated in all four rounds in the period under study.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zoya Nissanov

Zoya Nissanov is a Lecturer at the Department of Economics and Business Management, Ariel University. The author thanks Raphael Franck, Jacques Silber, and Avihai Snir for their constructive comments.