Religious and ethnic identities influence on public views of privatization: the case of Israel

ABSTRACT

Public attitudes regarding privatization are important for both political and normative reasons. Past studies of public opinion on privatization have shown how socio-economic variables and ideology shape public views. In this study, we focus on a relatively under-researched factor: identity as it relates to actor preference formation. We explore attitudes toward different privatization types in a society, in which the main political fault lines are not economic, but identity-based: primarily predicated on ethnic group membership and religiosity. Based on a random sample of 1142 Israeli adults, we find that unlike most other countries, identity variables matter more than Socio-Economic Status (SES) in this type of society despite the fact that privatization is primarily perceived as an economic policy. While high levels of religiosity are associated with support for privatization, membership in an ethnic minority, in contrast, is related to negative attitudes. The contrast between the relatively favourable views of ultra-orthodox Jews to the negative ones of Arabs suggests that identity group attitudes toward neoliberal policies cannot simply be explained by SES. Moreover, not only does identity matter for shaping views on public policy, but also the particular specifics of a given identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Privatization
• ethnicity
• religiosity
• public views
• Israel

Acknowledgements

We thank Nissim Cohen, Beni Fefferman, Shlomo Mizrahi, Lior Sheffer, Fany Yuval, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The distribution of the residuals was examined by Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk tests and was found non-normal in both tests (p  =  0.00) both for privatization of social services and privatization of infrastructure. The assumption of Homoscedasticity was found to be violated by plotting “regression standardized predicted values” with “regression standardized residuals”. Finally, in the social services model, the Durbin-Watson value in the ANOVA was 0.65 (less than 1.5), and therefore independence of errors could not be assumed. This assumption holds for infrastructure, where Durbin-Watson equals 1.8.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Baruch Levi

Baruch Levi is a teaching fellow at the Department of Health Policy and Management, School of Public Health, Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and is a senior health policy analyst in the Israeli Medical Association. His main areas of interest are welfare and health politics, health services planning and health measurement.

Amos Zehavi

Amos Zehavi is a senior lecturer with a joint appointment at the departments of political science and public policy at Tel Aviv University and is a fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. His main areas of interest are the social aspects of innovation policy, comparative social policy, the political implications of privatization, and mechanisms of institutional change. Amos has recently published in the Journal of Social Policy, Research Policy, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Administration & Society, Regulation & Governance, and Social Policy and Administration. His edited volume, Policy Analysis in Israel, was published by Polity Press in 2016.