The past decades have generated a wealth of literature on digital activism. Even so, the phenomenon has been little historicised. This paper engages in deconstructionist exercise historical references activism towards exploring implicit meaning-making symbolic-interactionist tradition. It identifies four distinct narratives: 1) technology narrative [activism as technology-driven]; 2) communicat...

This paper presents a model that demonstrates how developments in information technologies can generate increased political polarization in the absence of any changes in voter preferences. In contrast to the previous literature on the topic, the model abstracts away from possible ideological bias in the news media, and studies how specialization in information by the voters can generate politic...

Drawing upon the literature on physicians' strikes from other OECD countries, the experience with physician strikes in Israel is put into comparative perspective. There are both structural and ideological factors that help to explain why there have been more strikes in Israel relative to other countries. At the same time, the dynamics of the strike and divisions within the medical profession in...

Recent research has shown dramatic benefits to incorporating social media in public facing websites. Using a perspective based on the duality of goals, we argue that social media, with emphasis on facilitating visitors’ unconstrained exchanges, may undermine the communicative purpose of an organization’s website and may not be desirable in some cases. We tested these ideas by examining the soci...

In this paper we propose a model in which there are ideological and strategic voters who vote under poportional rule. We prove that the behavior of ideological voters matters for the determination of the outcome. We show that a subset of strategic voters partially counteracts the votes of the ideological voters. JEL Classification Numbers: C72, D72.

Scholars have long explored the colorblind and multicultural ideological approaches to improving intergroup attitudes and relations. Polyculturalism, a newly studied ideological approach, focuses on the past and current interactions and connections among different racial and ethnic groups. Drawing on cross-disciplinary work, we critically examine the various forms that each of these ideological...

We study lobbying with information in a setting where politicians are connected through a network describing information flows. There are two opposing lobby groups, who choose which politician to address. The decision depends on the ideological bias of politicians as well as the overall network structure. We show that there is an interplay between the strength of the network, as given by the in...

Ideological groups use the Internet to deliver their messages unhindered by the constraints of traditional media. We examined how ideological groups promote their worldview through their websites. Using the elaboration likelihood model (ELM), this research used trained coders to examine the websites of nonideological groups (n= 37), nonviolent ideological groups (n= 36), and violent ideological...

This study tests a model of students’ reflective thinking, perceived ideological bias among university faculty, and reactions to ideological bias in the college classroom. Participants were 187 undergraduates who completed the Reasoning About Current Issues Questionnaire and the Political Bias in the Classroom Survey. Structural equation modeling revealed that participants in lower ranges of re...