כנס ההתנהגות הפוליטית הבינ"ל - דברי סיכום

The Political Behavior Section of the Israeli Political Science Association held its first International Political Behavior Conference in July 2026. We were delighted by the tremendous response to the conference, both in the number of abstract submissions and in the dozens of participants who joined us on the conference day.

 

The conference, hosted at Reichman University, featured approximately 20 research presentations by faculty members, postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, and scholars from a wide range of universities, colleges, and research institutions. Under the broad umbrella of political behavior, the presentations covered topics including democratic backsliding, affective polarization, voting behavior, personalization and personalism, and the effects of conflict and war on attitudes toward political violence and military action. The conference program and the full list of participants are available here:
https://www.ispsa.org/save-the-date-19-7-26.

 

The keynote address was delivered by Professor Yphtach Lelkes (University of Pennsylvania), entitled Performing Partisanship: Identity, Audience, and Political Signaling. His talk brought together many of the central themes in contemporary political behavior research, offering fresh perspectives on topics that were also explored throughout the conference.

 

In addition, we held an interdisciplinary roundtable on the upcoming 2026 Israeli elections. The panelists discussed the key challenges Israel is likely to face in the months leading up to the election, including issues related to democratic norms, institutional resilience, electoral integrity, generative AI, and the evolving media environment. The discussion also highlighted several promising avenues for future research, including a better understanding of political behavior among young voters, Arab and Haredi communities, and the implications of AI for electoral politics.

 

We believe the conference was engaging, intellectually stimulating, and successful in fostering new scholarly conversations while highlighting important directions for future research. Just as importantly, we hope it marked an important step toward strengthening the Israeli political behavior research community, which now brings together dozens of scholars from across the country.

 

We would like to extend our sincere thanks to all of the participants for presenting their research, sharing insights from their work, and engaging thoughtfully with the research of others. We are especially grateful to the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy and the Institute for Liberty and Responsibility at Reichman University, as well as the PRD Project at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, for their close collaboration and generous support in making this conference possible.

 

We see this conference as the beginning of an ongoing series of Political Behavior Section events throughout the academic year, and we very much hope you will join us again in the future. Announcements about the Section's activities for the coming academic year will be circulated soon.

 

Kind regards,

 

The Organizing Committee

 

Dr. Clareta Treger

Dr. Lesley Terris

Prof. Amnon Cavari

Prof. Jennifer Oser