Do citizens' perceptions of parties' multidimensional issue positions shape partisanship? Dassonneville, Fournier and Somer-Topcu use survey data from 11 countries to study this question.

Since the early 2000s, Poland has experienced a remarkable Jewish turn, largely driven by non-Jewish Poles with a passionate new interest in all things Jewish. Klezmer music, Jewish-style restaurants, kosher vodka, and festivals of Jewish culture have become popular, while new museums, memorials, Jewish studies programs, and Holocaust research centers reflect soul-searching about Polish-Jewish relations before, during, and after the Holocaust. Poland's Jewish community is also undergoing a significant revival. Geneviève Zubrzycki examines these processes and asks what it means to try to bring Jewish culture back to life in a country where 3 million Jews were murdered and where only 10,000 now live. 

Drawing on a decade of participant-observation in Jewish and Jewish-related organizations in Poland, a Birthright trip to Israel with young Jewish Poles, and more than a hundred interviews with Jewish and non-Jewish Poles engaged in the Jewish turn, Zubrzycki's book Resurrecting the Jew presents an in-depth look at Jewish life in Poland today. She shows how the revival has been spurred by progressive Poles who want to break the association between Polishness and Catholicism and promote the idea of a multicultural Poland, exploring the limits of performative solidarity and empathetic forms of cultural appropriation.

Geneviève Zubrzycki is the William H. Sewell Jr. Collegiate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, where she directs the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia, and the Copernicus Center for Polish Studies. A historical and cultural sociologist, she has published widely on nationalism and religion; collective memory, national mythology and the politics of commemoration; and visual culture and materiality. 

Geneviève is the author of the award-winning monographs The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland (Chicago 2006), Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion and Secularism in Quebec (Chicago 2016), and Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism and Poland’s Jewish Revival (Princeton 2022), and the editor of National Matters: Materiality, Culture and Nationalism (Stanford 2017). In 2021 Zubrzycki was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and was awarded the Bronisław Malinowski Prize in the Social Sciences from the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by February 8, 2024.

What explains education-based political divides? Jonne Kamphorst discusses how decreased interactions between higher and lower-educated citizens has widened the political divide between them

Across advanced democracies, education levels are predictive of immigration attitudes and voting for new left or far right parties. What explains education-based political divides? Existing scholarship holds that education causes progressive attitudes, or proposes that being higher educated and holding progressive attitudes can both be explained by socialization during someone’s childhood. This article puts forward an additional explanation. 

We argue that decreased interactions and relationship formation between higher and lower-educated citizens has widened the political divide between them. Using panel and survey data of strong ties, we demonstrate that higher (lower) educated ties make individuals more progressive (conservative). Education divides citizens by providing a distinct worldview for the higher-educated, which is reinforced in increasingly homogeneous education-based networks. Our findings suggest the further crystallization of a cleavage based on education, and highlight the importance of studying networks to understand political behavior.

Jonne Kamphorst is a Postdoctoral Scholar in Political Science at the European University Institute in Florence and a Senior Research Fellow at the Polarization and Social Change Lab at Stanford University. He completed his Ph.D. in Political Science at the EUI in 2023. Before starting his Doctoral Degree, Jonne was a Master’s student in Politics and Sociology at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics and obtained his Bachelor’s in Political Science from the University of Amsterdam. 

His research, positioned at the intersection between comparative politics and political behavior, explores the roots of political divides in advanced democracies and proposes strategies to bridge them. Two questions define his research agenda: 1) What are the origins of political divisions? And 2) how can democracy be strengthened by re-engaging citizens and building new coalitions of voters that bridge political divides? Jonne answers these questions leveraging quantitative scientific methods. His methodological expertise is in the design, conduct, and analysis of randomized field and survey experiments which he often employs in collaboration with political candidates and parties. He also uses quasi-experimental methods for causal inference. Jonne’s research has been accepted at or been revised and resubmitted to the Journal of Politics, American Political Science Review, and Comparative Political Studies, among other outlets.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by January 25, 2024.