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³⁵ One hundred and fifty articles that included the name ‘Gilad Shalit’ appeared in Ha'aretz national newspaper during January 2010.

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³⁸ The main goal of the pilot study was to identify an experimental treatment that would successfully influence the subject's perceived external political efficacy. Ninety-seven Israeli students (71 females, 24 males, 2 unspecified; M age = 24.20, SD = 1.57) from two different academic institutions in Israel participated in the pilot study. They were randomly assigned to a high external political efficacy condition (N = 33), a low external political efficacy condition (N = 31), or a control condition (N = 33), and were exposed to the experimental conditions described in the text. To evaluate the effectiveness of the manipulation, participants were asked to indicate to what extent (1 = not at all, to 7 = very much) they thought that citizens had an influence on the government's policy regarding the negotiations with Hamas about the Gilad Shalit deal. A one-way ANOVA using Tukey post hoc tests showed that the manipulation had an effect on participants’ perceptions regarding citizens’ influence on actual decision making regarding the Shalit deal (F = 3.60, p = 0.03). Participants in the high external political efficacy group (M = 4.87, SD = 1.54) believed that citizens had more influence on the government decision than those in the low external political efficacy group (M = 3.68, SD = 1.82; p = 0.05). Interestingly, almost the same differences (although only marginally significant) in levels of perceived influence were found between the low influence group and the control group (M = 4.79, SD = 1.86; p = 0.06). It is worth noting that we used the pilot study to examine additional alternatives for external political efficacy treatment, but they did not yield any significant effects.

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⁴² No association exists between the timing of ideology measurement and experimental group allocation (χ² = 0.04, p = 0.978); no difference in the distribution of responses to this question in the two measurements (χ² = 0.83, p = 0.935); And no association was found between reported ideology in both ‘early’ and particularly ‘late’ measurements and experimental group allocation (F = 0.78, p = 0.459; and F = 0.78, p = 0.462, respectively). The main analysis was also conducted separately in the two groups, yielding substantively identical interaction-term coefficients (b = 0.072, p < 0.01 and b = 0.072, p < 0.01, respectively). The marginal statistical significance is due to the limited number of observations in the subgroups.

⁴³ ‘What is the maximum number of Palestinian prisoners that should be released in your opinion in an agreement for the release of Gilad Shalit? 1. Not willing to release prisoners; 2. Up to 10 prisoners; 3. 10–50 prisoners; 4. 50–100 prisoners; 5. 100–250 prisoners; 6. 250–500 prisoners; 7. 500–1000 prisoners; 8. Any number needed.’

⁴⁴ The two questions have an unequal number of choices (8 and 7). In order to balance the weight of the two questions the transformation relied on the following procedure: Deal_policy = 0.5{(prisoner_to_release/8) + (1000_prisoners_release_deal/7)} yielding a new variable that gives equal weight to the two items, and ranges between 0 and 1.

⁴⁵ Based on data drawn from the Central Bureau of Statistics: http://www.cbs.gov.il/

⁴⁶ Our main hypothesis is directional in the sense that external political efficacy is expected to increase the association between ideology and policy preference (rather than merely alter it). Under such a hypothesis it is appropriate to use a one-tailed significance test.

⁴⁷ It is possible that the treatment of political efficacy resulted in different levels of effort on the part of respondents to provide accurately true responses, and that this, rather than ideological polarization, accounts for the reported finding. The results of two analyses are sufficient to alley this concern. First, as noted above, the proportion of respondents who passed the IMC is not significantly related to the experimental groups (p = 0.538); Secondly, a variance comparison test between the ‘Low’ and ‘High’ political efficacy groups shows no significant difference in the variance between the two groups for the policy preference answers: ‘low-efficacy group’ SD = 0.3043; ‘high-efficacy group’ SD = 0.3047; p = 0.988; Moreover, neither were any significant differences in variance found in separate analyses for left-wing and right-wing supporters (p = 0.525 and p = 0.683, respectively).

⁴⁸ R. Jowell and the Central Co-ordinating Team, European Social Survey 2002/2003: Technical Report (London: Centre for Comparative Social Surveys, City University, 2003).

⁴⁹ Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Finland, France, United Kingdom, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Sweden and Slovenia.

⁵⁰ The 2004 and 2006 waves include only three questions gauging internal political efficacy (POLINTR, POLCOMPL, POLDCS), and the 2008 wave includes only two questions gauging internal political efficacy (POLCMPL, POLDCS).

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⁶⁴ We re-estimated all the models within each country as a robustness check. These analyses involved 66 country–policy issue pairs (omitting cases in which no overall association between ideology and policy preference was found). Statistically significant (at p < 0.10) and consistent results were obtained for 65 per cent of the country–policy pairs.

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⁶⁸ The only case in which the interaction between internal efficacy and policy preference is only marginally significant (p = 0.088) is in Model 24 for anti-hate legislation preference – much like the findings with external efficacy.

⁶⁹ The analysis controls for the sophistication effect (education level as proxy), education level, gender, age, whether the country is traditional, former communist, logged disproportionality of parliament seats and votes, coalition size, and country fixed effects.

⁷⁰ 0.124 log odds; 30.5 per cent change in the ordinal level of policy preference of on SD change in ideology; p < 0.001.

⁷¹ A further set of analyses including both external and internal efficacy, their respective interactions with ideology while controlling for the sophistication (education) interaction, and the set of individual and macro controls for the four groups of policies yielded similar substantive results.

⁷² Federico and Schneider, ‘Political Expertise and the Use of Ideology’.

⁷³ Campbell, Gurin and Miller, The Voter Decides.

⁷⁴ These were conducted by creating new groups by merging right-wing and left-wing identifiers from different experimental groups, and calculating these groups proportion of support for the release bargain. For example, the top-right cell of Table 9 was calculated by taking the left-wing identifiers from the high-PE group and the right-wing identifiers from the low-PE group (n = 160), and calculating their overall proportion of support for the deal. Such groups provide four different distributions of political efficacy, across ideological groups: two uniform distributions (top-left and bottom-right), and two with uneven distribution (top-right and bottom-left).

⁷⁵ Hug and Sciarini, ‘Referendums on European Integration’.

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