Loyalty, Voice, and Quasi-Exit: Israel as a Case Study of Proliferating Alternative Politics

Abstract

Until around the time of World War II, science tended to focus almost exclusively on institutional or traditional modes of activity. Legislation, public law, the interrelationship and inner dynamics of the branches of government, and similar elements were the central foci of the discipline. This is not to say that what later came to be known as extraparliamentary activity did not have any place in the work of earlier scientists; philosophers, theorists, and of course propagandists all discussed such phenomena as violence and revolution. However, in the main this area of the field remained a disciplinary backwater, and in most cases when it was addressed, the perspective was mostly of a situation gone terribly wrong. As a result of the (merely perceived?) dramatic increase in unconventional activity around the globe in the post-World War II era, and due to some methodological factors related to the discipline of science,2 the age of political conflict/ extraparliamentary behavior was ushered in as a recognized subdiscipline. From the mid 1950s until 1980, some 2,400 scholarly articles, in addition to hundreds of full-length books, were published, as Zimmermann found.3 The amount of work devoted to the field does not seem to have diminished in the 1980s.