Beware how you interpret the data

Political actors — including me — may be drawing causal conclusions too quickly from analogies that feel intuitively persuasive

Photo: Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid announcing the merger of their parties.

Correction: Before I get started, I have a correction from my last post. It turns out that in trying to express the nuance that my interviewee was sharing with me, I simplified some of the framing. Also, I didn’t explicitly write that he supports the war in principle and was gracious enough to share with me some of the possible secondary effects, based on his expertise. If you want to read the corrected version of the post, you can find it here. Now, back to the regularly scheduled program…

Last week, two of Israel’s opposition parties merged in a bid to overtake the ruling Likud party. Their leaders, Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, appear to be drawing lessons from Hungary, where Péter Magyar succeeded in unseating Viktor Orbán after 16 years in power. But the announcement makes me wonder: are they drawing the right lessons?

Lapid even compared their joint bid to Hungary. Magyar’s victory “happened because people believed change was possible,” The Jerusalem Post reported Lapid as saying. “They united behind one candidate, fought for their country, and won.” If the Hungarian opposition could defeat Orban despite his moves to give his party an unfair advantage, couldn’t they, too?

While the story of an opposition uniting to defeat an authoritarian leader sounds inspiring, I’m not confident that Bennett and Lapid are correctly interpreting all the data from Hungary. One possibility is that they are making inferences based on motivated reasoning. They are emotionally invested in defeating Netanyahu, which could cause them to be influenced by confirmation bias – accepting the data points that confirm their desired outcome and ignoring those that don’t. Consequently, they may be missing the complexity of the Hungarian political system and the relationship between the rulers and the governed, which does not translate neatly to Israel’s reality, as I understand it.

When this is the case, humans are apt to draw the wrong inferences from one model in applying it to another. David McRaney describes inference as the process of turning incomplete information into what feels like knowledge: “We add our biases, goals, identities, fears, and desires to make a guess… [that] can feel like reality.” From there, we build “inferences of inferences… all the way down,” mistaking a chain of assumptions for certainty.

The reason that most of our cognition is inferential, as McRaney explains, is that the world is “too complex, too fast, too ambiguous for the brain to process it in real time.”

This process leads to a cognitive tendency with the not-so-sexy name: the “makes-sense epistemology”. The idea, coined by Harvard psychologist David Perkins, is that people suspend critical judgment and stop looking for further evidence once they find enough to support their own existing belief.

In this case, Lapid and Bennett may have stopped looking for more evidence because the narrative of the unified opposition “made sense” as the decisive factor in Magyar’s success. If so, they could then conclude that a similar merger would work in Israel. Of course, I could also be drawing incorrect inferences and missing the significance of this move, but why might they be off the mark?

As psychologist Alex Edmans observes based on his research, isolated data points are not necessarily evidence of causation, and relying on them can lead us to make the wrong inference. Other factors may better explain Magyar’s victory, such as the absence of security threats to Hungary, public trust in the united opposition as a center-right party, the heterogeneity of the electorate, dissatisfaction with Orban’s dismantling of liberal democracy (far more than the Israeli government has) and the state of the economy.

In my understanding, these factors don’t necessarily map well on Israel. The most important one may be the perception of threat. In a country like Hungary, voters can take a chance on an opposition leader if the differences are about policy or economic conditions but not security. In Hungary, the major issues were a weak economy, corruption, a desire for change and the state’s relationship with the EU. Existential security fears didn’t dominate the election. In contrast, Israelis who voted for the current government do in general express existential fears, so they don’t want to empower someone who might push the country to compromises with the Palestinians. Lapid is considered center-left, so any right-winger considering switching to Bennett likely wonders if he will compromise in this area.

Those fears may help explain the lack of trust in Lapid and Bennett among these constituents. Even though Lapid and Bennett vowed not to rely on Arab parties, right-wingers don’t seem to trust that pledge because Lapid and Bennett did include an Arab party in their last coalition. Polls indicate they will need an Arab party to form the next government, so they could very well come under pressure to break that vow.

Even if right-wingers trust Lapid and Bennett on their pledge not to rely on Arab parties to form a coalition, switching their votes also strikes me as less realistic in Israel because of the tribal nature of Israeli politics. Many Israelis tend to remain loyal to their political camp, particularly ultra-Orthodox Jews, hardline nationalists and settlers. For Hungarians, switching from Orban to Magyar, who had spent many years in Orban’s party and only left over the corruption issue, was not a significant leap. In Israel, it feels like an unbridgeable chasm.

That tribalism also feeds into the challenge of rallying the public over the liberal democracy issue. For one, Orban pushed his anti-liberal reforms early on, so Hungarians had years to experience them, and their recent votes suggest they didn’t like the illiberal turn. Israelis, by contrast, are still debating largely hypothetical reforms whose consequences remain contested and untested.

Finally, if one goes by the maxim that elections are about the economy, Netanyahu is in a far stronger position than Orban was because Israel ‘s economy is resilient while Hungary’s was weak. Here, too, it seems to me that Lapid and Bennett may not yet be offering enough to persuade many Israelis who voted for the current government to switch.

Considering all these factors together, the Lapid-Bennett merger seems liable to hurt the opposition’s odds of returning to power, since their union has downsides that Magyar didn’t have to face. One might expect a dramatic announcement to significantly change the electoral map, like when Bennett announced he was running for the Knesset again. This time, initial polls showed the joint party not gaining but actually losing a seat relative to the last ones in which they were running separately.

If my observations are correct, then the consequence of this merger may be that Lapid and Bennett missed an opportunity to unseat Netanyahu by drawing the wrong inferences from the Hungarian election. Given the complexity of Israel’s electoral environment, I certainly can’t know how this will play out. I’m simply making my best inference from incomplete information and lived experience.

With editing by Rivka Klein-de Graaf. Photo credit: Itai Ron