Diaspora–Local Cooperation as a Driver of Ideological Change: The Ascendance of American Conservatism in Israel

The recent ascendance of American conservative ideology within Israel’s political Right is puzzling given its historical absence. Furthermore, prevailing theories—which focus on the role of other countries, experts, or transnational networks as ideational importers—cannot account for it. Accordingly, utilizing insights from the diaspora politics literature, we develop an alternative explanation that focuses on the cooperation between diaspora actors and local actors (diaspora–local cooperation, DLC) as a source of ideational importation and ideological change. Like other sources of outside ideas, DLC-based ideational importation depends on the establishment of organizational infrastructure for ideological dissemination—and ideational localization—for the adaptation and translation of external ideas to the local context. Unlike other kinds of transnational ideational networks, such cooperation is primarily based on national kinship that transcends specific ideational commitments. Such national kinship, we argue, legitimizes DLC and supports multidimensional ideational importation that can potentially amount to ideological change. We further suggest that the actual ideological change this process triggers depends on how imported ideas align with core ideological components and how they serve the needs of local actors in a given political context. We use detailed process-tracing analysis to demonstrate how DLC has led to an ideological change in Israel’s political Right.