Orit Kedar

Orit Kedar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and a member of the Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her principal research interest lies in comparative politics. She is interested in electoral politics and the intersection of institutions and behavior. Her research focuses on themes such as representation, voter choice under different forms of power-sharing, party systems, and electoral systems and institutions more broadly, as well as on gender and politics. Other interests of hers include multi-level explanations in comparative politics and federalism. Most of her research is conducted under a framework of political economy.
Kedar’s current research analyzes how various aspects of electoral districts affect representation and party systems. Among other questions, she examines how within-country variation in the number of seats per district (e.g., between sparsely populated rural areas and dense urban ones) affects representation, what partisan biases it leads to, and how it affects the party system. She also studies differences in interests, positions and priorities between co-partisans residing in different districts, and how these differences are reflected at the elite level. As part of her research on gender and politics, she studies the reversal of the gender gap in voting, male support for far-right parties, and gendered differences in perceptions of justice.

Kedar’s work appeared in such venues as the American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Electoral Studies, European Journal of Political Research, Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, and Public Opinion Quarterly. Her book, Voting for Policy, Not Parties: How Voters Compensate for Power Sharing (2009, Cambridge University Press), won APSA's Riker Award for best book in political economy. Her article ‘Are Voters Equal Under Proportional Representation?’ (AJPS 2017) won APSA’s Longley award for best article in representation and electoral systems. She is the former president of the European Political Science Association (2017-19). She serves on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Political Science, European Union Politics, and Political Science Research and Methods. Kedar’s work was funded by the European Research Council and the Israel Science Foundation. 

Kedar is a graduate of Tel Aviv University (political science and economics). She received her MA in political science from Brown University, and her Ph.D from Harvard's Government Department. Prior to joining the Hebrew University, she taught at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and at MIT. During the 2022-3 academic year, she was a Katherine Hampson Bessell Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.