It's Still An Ideological Country

The War and Peace Index is funded by the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research and the Evens Program in Mediation and Conflict Resolution of Tel Aviv University. A telephone interview poll was conducted by the B. I. Cohen Institute of Tel Aviv
University on 3-5 November and included 598 interviewees who represent the adult population of Israel (including the territories and the kibbutzim). The sampling error for a sample of this size is 4.5%.

For the survey data see this site and here's what interested me:

A majority of the interviewees — 49% — claim that the main motivation for choosing one party or another is its ideological platform, and only a minority — 26% — report that the main factor is who leads the party (15% attribute equal importance to the two factors and the rest have no clear opinion on the matter).

What will be important to you when you think about which party to vote for?

As for what matters most when deciding which party to vote for, the highest rate — 47% — of interviewees said the party’s position on security and peace issues is what’s most important for them, 23% said it was the party’s position on social and educational issues, and only 13% said it was the party’s stance on the economy that would mainly determine their vote next February. Note that this scale of priorities reflects a return to the traditional situation where foreign and defense issues were the key concern for Israeli voters. This contrasts with measurements we made in recent years showing that social and economic issues were moving to the top of the scale. Particularly striking is the order of priorities reflected in the answers to this question given the recent economic instability; one would expect that instability, combined with the fact there have been no recent dramatic events in the security and peace sphere, to have enhanced the importance of the parties’ positions on economic issues.