Looking at the current makeup of the Knesset, there are 18 parties represented in only 120 seats. Even the largest party has barely more than 1/5 of the seats.
I know that the Israeli system allows for multiparty lists and is not elected by district, but even so, why is it so fractured? I counted not just several party lists of nationalist-style platformed parties, but different factions within those lists. Why aren’t more of the smaller parties joining forces?
It all went downhill after the People’s Front of Judea split off from the Judean People’s Front.
Party list can do that.
Look at Italian politics a few years ago.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing, really.
That’s why having proportional representation for political parties is a bad idea.
It empowers the radicals.
I think it works better with a 5% minimum threshold rule like the Germans have. If that was put in place in Israel, there would only be 5 parties in the Knesset rather than the current 12.
There were 12 parties that passed the electoral threshold. The 18 today (if that is so, I didn’t look) are the result of further splintering after the elections.
Have you ever heard the saying,“two Jews, three opinions”?
I’m pretty sure 13 parties have Knesset representation right now:
Kadima, Likud, Yisrael Beitenu, Shas, Labor, Haatzmaut, United Torah Judaism, Hadash, National Union, Raam-Ta’al, the New National Religious Party, the National Democratic Assembly, and Meretz.
There were 12 who passed the threshold, but then Labor broke in half, when Barak left to form Haatzma’ut along with the rest of the Labor people who wanted to keep the Likud coalition.
You’re right. I forgot about him.
Splitter!
It empowers minority opinions. Without overrepresenting them. Unlike our 2 party system which empowers radical rightwingers far beyond their due electoral support.
Since when is suppressing opinions considered a benefit?
But it has not happened in South Africa (ANC still polls absolute majority). I think multiplication of small parties says less about a country’s political system than about its political culture.
If the US adopted Israel’s system then the religious right and the Tea Party would have vastly more influence then they do now.
In Israel Jewish fundamentalists have vastly more influence than do Christians fundamentalists in the US and that’s despite the fact that a far, far higher percentage of Americans identify themselves as born-again Christians than Israelis could be considered ultra-Orthodox.
Now, perhaps you would like to live in a country where the Tea Party and the religious right had vastly more power but I don’t.
But vastly less over the GOP, which would no longer be burdened with them. And, at the same time, new parties of the left would emerge – I would expect the Working Families Party to go national.
Not quite. The Turks have a 5% threshold. The German system is more complicated and is overdue for a change. Germans actually have two votes. The first is for a a particular member to represent their district and the second is a vote for the party. The second vote actually determines the total allocation of the Bundestag to a particular party.
Most Germans don’t really understand how this works, either, and that’s apparently why it is sort of successful. See Sartori’s Comparative Constitutional Engineering for the bewildering details.
I disagree. I’d say that segregating religious conservatives from business conservatives could well make both easier to deal with. In any case this analysis is backwards. A democracy should be judged on how well it represents its citizenry not on how well it reflects your personal opinions.
Yes and no. A democracy should be judged how well its actual policy outcomes represent the desires of its citizens. Consider the simple case of three parties in the US: the economic left, the economic right, and social conservatives, mostly indifferent to economic issues. Neither party has a clear majority. This means that in any coalition, pandering to the social conservatives is required no matter how small their representation actually is. This gives a small slice of the population outsized influence on policy creation. But in a “good” democracy, each citizen should have a roughly equal influence on policy creation via representation.
Parties fracture because their members know that there is a good chance that a splinter party will have to be included in the formation of a government regardless of the identity of the majority party. This violates some deeply-held convictions of fairness and equity. Personally, I think the only way we are going to have peace in the middle east is if Israel changes its electoral rules.
Yes, but unless I’m mistaken, parties which don’t get at least 5% of the total party vote (or a certain number of directly elected seats, but that wouldn’t apply to the Israeli system) don’t win any seats. That is the 5% threshold I was referring to.
There are democracies that incorporate elements of proportional representation yet manage to avoid the musical-coalitions phenomenon – in Israel’s case it’s not just the low threshold but also IIRC a 100% at-large list system that also helps the heavy fracturing. IMO, were there a significant number of “hard” seats that were to be directly elected (whether by district or at large, and we can even make it be by IR preference vote if we dislike US-style simple plurality), rather than just allocated from the list, that would weigh the system back in favor of broader parties.
Thing is, it hits many as unfair that with popular vote in the mid-40s % range you may get landslide supermajorities of elected legislators/delegates, as can happen with a US-style first-past-the-post WTA system; yet by the same measure it’s infuriating to think that single-issue 3-percenters could take the entire government as hostage.