Backgrounder: Israel and Electoral Reform

Since during the elections I commented several times on the Israeli electoral system and its distorted results, I thought this commentary in Haaretz made some of the points I have made. The problem is it is easy to editorialize on the need for a change in the system -- in the past Labor and Likud, and today Likud and Kadima, both say they want change, because of course the big parties want to be less beholden to the extortion of the small parties when it comes to coalition building.

But expressing the desirability of reform is one thing. How do you implement it? And here the answer seems to be, you can't get there from here. The author of the linked piece, Nehemia Shtrasler, notes that even David Ben-Gurion himself, by the time he realized the problems in the system, couldn't bring about change. And no one since Ben-Gurion has had his clout, and of course, in the end, even Ben-Gurion found himself at odds with the system and retreating, De Gaulle-like, to his farm. The problem remains that since any party that wins 2% of the vote can win seats in the Knesset, the incentive is there to create small, special-interest parties like the Green Leaf Graduates/Holocaust Survivors Party in this election, though that marijuana legalization/holocaust survivor rights party did not make the 2% cutoff. And from the beginning, the Orthodox religious parties have been a bloc sufficiently large to demand a seat in coalitions and thus to protect their own interests.

Later this week, the political parties will inform President Peres of their recommendations for who should be entrusted with the first chance to form a coalition. While Netanyahu is still clearly in the stronger position, Livni is stubbornly insisting she won, and seems to be trying to cajole Lieberman with promises of civil marriage and other issues. But Labor is saying that if Kadima makes a deal with Lieberman, it won't endorse Livni -- but then Ehud Barak already said Labor intended to rebuild from opposition, not from within the coalition.

The dealing and demands that have taken place over the past week reinforce the problems inherent in the electoral system. Such a fragmented system may work in, say, Belgium or the Netherlands, where small parties and broad coaltiions are traditional, but it doesn't work very well in a country as polarized, and as much in perpetual confrontation with its neighbors, as Israel.

Israel's strongest supporters always claim that it is the only democracy in the Middle East. I hafve to wonder if about now, Tzipi Livni is wondering, is this supposed to be a good thing?

A few years ago, you may recall, Israel went to direct election of the Prime Minister. This was supposed to be an attempt to create something more like a US-style directly-elected executive. But the directly-elected Prime Minister still had to create a Cabinet within a certain amount of time, and rejection of his or her cabinet would amount to a vote of no-confidence. So, while the choice of Prime Minister was directly made by voters, he/she still had to cut deals, and was still subject to extortionate demands, with the various parties and factions.

The direct election system worked for Netanyahu, who won the 1996 elections in something of a surprise. In 1999, Ehud Barak beat him in the second direct election, but his Labor-led three-party bloc (called One Israel) won only 26 seats, at that time the lowest number ever won by a winning party, suggesting that the result of direct elections was actually to further fragment the Knesset. Apparently, voters who were now free to vote separately for Prime Minister (one of the two big parties) did not have to vote for Likud or Labor to vote for Netanyahu or Barak, so now they voted for even more fissiparous special-interest parties.

In 2001, after the failure of Camp David II and the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, for the first time elections were held only for Prime Minister, with no Knesset elections. Ariel Sharon beat Barak comfortably, but since Labor outnumbered Likud in the Knesset, he had to form a national unity government. Clearly, the direct election experiment had backfired in several ways, and one of them was that increased, rather than decreased, the factional fragmentation of the Knesset. The major parties voted to return to the earlier system, and the 2003 elections returned to the pre-1996 system, with a few minor tweaks.

So Israel's one major experiment with electoral reform in recent years suggests that the law of unintended consequences still applies: the results were the opposite of those intended. So long as the smaller parties still have an effective veto over government formation, the system is hard to reform. And so long as they have that veto, they are unlikely to give it up.,