Matt Yglesias

37 Responses to “Stop Smearing the Israeli Election System!”

1. anonyman Says:
   April 1st, 2009 at 2:55 pm

   Well, it’s a perfectly fine system of government but I don’t think it’s crazy to suggest that it’s ill-equipped to deal with a long-simmering problem that is subject to great swings in popular emotion. You know, the precise situation they find themselves in.

   The parliamentary system is inherently fragile because a governing coalition can collapse at any moment. Thus, it’s subject more than most systems of government to the whims and tides of public opinion. There’s not a long term horizon to deal with problems. The focus is always on the immediate present.

   The result is that the government has very rarely been in a position to make the types of compromises that could make real progress on the conflict, and leads to overreaches such as the Lebanon mess. Obviously the other side is much more of a mess, and has been for many years, but Israel is uncommonly beholden to their fringe elements because the departure of said elements could fracture a coalition.

   I’m just a guy at a computer and by no means an expert, but if seems like if they had an American system they might be better equipped to make some unpopular short term sacrifices that pissed off the fringe elements in the name of getting things reasonably sorted out a couple of years down the road. That presupposes a viable partner in peace talks, which… yeah. It is what it is. But I don’t see a lot of evidence that Israel’s system of government has been a boon to the peace process.

2. pseudonymous in nc Says:
   April 1st, 2009 at 3:06 pm

   Oh, c’mon Matt.

   There are big differences between list systems that you’ve Wikipedially glossed over: notably the threshold for representation and the division of the electorate. (The Scottish parliament, for instance, has FPTP for 73 constituencies, then seven additional MSPs from each of eight regions.)

   Now, it’s true that Israel has a fractious party system with in-fighting, splits, reorganisation and Judean People’s Frontism that you can imagine regardless of the voting system. And it’s also true that these particular election results were not going to be transformed by a different system: it’s similar, but not quite parallel, to what came out of Canada last year.

   But the specifics of the Israeli system really do not help create a stable polity — not in a Weimar way, but in a way that makes extortion by the small clientist parties an inevitable part of coalition-forming.

3. Mark Says:
   April 1st, 2009 at 3:14 pm

   @anonyman:

   If Israel had a U.S.-style presidential system, the executive would be almost entirely insulated from consequences for the duration of his or her term. Therefore the government would be less likely to deal with anything that wasn’t in the interest of whatever elites happened to be in the government during that time.

   Most countries have systems more like the Israeli system than have systems like our system. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the U.S. government is its consistent failure to deal with any long-term problem until it is absolutely necessary, and often not even then. The European governments do a better job of dealing with large, long-term problems like health care and climate change than the U.S. government does, so if this demonstrates anything it’s that parliamentary systems of various kinds have the exact opposite effect from what you predict.

4. SLC Says:
   April 1st, 2009 at 3:15 pm

   The big problem with the Israeli system is the low threshold for representation, currently 2%. This encourages the formation of small fringe parties. Raising the threshold to, say 10%, would force these fringe parties out. Thus, under a 10% threshold system, there would be only 4 parties in the new Knesset, Kadima, Likud, Liebermans’ party, and Labor.

5. NYC_Charles Says:
   April 1st, 2009 at 3:16 pm

   Yeah, I think Israel’s problems have more to do with the low threshold for parties to get into the Knesset than the PR system, per se. I think most other states set the minimum for representation at 5% at the lowest and some are up toward 10%. This discourages parties from splitting and forces individuals with marginal opinions to make some sort of compromise in order to get representation. If Israel had a higher threshold, I would expect there to be only one major religious party, Labor would be under much stronger pressure to reinvent itself, etc.

6. max Says:
   April 1st, 2009 at 3:19 pm

   Given that underlying distribution of opinion, how was a different electoral system going to change things?

   Plus, as a bonus, the Weimarian hyperinflation had begun in August 1921 at the first war reperations payment, and ended in in November ‘23, when they went back to normal money! And they had a nice Republic for six years until the big crash, and then there was the big deflation for three years and THEN Nazis!

   max
   ['It ain't the money and it ain't the constitution, it's the politicians and the people.']

7. anonyman Says:
   April 1st, 2009 at 3:22 pm

   Mark-

   Well, I disagree the the US system is less-equipped than most to deal with long term problems or that insulating the president from the tide of popular opinion is necessarily such a bad thing to resolve a situation like Israel/Palestine.

   First, on the long term problem issue, no government is particularly good at dealing with problems beyond the horizon of the terms of elected officials because there’s not much incentive to do so. Health care isn’t really such a great example of Europe dealing with long term problems, because most of those systems simply grew out of whatever happened to have been in place at the end of WWII. It wasn’t exactly a crisis-response issue, or at least not in the way in which you are using it to illustrate your point. Global warming, for instance, is an issue that Europe has been as bad at addressing as the US, other than being better at blustering. Have they really made any more tangible progress than we have?

   On insulating the leader, no Israeli prime minister can really afford to alienate the fringe members of their party because of the ideosyncracies of their system. It would be like if Obama couldn’t do anything unless he had the 9/11 truthers on board. Yeah, from time to time that creates a Bush-esque accountability problem that leaves us royally screwed for 4-8 years, but it also gives responsible presidents some leeway to make tough Obama-esque decisions that they might not be able to make if they were constantly in fear that the 9/11 Truthers might leave the coalition and fracture the government.

8. anonyman Says:
   April 1st, 2009 at 3:24 pm

   oops, I meant fringe members of coalition, not party in that last paragraph.

9. LarryinLA Says:
   April 1st, 2009 at 3:25 pm

   Israel’s system is problematic for reasons that are related to their specific implementation of the party list method. pseudoInNy points out one, the extremely low threshold for representation, but there are others, the very small size of the parliament and thus the party lists (increasing corruption and reducing independence of the individual legislators), the large number of ministers, the single national district, the very large number of parties, and I could go on. The details are important, Matt.

10. Bryan1918 Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 4:03 pm

    Agreed with LarryinLA, the details matter most in the design of electoral systems. In fact, in most countries, these details are constantly being adjusted through democratic means in order to produce a more stable/responsive outcome (depending on what the system seems to be lacking.) Saying that the Israelis simply have “the appropriate system” for small countries ignores the range of choices they have to make, even within party-list PR systems. And there is certainly evidence that they could stand to tweak some of the details.

    However, as some commenters have suggested, the US system is probably a bad idea for them, given how little consensus Israeli society seems to have on many basic issues, and the US system is not widely copied elsewhere in the world for a reason. While the US system is highly stable, it is extremely unresponsive to the desires of the people (nowhere else in the world could Bush have remained President for years after the whole country had decided that it hated him…) This works ok in a country like the US which is (despite what you hear on cable news) relatively homogenous ideologically, and has no existential questions tearing it apart at the moment. In a country like Israel, it could be a recipe for disaster.

    Anyway, Matt, I’d encourage you to do a thoughtful post on the advantages and disadvantages of certain kinds of electoral systems, and the relevance for Israel and other in-the-news countries, which is a truly interesting topic. But that’s probably going to take a little more background research than Wikipedia…

11. Nimed Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 4:04 pm

    But the specifics of the Israeli system really do not help create a stable polity — not in a Weimar way, but in a way that makes extortion by the small clientist parties an inevitable part of coalition-forming.

    I don’t know why would you call it extortion, and the parties clientelist. They are merely representing the people who voted for them. Surely we want political parties to be clientist in this sense?

    I would like to give my Portuguese opinion about this. I do think the U.S. system is more stable, and less subject to, let’s say, short-term fluctuations in public opinion, which is overall a good thing.

    The major problem that may arise in the U.S. system, from my outsider’s perspective, is with the set of political positions in which both parties agree. The U.S. system allows the 2 major parties to be deaf to public opinion on issues with which there is agreement between the 2 parties.

    Let me underline that this is a potential problem. I’m not familiar with the results of U.S. opinion polls, so I don’t know if it there are concrete examples of this happening.

12. Lon Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 4:04 pm

    It is possible for a system to be a reasonable one in general and to not work in one particular place. I think it is generally true that Israel has not been well served by its system for the reasons that Lewis mentions. But I think that is less true with the current government than in the past.

    The old problem was that a small party could take control of an important ministry based on the fact that they were willing to apolitically join with whoever promised them the most control of that ministry. So a small religious party could run the education system to guarantee that money went disproportionately to them.

    But the current majority, at least before Labor joined, represented the most coherent grouping one was likely to see. That is to say that under an American system, or a system with higher thresholds, one was likely to see basically the exact same government coalition in place. The issue that defines the current spectrum has largely dwarfed the special interest parties, so at least the dissatisfaction that American observers have with how the elections turned out are not a matter of the electoral system, as Yglesias is correctly noting.

13. SLC Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 4:15 pm

    Re Lon

    Unfortunately, the presence of the Shas Party in the coalition works against the position taken by Mr. Lon. If the 10% threshold were in force, Shas wouldn’t even be in the Knesset, nor would the other religious parties.

14. SLC Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 4:28 pm

    OT, but relative to the situation with Iran, it’s just possible that President Osama and Bibi are playing a game know as good cop/bad cop with the Iranian regime. Thus, Osame play the good cop and Bibi plays the bad cop. Just a thought.

15. pseudonymous in nc Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 4:32 pm

    LarryinLA : there are others, the very small size of the parliament and thus the party lists (increasing corruption and reducing independence of the individual legislators)

    I was going to mention that, but checked the numbers: the MK/pop ratio for Israel is actually 1:60,000, which is pretty much the sweet spot if you compare it to national legislatures around the world. (As opposed to the 1:700,000 for the House of Representatives.) That said, there’s certainly room for a slightly larger Knesset: smaller countries have more wiggle room in that regard.

    I don’t know why would you call it extortion, and the parties clientelist. They are merely representing the people who voted for them. Surely we want political parties to be clientist in this sense?

    To some extent, yes: you want elected members to live up to the basic manifesto pledges of the party they’re elected under. But there’s a distinction to be made in most systems between representing your electorate and representing your party, especially on a day-to-day basis. A British MP, for instance, may only receive 35% of the votes of his/her constituency, but has to respond to the everyday needs of the 65% of constituents who voted for someone else. That, I think, is useful.

    The single-district model means that parties represent dispersed demographic rather than geographical constituencies. That means you don’t have the equivalent system of constituency service, and that can translate into segregated politics and pure clientism.

16. LarryinLA Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 4:47 pm

    pseudoInNy:

    I’m not arguing that the MK/pop ratio is too small. I’m arguing the actual number of representatives is very small. A parliament of 120 is very small, and with the biggest lists getting no more than 30 members into the Knesset, the problems are substantial. Doubling the size of the Knesset would probably be useful. As it stands, party discipline is pretty much an absolute given, which means the Knesset is really reduced to effectively about 10 members. That’s just not a useful legislature.

17. pseudonymous in nc Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 4:49 pm

    Let’s say “clientelism”, since that’s the proper term. And SLC is right to note the presence of Shas, taking (as expected) the spoils-friendly ministries of housing and internal affairs. Quite a few Shas MKs have been convicted of various corruption charges over the last decade.

    I’d be more confident in a 5% threshold than a 10% one, but I also think that the Israeli system would benefit from a degree of districting that would make MKs representatives of people who did not vote for them.

18. pseudonymous in nc Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 5:01 pm

    LarryinLA: absolutely agreed in that regard. Doubling a 120-member body to 240 presents fewer issues than doubling 240 to 480, or 435 to 870. And you’re right that having a 27-member bloc as the “major party” in a coalition is screwed up.

    The knock-on is that the cabinet (plus deputies) makes up more than half the size of the 69-member coalition. If you’ve got cabinet government and n ministries, then you really want a ruling coalition made up of at least 2n members.

    (Lithuania has a legislature of 141 members, about a dozen cabinet ministers, and a mixed constituency/national list system.)

19. SLC Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 5:09 pm

    Using the 2% current threshold, the top 4 parties have

    Kadima – 28
    Likud – 27
    Lieb – 15
    labor – 14.

    Under a 10% threshold, these would be the only parties represented and the count would be

    Kadima – 40
    Likud – 39
    Lieb – 21
    Labor – 20.

    Thus, the coalition of Likud, Liebermans’ Party, and Labor would have 80 seats, which would insulate it against defections. Of course, this is somewhat misleading as the voters for some of the current smaller parties, such as Shas, would probably vote for one of the 4 parties listed above as a vote for the smaller partiy is wasted.

20. rapier Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 5:31 pm

    A tangential but not unimportant thing about Israel is that the Arab party or parties are totally irrelevant in the formation of any coalition. Which come to think of it does tilt in favor of the political system there being broken.

    Democracy is ill equipped to run what is absolutely guaranteed to be a sort of ever creeping forward garrison militarized state. Never mind the exact system of representation.

    The next step will be self selection of Jewish Israelis to leave or the more liberal ones to withdraw from the political system. The more absolutist nationalists and cultural chauvinists to move in. Israel is an historic oddity and so prediction is made doubly difficult but it is almost impossible to envision anything but the current inexorable drift ever rightward.

    The amount of blood and burned bodies of Israeli opponents and enemies is likely to be stupendous.

21. abb1 Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 5:35 pm

    The electoral system is fine, the electorate is the problem.

    They imported Zionists from all over the world, giving them instant citizenship; they denied citizenship to and expelled most of the indigenous population.

    The result, of course, is not a normal country, but a Zionist club (or ‘entity’, if you wish) masquerading as a country. No electoral system will fix this travesty.

    Send the foreign-born Zionists back home, bring back the indigenous population, and then any electoral system will do.

22. stringph Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 5:38 pm

    Belgium is precisely an example of this sort of system *not* working. Belgian politics has been broken for a long time now.

    The general problem is parties developing and having significant power despite being essentially regionalist and/or minority-interest. Belgian parties are either Walloon or Flemish, whoever actually forms a government can never have national credibility because they bear a label which excludes the other half of the country.

    Israel’s problem is rather different, the proliferation of tiny parties whose stated policies would be absolutely ruinous for the great majority of the population. They have no proper place in a national government, but are numerically required for coalitions in which they only prevent the serious parties (those who could pursue their policies without immediate breakdown of society) from effectively doing anything.

    There is a serious case to be made for banning, in national elections, parties whose basic appeal is exclusionary – i.e. parties of identity politics, religious or ethnic or racial or geographic … or indeed gender. It makes no sense to have national parties based on distinguishing between citizens in this way.

23. LarryinLA Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 5:39 pm

    SLC:

    Actually, it’s not clear what the government would be, since right/left split exactly 50/50 there. Kadima would have been in a much stronger position and Livni would almost certainly be PM in that scenario.

    The knock-on is that the cabinet (plus deputies) makes up more than half the size of the 69-member coalition. If you’ve got cabinet government and n ministries, then you really want a ruling coalition made up of at least 2n members.

    Absolutely. I believe I mentioned this before, as well.

    There’s one other elephant in the room. The Israeli system is de facto super-majoritarian. Since the Arab parties rarely make it into government, you effectively need more than 50%+1 to form a coalition. I think on a few occassions the Arab parties have made up a portion of the governing coalition, though not officially with any ministries. That there are Arab MKs is to Israel’s credit, however, their role in coalition politics is mostly to make it harder to form stable governments, especially on the left.

24. SLC Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 5:42 pm

    Re abb1

    Send the foreign-born Zionists back home, bring back the indigenous population, and then any electoral system will do.

    That’s right, send the Jews kicked out of Iraq and their descendants, back to Iraq. I’m sure that the Iraqis would welcome them back with open arms. Not.

25. SLC Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 5:47 pm

    Re LarryinLA

    In my 10% threshold scenario, there wouldn’t be any Arab parties represented. However, the major parties would find it to their advantage to place some Arabs high enough on their lists to be elected. Probably, those Arabs would be better then the likes of people like Mr. Tibi, who apparently cares nothing for the welfare of the folks who vote for him.

26. LarryinLA Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 5:47 pm

    Send the foreign-born Zionists back home, bring back the indigenous population, and then any electoral system will do.

    Really? Where? And what about those Zionists born in Israel?

27. Gitai Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 5:59 pm

    I agree that 2% is too low, but I don’t think it would eliminate the extremist parties. Instead it will consolidate them. Degal ha-Torah and Agudat Yisrael were two small, sad little parties that had all the electoral prospects of the party that wanted to legalize pot. So instead, they formed United Torah Judaism. They would still be below a 10% threshold, so they’d hook up with Shas. The National Union would be absorbed into Yisrael Beitenu. The Arabs wouldn’t be shut out, but Balad, Hadash, Ta’al, and the United Arab List would need to combine. Meretz, Mafdal, all the smaller parties would have to wheel and deal to get inclusion into a larger party. But on the bright side, the consolidation of the right and left wings would probably always be enough to prevent the need for a small extremist party to round things out.

28. pseudonymous in nc Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 6:05 pm

    I also noticed that SLC didn’t bother mentioning that his proposed 10% threshold would exclude the existing Arab parties, even with a joint list that included Hadash. For him, of course, that’s a feature rather than a bug. The existence of separate Arab parties is as problematic as the religious or ethnic-nationalist Israeli parties, but it’s hard to get there from here, even in a polity like Northern Ireland where there’s much less clientelism.

    In any case, most closed-list systems get by with a 5-7% threshold. (The Lithuanian list system, comprising 50% of members, has a 5% threshold for party lists and 7% threshold for multi-party lists.)

    There is a serious case to be made for banning, in national elections, parties whose basic appeal is exclusionary

    You can mediate it without such extreme measures by introducing an element of districting. Having to do constituency service for people who didn’t vote for you is a good thing. My guess is that most MKs don’t have much working contact with ordinary voters outside their core constituency.

29. SLC Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 6:18 pm

    Re pseudonymous in nc

    See comment 25 where I address this issue.

30. Giles Robertson Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 6:29 pm

    With regard to the Weimar Republic note that in 1932 a majority of Germans voted for either the Nazis or the Communist Party. Given that underlying distribution of opinion, how was a different electoral system going to change things?

    The argument is, of course, that the political dysfunction of the Weimar republic (1919-33) produced the opinion distribution of 1932. In short, support for the Nazis and Communists is to be viewed as a dependent variable.

    It’s still a bad argument – the reasons to be suspicious of the d’Hondt methods are clearer than this: notably the power it gives to the compilers of party lists. Also Israel has an unusually low threshold for representation compared to other countries, which encourages a series of fringe, single interest parties.

31. Ed Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 7:30 pm

    Had Weimer used a single member district, plurality vote(commonly known as “first past the post)system like the US, with the same party votes the Nazis would have gotten a majority in the Reichstag about a year or two earlier, without even needing to burn the place down and arrest a fifth of the deputies. Before 1930 they wouldn’t have had representatives in the Reichstag, but historically in Weimer they weren’t much of a problem before 1930 anyway.

    OK, if you posit that a fringe party can’t come out of nowhere to be a major contender with single member plurality (though it has happened), then Hitler could have taken over Hugenberg’s DNVP, which was the major right wing party before he came along, and was almost as bad as the Nazis.

    What if Weimer had a presidential system? Well actually they did have a fairly strong presidency. Removing most of the president’s power was the most significant step the Germans took after World War II to prevent a repeat of what happend with Weimer.

    I can only imagine the headaches created with Israel using single member plurality. Do you have districts on the West Bank where only Jews can vote, so the settlers can keep their representation? Or do the settlers vote absentee? Do you gerrymander districts so no single one has a large Arab Israeli population? Plus you would probabably get a fairly ugly nationalist-religious coalition with a solid Knesset majority every time, though I think for people like Bernard Lewis this is a feature, not a bug. It might be worth doing if you can disenfranchise the settlers.

    Israel would probably benefit from switching from closed party list to open party list, and in making it harder to form small splinter parties. In fact the semi-proportional system used in both the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland would be a good fit. But Matt is correct that the problems with Israeli politics stem from things no electoral system can correct.

32. Jeffrey Davis Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 8:20 pm

    The Israeli system reflects the psychological reality of the religious mind: certain issues cannot be compromised. And since what those might be can’t be predicted from rational first principles — those thousands of crazy injunctions in the Bible, for example — you’re going to have minds that are comfortable with going to the mat for arbitrary minutiae.

33. lewandorkski Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 8:23 pm

    I don’t think the structure of political systems matter as much as the culture. I mean, France had a presidential system and had to deal with Le Pen. Italy keeps on rewriting their electoral system and has the same instability problems. Our sepratist problem led to a civil war, and Belgium’s and Canada’s are both causing political instability – despite having three wildly different political systems. Having a first-past-the-post system in India has caused their parliament to be extremely fragmented, to the point where 20+ parties have representation in parliament. I think that parliamentary systems generally work better (a collapsed government looks better to me than any possible showdown between a president and his legislature), but I’m not quite sure it actually matters. What matters more is that everyone is willing to talk to each other.

    And, the 10% barrier has only been implemented in Turkey, in order to disenfranchise the Kurds, where it has the perverse affects of letting the islamists rule over a bevy of secularist parties with ~8% of the vote.

34. Jonathan Locker Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 11:22 pm

    David Ben-Gurion was always disappointed in the electoral system of Israel. If you remember, Israel was born during a war with its Arab neighbors. Due to the fact that just about EVERYONE was in the army, and constantly moving around, it was not possible to have an electoral system with districts…as it was impossible to know where anyone was living.

    The plan was always to draw districts once Israel was stabilized. However when that point happened, the smaller parties had gained a veto power, and an electoral system based on districts as opposed to direct proportional representation never happened.

    It was an accident of history that Israel has its current electoral system.

    I am not judging whether a direct proportional system is superior than a system with the plurality of votes in a district taking the seat, but that the current system was done for convenience, and not because it was favored by the founders of Israel.

35. Ex Boyfriend Says:
    April 8th, 2009 at 8:11 pm

    Hey, nice tips. Perhaps I’ll buy a bottle of beer to that man from that forum who told me to visit your blog

36. ethinfelt Says:
    April 8th, 2009 at 8:26 pm

    FANTASTIC!

37. Vince Delmonte Says:
    April 15th, 2009 at 5:38 am

    The style of writing is quite familiar . Did you write guest posts for other blogs?