Matt Yglesias

Blame the Threshold, Not the PR

Rick Hertzberg blogs a point that Adam Blickstein made to me in person yesterday: While there’s nothing unusual about Israel’s use of party list proportional representation, there is something unusual about the use of a very low threshold—just two percent—to get into the Knesset. It would be more common to have something like five percent.

That’s a fair point, and something the Israelis might want to change.

Stop Smearing the Israeli Election System!

Bernard Lewis, writing in The Wall Street Journal becomes about the millionth American friend of Israel to assert that Israel’s election system is the source of its problems. The people making this argument tend to know exactly four things about electoral systems:

• Israel uses party-list proportional representation.
• So did the Weimar Republic!
• Israel’s politics is messed-up.
• In America we use a different system!
• Q.E.D.

Really. This is the argument:

This system of voting by lists is the source of many of the difficulties which plague Israeli public life. In the English-speaking countries — the oldest and most stable democracies — voting is by constituencies. The founders of the state of Israel preferred the Weimar model — hardly an auspicious choice.

The system used in Israel is D’Hondt Method Party-List Proportional Representation and it’s not some idiosyncratic Weimar-and-Israel thing, it’s in use in many medium-sized democracies and most of the small ones. In alphabetical order they use it in Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, East Timor, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro, The Netherlands, Paraguay, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Scotland, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, Venezuela and Wales. The similar Sainte-Laguë Method of list PR is used in New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Latvia, Kosovo, and is partially used in Germany.

Nobody ever writes op-eds in the United States about how list-PR is killing Denmark or Portugal or how local government will never work in Scotland until it’s abandoned. This is simply the system that’s usually used in small countries. And Israel is a small country. So they use the appropriate system.

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?

Extremism and Proportional Representation

Jeffrey Goldberg is among those who think Israel’s problems can be lain at the feet of its proportional representation system:

The Arab world doesn’t have enough democracy; Israel has too much. Israel’s is an insane system, which gives every lunatic fringe party disproportionate say in the running of the country, and therefore encourages radicalism. Lieberman is incorrigible, but if he had to exist within the framework of a center-right party, he’d be marginally less offensive.

First, it needs to be said that Israel’s system, whether you like it or not, is hardly an “insane” outlier. Most small democracies use very similar systems and Israel is a small democracy.

Second, as regard Lieberman I think this is totally wrong. If he had to exist within the framework of a center-right party in an American-style system, he and his followers would be the “base” of his party. He wouldn’t be a viable national leader, but he could still, à la Mike Pence, be an influential force. But more to the point, the larger center-right party would be anchored to the base’s views. Under the current Israeli system, there’s no procedural rule forcing Netanyahu to govern in coalition with Lieberman. The current electoral results are consistent with a center-right coalition grounded in a Likud-Kadima partnership. By contrast, in the U.S. system only coalitions that start at the extreme and work inwards are viable on anything other than a spot basis. And one consequence of this is that centrist dealmaking tends, à la Nelson-Collins, to devolve into inane horse-trading rather than a genuine effort to develop a synthesis of ideas.

Israel: What a Center-Right Nation Looks Like

I read some folks in comments yesterday suggesting that somehow the outcome of the Israeli elections debunks my preference for parliamentary systems. Indeed, I recently heard Hubert Védrine, the former Foreign Minister of France, suggest that the whole key to the problem lay in the Israeli electoral system.

One needs to respond to that on several levels.

First, nothing about the idea of a parliamentary system compels you to embrace the idea of proportional representation via party lists or Israel’s very low cut-off threshold for inclusion in parliament. I would say that party list PR is only appropriate for a small country and certainly not something you’d want to try in the United States, which would be better-suited for something like multiple-member constituencies (as in Ireland) or the current first-past-the-post system. But Israel is a small country and I think this is a perfectly appropriate system for them. If I were to offer a purely procedural criticism it would be that the Knesset has too many members. The Netherlands has a similar electoral system, but its parliament features 150 seats for 16 million people. Israel only has 7 million people and 120 MKs.

That said, it’s just not the case that Israeli security policy is being paralyzed by tiny extremist parties. On the contrary, Israel has normally been governed by coalitions dominated by a large centrist party—first Labor then Kadima—which is precisely the virtue of these kind of electoral systems. Unfortunately, underlying Israeli public opinion has shifted sharply to the right over the past ten years. Likud used to be the main rightwing party. Then, under the government of Ariel Sharon in fragmented into a more pragmatic Kadima faction and a hardline-nationalist faction led by Bibi Netanyahu. Now, Israeli opinion has shifted so far to the right that Kadima, which was founded as a center-right party just a few years ago is now left of the public opinion’s center. And the far-right Yisrael Beitanu party is bigger than center-left Labor and dramatically bigger than left-wing Meretz. Meanwhile, Labor has itself shifted right. A politics dominated, on both sides, by nationalists—ranging from pragmatic nationalists to not-so-pragmatic nationalists to frothing-at-the-mouth-racist nationalists—is not so promising for the cause of peace. But that’s because of public opinion not electoral systems.

Party-Banning In Israel

James Kirchick mounts a semi-defense of Israel’s move to ban the party’s two Arab political parties. He notes, among other things, that Israel has banned parties in the past including most recently Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Kach Party that was running on basically an ethnic cleansing platform:

The standards for operating a legal political party in Israel are hardly unreasonable. The four offenses that could lead to possible banning are:

* Any rejection (in the party’s goals or activities) of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish, democratic state.
* Any incitement to racism.
* Any support of the armed struggle of an enemy state or terrorist organization against the State of Israel
* Any hint of a cover for illegal activity.

The case for banning these two Arab parties may not be as strong as it was for the outlawing of the Kahane movement, but this decision did not just come out of nowhere. In the United States, if the Ku Klux Klan were to form a political party, advocating the dissolution of the American government and inciting violence from within and without, it would be banned, and rightly so.

I think this conflates some different issues. Obviously the United States would ban organizations that are dedicated to the incitement of violence or that are part of a conspiracy to effect the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. We would not, it seems to me, ban organizations merely for advocating or inciting racism. But America is an outlier in terms of its strong stand in favor of free speech in this regard. I think we’re right and the European and Israeli approach is wrong, but the Israeli approach is hardly outside the bounds of institutional set-ups that count as democratic. Rejecting the existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish state seems like a different matter to me. Israel is one of a number of democracies that combines religious tolerance with an established state religion (pretty much all of Protestant Europe, e.g.) and also one of a number of democracies that relies heavily on ethnic origin as a criteria for immigration (Germany, Finland, etc.) both of which are important parts of Israel’s identity as a Jewish state. If you ask me, that’s fine. But by the same token, it’s hardly beyond the pale for a political party to think that those kind of policies should be changed and if that means calling into question Israel’s existence as a specifically “Jewish state,” as opposed to a state where lots of Jews live, I don’t really see why that should be illegal.

More broadly, though, I agree with Kirchick that the pragmatics of this are hard to understand. Israeli Arab public opinion isn’t a small, violent conspiracy that you can ban and extinguish. It’s a real issue that Israel needs to grapple with.

The Case for Design

One doesn’t necessarily think of “elegant design” and “public infrastructure” as going hand in hand, but in a lot of ways these are important issues. People don’t like to see really ugly things built near where they live. But infrastructure is especially needed where people live, so that it can serve actual people. Consequently, a lot of useful stuff winds up going unbuilt since people don’t want to see something ugly put in their line of sight. Which brings me to James Wimberly on building electrical transmission lines we can believe in:

The EDF is rare and possibly unique among big utilities in seriously exploring new transmission tower designs to reduce visual nuisance. The model in the photo – “Roseau”, or reed – is part of its second generation of tubular towers; the other is the asymmetric “Fougère” – heather – which is fun but might become irritating after a few years. The first generation was the workmanlike “Muguet” – lily of the valley – , which is a common sight:

EDF has formidable engineering resources and reputation, and you can take it that these designs meet high specifications, including 170 km/hour winds. But it is coy on costs. The designer Marc Mimram gives the unit cost of the complex “Roseau” pylon as €580k. The typical cost of a traditional 400kv backbone line in France was €600k/km in 2002, of which about a third went on the pylons, making €70k each. Say €100k now.

Along those same lines, I was reading an interview with some architect/urban planner guy in Dwell on a plane over the weekend and he was arguing that we ought to pay more attention to the design of our garbage cans. He points out that large cities have a ton of these, so the cost-per-unit of investing in design would be pretty low. And on top of that, good garbage cans are integral to the success of public spaces. You can’t have tons of litter everywhere in a good public space. But a public space that’s actually used by people is likely to generate a lot of litter — soda cans, food wrappers, etc. — as a consequence of its success. Hence, garbage cans. But garbage is ugly undermining your effort to build a good public space. Hence, design is needed.

For power lines, meanwhile, the point is not merely that we need these lines to power our homes but that building next-generation renewable energy facilities on a mass scale is going to require next-generation transmission lines to move electricity from where the wind and sun is to where the people live.