Israel’s election system puts coalition deals ahead of voter choice - opinion

As the dust settles on another bruising Israeli election cycle, public attention has already turned toward the machinations to form the 38th government in Israel’s 78-year-long history.

Since its reestablishment, the State of Israel has been a parliamentary democracy, and it has systematically utilized a proportional representation (PR) system of election. Each party is awarded seats based on its share of the total number of votes cast nationally, after votes cast for “fringe” parties taking less than 3.25% of the votes cast are set aside. Such votes are, in effect, wasted votes.

In Israel, PR is based on national party lists, rather than on elections within regional or other subnational constituencies. Theoretically, PR (at the national level) serves to produce the most equitable set of electoral results, particularly because it avoids the well-known downsides associated with first-past-the-post (FPTP) election systems, as practiced in the UK and US.

The foremost downside of FPTP is that one need only attain the largest plurality in a constituency to prevail, rather than a majority of the voters in that particular constituency. In other words, a candidate with a narrow (and, perhaps, inconsequential) plurality can prevail even if a substantial majority voted against that candidate.

However, Israeli PR, that is, proportional representation at the national level, has its own downsides. Israeli PR measures public support and gives voice to many divergent parties. But that comes at the cost of factionalizing parties and the public.

In such a system, it is rare for one party to gain an outright majority, because the closer it moves to majority status, the more likely a wing or faction will break away. In such circumstances, forming a majority government will depend not on voter choice, but on the bargaining, often secret, among parties and factions.

To put it another way, FPTP will frequently yield two dominant parties giving the voters a concrete binary choice, and the voters will choose the government. Under Israeli PR, voters choose parties, but which parties enter government will depend on facts and circumstances unrelated to the election and on relative deal-making skills (if not outright bribery).

Indeed, what is euphemistically called “deal-making” is sometimes little more than a party’s absolving itself of its most recent party manifesto in order to place its party leaders in government ministries within a larger coalition. All these machinations are merely a way to say: Voters have no role here.

In the Israeli PR system, voters get a choice and a voice, but that voice does not automatically translate voter sentiment into specific electoral results. One might conclude that Israeli PR is a bulwark against elections leading to meaningful change. If change should emerge, it has more to do with the machinations of government formation than with which parties enter the Knesset, and how many MKs they bring into the government coalition.

Devoid of any constituency or regional element, the defining factor in forming a coalition government in Israel is voting efficiency. This does not simply mean turning out one’s base; rather it means ensuring that all votes cast for one’s own party and its potential coalition partners go to parties that will exceed the 3.25% threshold.

In a tight national election, a few hundred votes can be the difference between the trappings of ministerial office and the lean exile of opposition. Haunted by the 1992 election, the Israeli Right has endeavored never to repeat this past mistake, which allowed the Labor government of Yitzhak Rabin to take power.

Indeed, before the 2022 Knesset elections, Netanyahu, then the opposition leader, worked assiduously to ensure that the Right did not leak votes to minor parties that would fall below the 3.25% threshold, thereby blocking his return to government.

Moaz would have fallen below the electoral threshold running alone, and there was no guarantee either whether Smotrich’s or Ben-Gvir’s parties would have surpassed the 3.25% threshold. Even if they had, it would have been only by a small margin.

Instead, through a brokered arrangement, the thousands of votes that would have been “wasted” on Noam were harnessed, and all three faction leaders went on to hold positions of power in government. What does any of this have to do with voters and voter choice?

Netanyahu was unable to broker a similar arrangement in this election. Time and negotiations will tell whether this failure stymies (or ends) his political future.

In this election, as in the last one, we expect that over 70% of Israelis will turn out to vote, and that over 4.7 million votes will be cast. So, we ask: Is it equitable that the defining factor will not be the votes cast for any number of parties who stand on their own two feet, but by the ability of either the Left or the Right not to lose votes to their furthermost wings?

This goes to a deeper, more fundamental question for Israelis to decide upon: What is it that they want (or what anyone should want) from their electoral system? Is it an electoral system that empowers, or disempowers, different factions in government formation talks, or is it a system that produces a clear preferred choice of the electorate?

This is a question that should not be decided upon merely by those who form the next government, or indeed, merely by all those who form the 26th Knesset, but by a broad process of national consultation.