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date: 18 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

Israel has experienced both failed and successful attempts to reform its democratic institutions in the seventy years since its founding. The most noteworthy failure has been in the promotion of much-needed electoral reform that would moderate the “extreme” features of the hyper-representative, party-centered electoral system. Successes range from small modifications of the electoral system to wide-ranging reforms of the government system at the local and national levels and within political parties. These reforms injected doses of majoritarianism and personalism into the system. But they did not help to solve the problems in the functioning of the Israeli regime; in fact, they often made them worse.

Keywords: Israeli politics, political reform, electoral reform, electoral threshold, legal electoral threshold, primaries, direct elections, politics of reform, referendum, constructive vote of no confidence

Gideon Rahat

Gideon Rahat, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

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