Neil Rogachevsky on Israeli Electoral Reform

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2020

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Israeli politics are a mess. After its second election in six months failed to produce a governing coalition, Israelis are scheduled to head back to the polls for the third time in a single year’s time this coming March. In the Jewish state’s short history, this kind of political crisis is a first, but its seeds may have been planted at the very founding of the state.

Since its very first election, Israel has chosen leaders through a system of proportional representation (PR). At election time, Israelis vote for parties, not individual candidates, and seats are then distributed in the 120-member Knesset in proportion to each party’s share of the vote. The system is simple and democratic, but, argues Neil Rogachevsky in a recent article in Tablet, it is also the source of Israel’s chronic political instability and recent electoral chaos.

In this podcast, Rogachevsky joins Jonathan Silver to discuss his piece and make the case for reforming Israel’s electoral system. He explains why PR systems routinely fail to produce political stability, how they reduce lawmakers’ accountability to the public, and why a “first-past-the-post” system would make Israeli politics healthier and more representative.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble, as well as "We Are Your Friends" by Mocha Music.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Israeli politics are a mess. It seems like they're always a mess, but they're especially
0:12.8	a mess right now. Following a liqueude victory in national elections back in March of 2015,
0:19.5	elections were due to be held in November 2019,
0:22.8	but a dispute over a law requiring Haredi participation in national service triggered early
0:28.8	elections, and they were held back in April of 2019. That election gave Prime Minister Netanyahu
0:35.2	the mandate to form a government, but after a month of negotiation,
0:38.7	no government could be formed, and new elections were called again for September, just five months later.
0:45.2	September came, elections were held, Prime Minister Netanyahu received another mandate to form a government,
0:51.8	and another government could not be formed. Then his main political rival,
0:56.3	Benny Gans, of the Blue and White Party, was given a chance to form a government and he too failed
1:01.0	to assemble a governing coalition that could bring stability to Israeli politics. A third election is now
1:06.9	scheduled for March 2nd, 2020, and honestly, there's no guarantee that that election will
1:12.3	bring order to the chaos either. By that time, it will be nearly a full calendar year, since Israel
1:18.8	will have had a secure Knesset majority to govern the nation. Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your
1:25.0	host, Jonathan Silver. On today's show, we're not going to enter into
1:29.1	Israeli politics, the matters of policy and partisanship over which all democratic countries
1:35.1	rightly argue. We're going to think instead about the forms of Israeli public life, the structures
1:41.7	in place that facilitate argument and elections, and we're going to
1:45.9	try and think creatively about an electoral reform that satisfies the democratic requirements of
1:51.7	Israeli citizenship and improves the electoral system by making elections more decisive.
1:58.2	We're going to speak about Israel's system of proportional representation.
2:03.2	My guest is Neil Rogachevsky, frequent contributor to Mosaic. He teaches Israel studies and
	...

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