Knesset
Introduction
Israel’s electoral system is a unitary, party-list proportional representation system. Each eligible voter (every individual older than 18) may cast a ballot with the name of the list/party of his/her choosing, or an empty ballot. Upon completion of the election period the votes are summed and two key metrics emerge:
- votes per parliament seat
- an electoral threshold of votes a party/list must meet for its votes to count towards a seat.
Then each party/list receives a number of seats (out of 120) proportional to the number of votes it received, with any excess votes divided among the parties based on the D’Hondt/Bader-Ofer method;1 The parties then deliberate and attempt to form a coalition that would meet –and hopefully exceed– the majority requirement (>=61 seats).
The system was formed in such a way to enable representation of every reliogio-political constituent group in the nascent state of Israel, as well as to encourage collaboration across and co-option of said groups. That being said, as time passed fulfillment of sectarian interests triumphed over co-option and collaboration in Israel’s parliamentary culture. Thus, a political deadlock became a more probable outcome.
The following analysis attempts to analyze one such deadlock: the 2019-2021 electoral deadlock which encompassed 4 elections. It shall attempt to answer the following questions: which coalitions were possible in a combinatoric sense, and which parties if any constituted a structural pivot; Answering these questions would allow to better judge whether the system was actually constrained due to vote distribution, or due to a lack of a will to cooperate by the political actors.