Eleventh in an ongoing series
RISHON LEZION, Israel -- Imagine that you enter a voting booth in the United States to choose your congressman, and there is only one choice on the ballot: "The Democratic Party" or "The Republican Party." This is the only option that Israelis have at election time.
As Israeli voters ponder the fate of their country following its recent, inconclusive elections, the Jewish state itself is facing a crisis of confidence. The people distrust their leaders following numerous investigations, convictions, and resignations from the top levels of government for serious crimes (including a former president Moshe Katsav's future trial for rape and sexual harassment) and blatant ineptitude (the failed war against Hizbollah in 2006). Civil society is becoming fractured and polarized because of political, ethnic, and religious divisions. The chance of peace with the Palestinians is looking increasingly remote with each passing year.
All of these problems have complex causes, but there is one underlying factor that is a partially responsible for each of them: Israel's broken electoral system. If Israel wants to solve these fundamental issues, then the government must replace its proportional-representation electoral process with one that resembles the American model: a representative democracy that uses a winner-take-all system.
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When a country decides upon an electoral system, it must choose between two types that have conflicting values.
Proportional representation, the system used here, gives a political party a number of seats in the legislature that is equivalent to its level of support in an election. If the center-right Likud Party in Israel, for example, receives twenty-five percent of the overall vote in an election, it would have roughly the same percentage of seats in the next parliament.
However, a representative democracy divides a country into electoral districts, and the candidate who receives the most votes in a district becomes the representative of that area in the legislature. This is the model for U.S. elections.
Each system has its benefits and drawbacks. Proportional representation ensures that nearly all opinions have at least some presence in government. This allows for a diversity of viewpoints, and it ensures that minority voices and various interests have political voices. In Israel, this results in a political party for Arab citizens having representation in the legislature of a Jewish state, and it allowed for a small interest-group like the Gil party here to gain enough influence in the 2006 election to advocate for pensioners in the resulting parliament. However, Israeli governments elected through this system are always unstable because a single party never gains enough legislative seats in such a fractured country to claim majority-control of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, by itself. This forces the major parties to gain a majority of seats by forming coalitions with minor and extreme political parties, which then gain a disproportionate amount of influence and an ability to extort through a veto pen.
In contrast, representative systems usually result in political moderation and internal stability because of statistics. The distribution of political beliefs of any given population usually resembles the shape of a bell curve: There are a large number of people in the middle, but the level of support declines swiftly as one moves further left and right. When the size of a sample population increases, so does the overall tendency towards moderation. As a result, the candidates who receive the highest number of votes in most legislative districts will usually be moderates from the center-left or center-right parties. In the United States, for example, nearly every congressman is a Democrat or Republican. However, the negative consequence is that these parties hold a monopoly on power. Other viewpoints are rarely heard.
Israel's proportional-representation system -- in which the people literally vote for a party in Knesset elections -- does result in the presence of various opinions in the legislature, but the tradeoff is that governments can be weak, ineffectual, and paralyzed. To solve the complex issues that are facing the country, Israel needs to value political moderation and stability over ensuring that a diversity of opinions is involved in public policy. It needs to divide the country into legislative districts and implement a winner-take-all system in which each party, following a primary, runs one candidate in each locality. The benefits would be numerous.
Functioning governments. Small and extremist parties would receive fewer seats, if any, in the Knesset while the center-left Labor, moderate Kadima, and center-right Likud would receive many more. The center would become stronger, and the extremes would lose power because a single party would be more likely to gain a majority in the Knesset by itself (or with one other party at most). Governments would survive until the next scheduled election because they would never be held hostage by smaller parties that have disproportionate influence in governing coalitions. Minor parties would not have the ability to veto the peace process -- or other major issues -- by toppling the government. The ultra-Orthodox Shas party, for example, would not be able to demand -- and receive -- NIS 775 million ($224 million) from the government for its religious institutions, as it did last year. (Pork-barrel politics, it seems, can still occur in a Jewish state.)
National consensus. Israeli policy would generally remain consistent over time because governments and ministries would be comprised of people who range only from the center-left to the center-right. The Israeli government and people would be able to form broad, moderate compromises on the unaddressed political and religious issues that have plagued Israeli society for decades: the conflicting desires to have a country that is a Jewish state, a democracy, and in the ancient Land of Israel; the issues of Jewish identity and diversity within the Jewish religion; and the longstanding conflict with the Palestinians.
Many efforts to resolve these issues are vetoed by extremist parties whom governments need to please to keep them in governing coalitions to remain in power. So far, Israel has chosen to sweep these longstanding controversies under the proverbial rug in an effort to prolong the unsustainable status quo as long as possible. But it is time to settle them once and for all.
Faith in government. Israelis vote in every election, but they have no one in the Knesset who directly represents them because party officials usually compile their own lists of candidates for the Knesset. If Likud, for example, wins enough votes to receive thirty seats, then the top thirty people on the party's list will become members of the Knesset.
If individual members of the Knesset were chosen directly by the people rather than political parties, then Israelis would have more confidence in their leaders. The fact that party officials create candidate lists only invites corruption at every level. A member of the Knesset would be less likely to engage in unfit practices if the people had the direct ability to remove him from office at the next election. The quality of the members of the Knesset would increase when the people have the ability to evaluate a candidate's ideas, qualifications, and integrity before choosing whether to vote for him.
Moreover, an electoral system in which people vote for parties and ideologies -- as opposed to voting for a person -- encourages partisanship and extremism in general.
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Still, a representative democracy in Israel would be far from perfect. In recent years, the Democrats and Republicans in various U.S. states have redrawn legislative districts in an effort to ensure that representatives from their parties are consistently re-elected. To avoid such a scenario in Israel, the power to determine the electoral boundaries should be given not to the Knesset but to a multi-party committee appointed by the president and comprised of esteemed, retired statesmen.
There may be another significant issue. If minor and extreme parties are marginalized, then it would be likely that non-Jews -- most significantly Israeli Arabs -- would lose their representation because they comprise a plurality in few, if any, places. Those who are extremely passionate about one issue, like Gil's pensioners, would also lose their ability to advance their cause by forming a political party and gaining a few Knesset seats.
However, these problems would probably be less significant than one would think. In an effort to attract additional voters, the remaining two or three major parties would eventually co-opt the political causes (like advocating for pensioners) and ethnic constituencies (like Russian immigrants) that had been represented by various minor parties. (This is similar to what happens in the United States: either the Democrats or the Republicans will neutralize a third party by adopting its cause.) In addition, the electoral committee could draw the electoral map in a manner that unites Israeli Arabs, or any other demographic group, in an given area into a single legislative district to ensure that they have representation. The benefits of a representative democracy would far outweigh any possible drawbacks.
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Implementing such a radical change in Israel's electoral system would not be easy. Of course, the minor political parties would resist any reforms that would decrease their power. All of the political parties will fight against any changes that reduce their ability to pick the individual members of the Knesset themselves, but they should dismiss these selfish concerns for the sake of the country.
However, there is a way to adopt these needed reforms. President Shimon Peres could lead the way. As Israel's head of state, he is supposed to rise above politics and represent the Israeli people as a whole. In this capacity, Peres can work to persuade the Knesset. The leaders of Labor, Kadima, and Likud could support this effort as well. The three major parties would naturally benefit from these reforms, and they would be able gather enough votes to pass this legislation. Although electoral reform seems to be dead in the next government already, this issue cannot be taken off the table.
After sixty years as the Middle East's only democracy, it is time for Israel to reform its electoral system before the next election and unite its people under a banner of moderation, stability, and unity. This might be the only way for the Jewish state to survive for another sixty years.
Prior letter: Sex and Feminism
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