Electoral and Constitutional Reform for Israel
Daniel J. Elazar
"In framing a government which is to be administered by men
over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first
enable the government to control the governed; and in the next
place, oblige it to control itself." With these words in
Federalist #51, James Madison points out the essential problem of
constructing a proper constitution or frame of government. He
continues: "A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary
control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the
necessity of auxiliary precautions."
Successful political systems from a democratic perspective
are those in which the government has sufficient energy to
govern, that is to say, to confront the tasks placed before it,
and at the same time is sufficiently controlled to be responsible
to the people. Madison again: "It may be a reflection on human
nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the
abuses of government. But what is government itself but the
greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels,
no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men,
neither external nor internal controls on government would be
necessary." Since this is not the case, every political society
must find ways to both empower and limit its government.
That is the problem of electoral and constitutional reform
in Israel today. On one hand we have what seems to be the most
democratic possible electoral system. Any group that wins a
touch more than a bare 1 percent of the popular vote in a Knesset
election gains a seat in the Knesset and, under present
conditions, a chance to enter the governing coalition and indeed
the government itself under advantageous conditions. The end
result of all this, however, is to frustrate both necessary
dimensions of good government. The government that results must
rest upon so delicately balanced a coalition that it cannot
muster the energy necessary to govern effectively, while the
electoral system is so party-based that the people feel
unrepresented most of the time. Under such circumstances,
electoral and constitutional reform become vitally necessary.
While Israel's predicament has its own special flavor, in
fact, parliamentary government is in trouble all over the world.
The Economist (27 August 1988) describes the situation in
Britain: "Parliament, unlike the United States Congress, is not a
true legislature. It is a small part of a legislative process
dominated by ministers and officials... MPs are self-importance
because they lack real importance; they look busy because they
are not actually engaged in business." What is true in Great
Britain, still a model democracy in many respects, is even more
true in other countries, which is why there has been a steady
movement away from parliamentary systems to others emphasizing
the constitutional separation of executive and legislative
powers.
Parliamentary systems developed out of the European
experience with absolute monarch who had to be brought to heel
and subordinated to the will of the people. Parliaments became
the devices for doing that through the people's representatives
elected at first to control the purse so that the monarch could
not do what he or she pleased without some measure of popular
consent. As time passed, Parliament extended its powers to the
point where a committee of Parliament became His Majesty's
Government headed by the king's first (or prime) minister. By
the end of the modern epoch, the seventeenth century imbalance
toward absolute monarchy had been transformed into an imbalance
in the other direction. Kings, if they still occupied their
thrones, had become figureheads, Parliament was supreme, and the
government, its committee, controlled Parliament. That was
because parliamentary institutions were built to check monarchy,
not to check each other.
In the meantime, Montesquieu and the United States had
demonstrated in theory and practice why democratic government, to
be both energetic and democratic, required separation of powers
with meaningful original authority lodged in the executive,
legislative, and judicial branches of government. Like other
countries in the world, Israel must learn that lesson and proceed
accordingly.
Which Electoral System?
The Israeli political system may have finally reached the
crisis that will bring about action to reform its electoral and
governmental structure, long overdue changes that will enable
those elected to govern to do so. Two kinds of changes are
proposed. One, electoral reform, has two purposes. At its most
effective, it would enable a single party to win a majority of
seats in the Knesset to govern without a coalition. At the very
least it should eliminate the multiplicity of very small parties,
each of which is needed for coalition-building and hence can
demand an outrageous price for its support.
It seems fairly well conceded by now that in the Israeli
context no reasonable electoral reform can bring about a majority
for a single political party. The divisions in Israeli society
are too much like those of continental Europe to make possible a
two-party system. In theory it would be possible to enable a
single party to win a majority of the seats if the country were
divided into 120 single-member districts, but at best it would
inevitably be a minority government, something like the present
British system where three or four competing parties insure that
even the party that wins a majority of the seats barely exceeds
40 percent of the popular vote.
Moreover, because of the distribution of population in
Israel, a pure single-member constituency system might give the
balance of power to the ultra-Orthodox and the Arabs, the two
minority groups whose residential patterns would permit them to
secure several Knesset seats even under that system should they
choose to run their own candidates. Nevertheless, such a system
has sufficient merit to deserve serious consideration since it
would prevent the formation of small parties whose voters were
spread throughout the country, not sufficiently concentrated in
any particular geographic area. It could only succeed if the two
major parties became broader coalitions that gave voice to those
minority interests.
On the other hand, if the more modest goal of preventing the
proliferation of small parties is sufficient, then it is
sufficient to raise the minimum percentage needed to qualify for
a seat and to change the method of aggregating votes. In a
recent article, Matthew Soberg Shugart indicated how adopting the
Imperiale system in place of the d'Hondt divisors would require
only an increase of the threshhold to 2 percent to eliminate 5 of
the parties that won seats in the last elections, giving the two
large parties a total of 88 seats. While this would not solve
the problem of coalition bargaining, it would at least reduce the
ability of very small parties to blackmail the large ones.
Moreover, as he shows, using a different system of divisors, the
system would gain more stability than it would by raising the
threshhold to 5 percent with the present system of divisors.
None of the other proposed electoral systems is likely to
make a major difference. Instead each is likely to be more
confusing to the general public. The system proposed by
Professor Uriel Reichman's group which would involve electing
half the Knesset from districts and half by proportional
representation with a very complicated formula to determine which
party would be entitled to form the government is not likely to
bring either the maximum or the minimum result, and with a
Knesset whose size would change from election to election,
confuse the general public beyond acceptable limits. In a
political system known for its penchant for manipulation, this
would offer even greater opportunities for manipulation.
The same problem of who would form a government would affect
all mixed systems, which is why in the rest of the world mixed
systems of the kind proposed here are basically confined to
legislatures with two houses, or the mixture is not based upon
different electoral systems for different segments of one house
but an arrangement whereby all seats are chosen through the same
mixture. Thus it is possible to have multiple-member districts
in which the selection in each district is through proportional
representation. Such a system should be seriously considered for
Israel.
To the extent that one of the goals of electoral reform is to
secure representation for territorially-based interests, the
division of the country into a permanent number of districts, say
12, among which the 120 Knesset seats are apportioned on a
population basis after each census, offers serious possibilities.
Under such a system the voters would then cast their ballots
either for a straight party ticket or for individual candidates
selected from different party lists submitted in that district.
Those that received the highest number of votes would be elected.
Thus if a district had eight seats, the eight highest
vote-getters would be elected regardless of party. A straight
party ticket in that case would count as a vote for each
candidate. This system would not only have the advantage of
giving representation to territorial as well as sectoral
interests, but would also further open up the political parties
to new leadership because there would be a high incentive for
each party to run strong candidates to attract the floating vote.
There are two possible ways to divide the seats under this
plan. One would be to take the current administrative
subdistricts of the Ministry of Interior which reflect the
permanent geographic divisions of the country and to apportion
the seats among them. Another would be to divide the country
into twelve equal districts which, while they may not remain
equal in the future, would be within a relatively close range. In
my opinion, the first system would be the fairest. It would
assure representation to the peripheral regions of the country
and at the same time by having relatively large districts in the
areas around the three major cities offer the possibility for
some ideological diversity to be expressed as well.
A Presidential System?
All told, no electoral system can bring stability where
ideological fragmentation is strong. While Israel certainly does
not need as many parties as it now has to reflect ideological
differences, there are seven long-term blocs in this country that
must be represented in some way: the two centrist blocs, one
center-left and one center-right; a Zionist-left bloc; a
non-Zionist-left bloc, mostly Arab; a Zionist-right bloc; and
religious Zionist and ultra-Orthodox blocs. Perhaps all of these
blocs can be forced into the Sodomian bed of a two-party system
but it is not likely. This means that the electoral system can
be redesigned to decrease instability but not to provide
stability in and of itself. For that, broader constitutional
reform is needed.
One idea that has been proposed is the direct election of the
head of government. The proposal presently on the table is
somewhat confused since it would keep a separate president as
head of state, presumably still elected by the Knesset, while
there would be a head of government elected by the people.
Moreover, it would be a mistake to simply provide for the
election of the head of government without redesigning the
political system so that it would be based upon checks and
balances between the legislative and the executive branches. It
is just as necessary to prevent executive dictatorship, as it is
to prevent legislative paralysis.
In this regard it would be better to have a directly-elected
president as chief executive who would appoint a cabinet not
dependent upon the confidence of the Knesset, which in turn would
be given more extensive powers to initiate legislation, over the
budget and a stronger committee system. This is similar to the
American model, sometimes erroneously called the presidential
system but in actually a system of checks and balances. It would
provide the stability of a single, popularly-elected executive
serving for a fixed term with the possibility of a strong
legislative counterbalance.
The French have developed a presidential system in the
constitution of the Fifth Republic. There the president is
elected for an extended term with exceptional powers, balanced to
some extent by a legislature with a government and prime
minister. As we have seen, this can lead to a situation of
"cohabitation" whereby the president is of one party and the
prime minister of another, which would not solve Israel's basic
problem.
There are many drawbacks to a system in which the president
is directly elected. If the president is not sufficiently
limited, he gains far too much power for a democratic polity. If
constitutional checks and balances are instituted, other kinds of
stalemates can develop as the American experience shows.
Nevertheless, on balance it seems that a directly-elected
president is the best possible solution for Israel's problems.
With a proper system, all three goals of electoral and
constitutional reform, more decisive government, less distortion
in the allocation of power between central and peripheral groups
in the political system, and better representation for the
citizenry can be attained through a checks and balances system.
We need to pursue this reform agenda with our eyes open. It
will not solve all problems. Indeed it will create some new
ones, but at least they will be problems that will not prevent
the concentration of the requisite energy in the Israeli
government to undertake the tasks it faces in this respect. The
government will be able to govern, yet also will be under
control.
