Reform or Die by Hagai Segal

‘The essence of the problem of legislating for electoral reform [in Israel] is that the surgeon is also the patient’
Vernon Bogdanor’s comment written in the early 1990s is as accurate today as it was then. Another Israeli election has passed and another deeply unsatisfactory political picture has emerged. The Israeli public has spoken: the party that won most seats is not in government, it has taken two months for the government to be formed, and that government is a tense marriage between Right, Far-Right and Centre-Left. For anyone aquainted with Israel’s political history will not be surprised.
The current electoral system was introduced during the pre-state Yishuv — the government-in-waiting of the future state of Israel — and it was designed to be as simple and representative as possible, allowing for formal representation to the many diverse groups that made up Mandate Palestine’s Zionist community in order to ensure unity in the movement. It was never intended to be Israel’s permanent electoral system.

Faced with far more pressing problems than the seemingly mundane matter of how to conduct its elections — war, enemies intent on its destruction, integrating hundreds of thousands of immigrants, building the new state, etc. — Israel ‘temporarily’ continued with the system. And it has been stuck with it ever since.
Israeli national parliamentary elections are conducted under a form of Proportional Representation, one of the variants of what is known as the Party List System.
Each party submits a list of up to 120 names — the total number of seats in the Knesset, the unicameral national legislature — which are elected nationwide (Israel being one single electoral district).
Following an election, Knesset seats are distributed as per the order on the lists — if party ‘A’ receive five seats, the individuals listed one to five on their list are elected to the Knesset.
The leader of the party deemed most likely to be able to form a government is invited to do so by the (otherwise ceremonial) State President. If they are not able to, within the timeframe allotted, another party can be offered the opportunity to form the government instead. The leader of the party who succeeds in forming a government becomes Prime Minister.
The only regulating factor in the virtually unimpeded translation of votes into seats is the Threshold, a bar that has to be passed before a party can be eligible to win a seat.
Until the elections for 13th Knesset (1992) the Threshold was one per cent, and during the 16th Knesset (elected 2003) it was increased from 1.5 per cent to two per cent. This is one of the lowest in existence in any PR system — with countries like Turkey placing it at 10 per cent, and with one as high as 20-25 per cent in Eire — which has proven increasingly significant to Israel’s political fortunes as the decades have passed.
The role a regulating mechanism like the Threshold plays in such a system is vital, with its size having a huge bearing on the ability of parties to win seats.  Where the Threshold is low, small parties have an opportunity to secure parliamentary representation, and thus many participate; when the Threshold is high, only parties with higher levels of public support have a chance to win seats, and therefore fewer parties participate.
The Threshold also influences possibly the single most important function of any electoral mechanism: the ability for a government to emerge from an election. When the Threshold is low the chances of a clear winner are low, for it is most unusual in modern democracy for a party to win over 50 per cent of the national vote, and coalitions become inevitable.
However, when the Threshold is high the chances of a clear winner increase significantly: votes of parties failing to pass the Threshold are either discarded or redistributed, meaning that a party winning less than half the seats can secure more than half of the seats.

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