From Haaretz a month ago, The Izraeli Zizstem..:
Last update - 07:52 08/12/2006
Sutch a loony system
By Michael Fox
Considering his deserved reputation as a master of the English language, Winston Churchill's much-quoted maxim on democracy is surprisingly inelegant. In a debate in the House of Commons in 1947, Churchill said: "... it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." But the saying, however clumsily phrased, is incontrovertible. The dustbin of history is crammed to overflowing with ephemerally successful attempts at alternative forms of government that have in the end proved disastrous. We only have to look at the calamitous totalitarian experiments of the 20th century to be reminded of what awaits those who depart from the democratic paradigm. Yet there has never been a time that Churchill's adage has been more sorely tested. As the United States attempts forcibly to foist the blessings of constitutional government on a hitherto undemocratic and demonstrably ungrateful Middle East, the newly enfranchised of Iraq and Palestine respond by disobligingly electing parties that vilify the system that gave them power.
Democracies come in all shapes and sizes and electoral systems vary radically among them. In its purest form, a democratic system should give equal weight to the vote of each elector. That is patently not the case in the United States and Great Britain. Their "winner takes all" system for the election of legislatures effectively disfranchises those who voted for a losing candidate in a particular district. But it ensures stable government.
If your idea of an ideal democratic electoral system is one that accurately reflects the percentage of votes cast for a party in an election, you should be looking for a country with a single-chamber legislature and a system of nationwide, single-constituency proportional representation. There is one such country - the country whose language gave the world the term tohu-bohu. In Israel, you get what you vote for. Proportional representation anywhere involves government by coalition; in a Jewish state it is a recipe for anarchy. In order to cobble together a government, a would-be prime minister must yield to the demands of diverse special-interest groups, who command much-needed votes in the Knesset, Israel's legislature. The process is ruinously expensive because each potential partner has demands, financial and legislative, favoring his own sector. The stranglehold of the religious parties over legislation has resulted in Israel - a country that, whatever its faults, has a Western-style, open society - having laws of personal status that would shame the Taliban.
Israeli elections are said to be dull. I am not sure that I share that view. For one thing the voter is faced with an embarrassment of choice. Earlier this year, over 30 parties presented lists of candidates for election to the Knesset. You could, for instance, choose to vote for such exotica as the Green Leaf party whose sole platform was the legalization of cannabis. This list received over 40,000 votes, 1.3 percent of the popular vote. With a little more luck it would have passed the 2-percent threshold and would have put into the Knesset three members who would have joined any coalition that permitted them to smoke pot.
Divorcees and dodderers
Frivolity on the part of voters is not confined to Israel but it is only under a system such as Israel's that it can actually make a difference. In Britain the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, founded by the wildly eccentric rock singer, the late Screaming Lord Sutch, has contested numerous constituencies over the years, but never got near to getting a candidate elected to Parliament. Yet, in a by-election in the constituency of Rotherham in 1994, the Screaming Lord succeeded in getting 4.2 percent of the vote. That percentage, translated into Israeli terms, would have earned the raving loonies six seats in the 120-member Knesset. Six seats! They would have been worth gold when the time came for negotiating the coalition. The party whose ideology is "Insanity, Satire, Pragmatism and Existentialism" could have demanded, as a condition for its joining the coalition, that the new government adopt the Loony manifesto demanding the abolition of income tax; the introduction of a 99p (make that agorot) coin to save on change; and the retraining as vicars (rabbis) of traffic police too stupid for normal police work.
Of course, you could add some really mad ideas that might catch on in Israel. This may sound farfetched but you could, for example, propose a law forbidding any man called Cohen from marrying a divorcee.
Getting the Loonies into the Knesset is something of a pipe dream. But, in 2006, something similar did happen to another single-issue party. A perennial no-hoper in Israeli elections was the Pensioners' Party. Its program was to improve the lot of senior citizens, an estimable enough cause, but, in the many previous elections in which it had run, the electorate had chosen to cast its vote for parties with less sectoral aims. But something happened in 2006. Against all expectations, the pensioners' list received almost 6 percent of the popular vote, bringing the party seven seats in the Knesset and taking a group of dazed dodderers to Jerusalem where they found themselves, thanks to the vagaries of the electoral system, wielding a power that they can never have dreamed of as they sat at home dozing in front of their television sets.
How did a party that had in every previous election had meager support, suddenly produce 185,000 votes? This was not a revolt of the aged. It was not that the elderly, however ill-used, had changed their party affiliations to vote en masse for their special interests. This was a vote for a lark by people who would otherwise not have voted at all. It was a classic instance of the social epidemic, a phenomenon analyzed in a much-discussed 2000 book, "The Tipping Point." According to its author, Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker, there is a stage that an idea or trend crosses a threshold, tips and spreads like a brushwood fire. This is the tipping point and how it happens is the subject of the book. Here, the word got round that the cool thing to do was to vote for the pensioners. In a matter of days the tipping point was reached.
The beneficiaries of this epidemic, the Pensioners' Party, were not unworthy but the motives for voting for them were essentially irrational. The "connectors" and "mavens" who, according to Gladwell, produce social epidemics could equally have pushed the Raving Loonies or their local equivalents, the War Against the Banks list or the party for men's rights, over the tipping point. Israel's electoral system encourages this type of irresponsibility on the part of the voters.
Unhappy day
It is apparent to any reasonably objective observer that reform of Israel's electoral system is long overdue. The difficulty has been that the very interests whose baleful influence gives rise to the need for reform wield that same disproportionate influence to scupper reform. There has been no shortage of proposals for reform. Indeed, there have been as many such proposals as there are party lists in the elections. In the 1980s a movement for reform spearheaded by prominent law professors actually culminated in a new law: the direct election of the prime minister. Hard though it must have been to achieve, the reform - giving each voter two votes, one for a party list and one for a candidate for prime minister - resulted in even greater chaos than had prevailed hitherto. Fragmentation of government increased and the already outrageous bargaining power of splinter parties was enhanced. The whole sorry experiment was canceled after the elections of 2001 and the old system was restored. So much for law professors.
Electoral reform is once more in the air in Israel. One who has a proposal for reform is Avigdor Lieberman. The head of a party commanding a powerful 11 seats in the Knesset, he has recently joined the ruling coalition. A principal feature of his platform is the redrawing of Israel's boundaries so as to exclude, in favor of a future Palestinian state, areas of Israel that are chiefly populated by Arabs. He has also advocated the death penalty for Arab members of the Knesset that he regards as collaborationists. The fact that liberal-minded ministers find it possible - faute de mieux - to sit in the same government as Lieberman is itself the most eloquent criticism of the state to which Israel's electoral system has reduced us. Lieberman's own proposal for reform is for a "presidential" system. The strong man he has in mind to lead the country under this system is generally assumed to be the one whose face he sees in the bathroom mirror every morning.
It was an unhappy day for Israel when it adopted its unique, nation-wide electoral system. Ben-Gurion himself favored a two-party system with constituencies on the British model. Thanks to pusillanimity on the part of the major parties, this is not likely to happen soon. But one day something like it will have to happen if Israeli democracy is to survive.
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