@sarawolk I agree that the political situation in Israel is highly problematic and that the influences of far-right figures like Smotrich and Ben Gvir are amplified beyond what one would expect based on their parties’ vote shares. However, I don’t think it’s fair to blame Israel’s version of PR for this. Instead, my claim is that no other electoral system that is currently in use by any other government on the planet would make Israel significantly better off.
What if, instead of PR, we had single-winner districts? You might expect this to cause fewer people on the fringes to get elected, but I’m skeptical since different regions of Israel are very different culturally. Tel Aviv and Haifa are liberal. Jerusalem is conservative. The settlements are extremely conservative. Israel’s most notable minorities (Arabs and the ultra-orthodox) tend to be clustered. With single-winner districts, people from across the political spectrum would still be elected; I have little doubt that Ben Gvir-ists would do well in the settlements. (The far left, i.e. Labor and Meretz, could suffer significantly, however.)
So how would things be different with single-winner districts? First of all, it would open the door to gerrymandering. I shudder to think what might happen if that became a possibility. In Israel, I think it is extremely important to deny politicians (or even ordinary citizens) from such means of gaming the system. Second, it would make the outcomes a lot less proportionate. I don’t know who would come out on top from this, but, in general, injecting random noise shouldn’t be expected to make things better. And insofar as the noise isn’t random I’m even more concerned.
Note that none of this is dependent on which single-winner method is used. Plurality, STAR, and Condorcet would all be vulnerable to these issues (though of course Plurality would be the worst by far). In short, I think that switching to single-member districts has little upside and could make things a whole lot worse.
What about tweaks to the PR system? I don’t think switching to multi-member districts with a List PR system would accomplish much of anything; the outcomes would still be generally proportional. Likewise with MMP; we’d still have similar distributions of seats and similar negotiation dynamics.
STV could make political parties less cohesive and that might help; one of the most likely ways for Netanhayu to be removed from power now is for some members of his Likud party to defect and call for a vote of no confidence. But remember: the reason Netanyahu came to power most recently is that the parties who constituted the previous governing coalition failed to be cohesive, so there were new elections that were won by Likud and the far-right parties.
One interesting option is increasing the threshold of support that a party needs to get elected. If this threshold was high enough it would keep the fringe parties out of the Knesset. But the political context in Israel is worth remembering: Ben Gvir and Smotrich don’t have the most toxic parties in the country in the public perception. That distinction belongs to the Arabs. In the lead-up to the last election, the Likud argued that you had to vote for them because if Yesh Atid (the center-left party) won they’d form a coalition with Arab parties who would insist on terrible things like allowing the creation of a “terror state” (i.e. an independent Palestine; this claim was pretty ridiculous, by the way). So the only way to stop the Arabs was to support Netanyahu. The bottom line: any reform that marginalized the fringes enough to keep Ben Gvir out of the Knesset would probably keep the Arabs out as well.
You mention vote-splitting as a problem in Israel’s system, and this is basically indisputable. Netanyahu’s faction won a majority of seats in the last election without a majority of votes because two left-wing parties failed to reach the threshold (if not for vote-splitting, the Knesset would have been split 60-60; see https://fruitsandvotes.wordpress.com/2022/11/02/coordination-failure-under-nationwide-pr-manufactured-majority-in-israel-2022/). There are easy opportunities for improvement here, but I don’t think the problem is all that severe. Vote-splitting can cause a handful of seats to go the wrong way from time to time, but it’s not the root of Israel’s problems.
Relatedly, I strongly disagree with the claim, “This also prevents new parties from being able to gain viability and essentially creates the illusion of choice and representation with nothing to show for it.” I assure you, the problem with Israeli politics is not a lack of viable political parties, and reaching 3.25% is not an outrageously tall order for someone looking to build a movement. (There is also the option of forming an alliance with another party for the purpose of an election, running on a joint list, and then negotiating coalition agreements separately.) Israelis have many choices, real choices, at the polling booth, and a wide range of minorities are represented.
Insofar as electoral systems are concerned, the problem in Israel is the same thing that allowed the Nazis to gain power: A majority of a majority can control the government, even if it is unpopular among a true majority of the population. We can see this with Israel’s judicial reforms that would abolish the independence of the judiciary and eliminate the only check on the Knesset’s power. Over 60% of Israelis oppose these reforms, including many Likud members. And people feel strongly enough about this that it caused the largest protest movement in Israeli history. But, as far as I remember, more Likud members support the reforms than oppose them.
This flaw is hardly unique to Israel’s system. In the United States it’s worse: Congress is elected in a sufficiently disproportional manner that a majority of the minority can hobble the government.
How Israel’s system is supposed to avoid the current predicament with the far right wielding so much power is through shifting coalitions: Instead of forming a coalition with Jewish Power and Religious Zionism (the far-right parties) the Likud would coalition with more centrist parties. What went wrong is Netanyahu. He has thoroughly alienated the parties that are ideologically closest to his, and they have no interest in forming a coalition that would protect Netanyahu from prosecution. This has left Netanyahu at the mercy of the far right. Still, I wouldn’t call this a complete fluke. It’s a problem that can befall any PR system in the world.
(Side note: Many left and center-left parties offered to form a unity government with Netanyahu still as prime minister after the attacks on October 7, on the condition that Jewish Power and Religious Zionism were excluded from the government. Netanyahu declined.)
It’s worth noting that STAR Voting and Condorcet have their own, very different solution to the majority-of-the-majority problem (when combined with primary reform): They give the minority faction(s) a strong voice in which politicians in the majority faction will be elected, such that these politicians won’t be beholden solely to voters in the majority faction. So the will of the true majority takes precedence. So long as gerrymandering and the like don’t mess things up.
So, do I think that any version of PR is better than any non-PR system? Yeah, pretty much. Israel’s system has its problems, but I don’t think they’re greater than the problems of single-winner systems. The experience of Israel has somewhat disenchanted me with List PR, and I no longer believe it’s dramatically better than STAR Voting with single-winner districts. But I don’t think it’s worse, either.
To the best of my knowledge, the Israeli electoral reform movement is nonexistent. As for what it will take to stop the bleeding…well, no electoral reform will eliminate, or even substantially ameliorate, the violence between Israel and Palestine. In my opinion, that would require (a) a two-state solution, and (b) the destruction of Hamas. The problems that we, as voting methods reformers, can hope to work on are Israel’s internal woes.
I see two institutional changes that would greatly improve the stability and long-term future of Israel. First, there should be supermajority requirements to make changes to the structure of government; a slim majority shouldn’t wield unlimited power. (It is worth noting that Israel doesn’t have a constitution. Instead it has “basic laws”, and all it takes is a simple majority of the Knesset to pass them.) Second, I do think that changing voting methods can greatly improve the state of Israeli politics, but the kind of system that would be a major improvement is not in use anywhere.
What would be a major improvement is a system that provides politicians with an incentive to care about the opinions of opposing voters while also yielding proportional representation. I view this as the holy grail of electoral reform. The main paths to addressing polarization are (a) incentivizing politicians to care about the preferences of a wider swath of the electorate, and (b) having more than two parties with substantial representation so that no one party can expect to obtain a majority on its own, leading to coalition agreements and shifting coalitions, and preventing the binary “us vs. them” dynamic that is so pernicious in American parties. Single-winner STAR and Condorcet achieve (a) and PR achieves (b). The ideal system would achieve both - and I believe that anything less than this would fail to significantly help Israel. This is a big part of why I’m interested in STAR-PR; such systems are possible, and by researching them and promoting a good one we might eventually help my new country of Israel.