By Ted Belman
The Citizens Empowerment Center in Israel, founder in 2003, issued a Joint Outline for Changing the Government System. Its worth reading.
This system recommends the threshold be increased from 2 to 4 percent and that half of the Knesset seats be set aside for regional representation. There are many other recommendations of interest all of which are intended to stabilize the government of Israel.
As you know the threshold was amended prior to the last election to 3.25. The result was that the four Arab parties coalesced into one party and got 12 seat and Yachad created by Eli Yishai failed to make the cut.
It is felt that the threshold must not be raised too much as it would prevent special interest groups from forming a party. But that is precisely what must be done.
There are 6 factions with less than 10 mandates. If the threshold was increased to 8% for the next election, all these parties would be forced to join a larger party and negotiate a joint platform just as the Arab parties had to do. Plus the law should provide that each party who still wants to contest the elections in the hope of passing the threshold, would have to designate a party that would get all their votes should they not succeed. The pressure on them to amalgamate with another party would be enormous.
As the number of parties are reduced the need for so many Ministries would also be reduced.
Something to think about.
@ Bear Klein:
In Germany, a voter gets two votes. He gets one vote for his own local representative and he gets a second vote for the party list he has chosen. Basically, it tries to combines the advantages of first past the post district elections with the merits of PR so both local representation and fairness in party representation are ensured. In Germany, parties that get overhang seats get to keep them. The country still has coalition governments but they’re more stable than they were in the Weimar period.
@ NormanF:
Norman how does the German system work?
As noted the proposal has been around since 2003. It is a good idea. However it needs to be implemented as part of a constitution to become permanent. Right now everything can change every election because the lack of a constitution.
I would adopt the German mixed system and lower the PR threshold to 2% for the PR list half in exchange for the smaller parties agreeing to district representation for the other half. No one would lose out. The largest party would get enough bonus seats to form a majority government if its vote share met a 30% threshold. It would strengthen Israel’s system of government by giving voters individual representatives, eliminating the ability of smaller parties to bring down the government and give Israel’s government a coherent long term sense of direction. It could work since there’s something for every one in such a proposal for it to pass the Knesset.