An electoral reform could turn Sderot into Tel Aviv - opinion

The nature of the electoral system is not merely a technical issue. It is a central component of any democratic system–it is the means for translating citizens’ preferences into representation and policy. Different systems implement these preferences in different ways, and they also have different effects on the behavior of elected officials.

The last year has demonstrated the extent to which two characteristics of the existing electoral system in Israel are not only unhelpful, but actually prevent the country from dealing with the huge challenges facing it: first, there is an absence of any regional element to the system, such that all of Israel constitutes a single electoral constituency, which elects all 120 Knesset members. Second, given that the system allows Israelis to vote only for parties, rather than specific candidates, there is an absence of any personal element.

From a comparative perspective, the Israeli electoral system is unique. Of the 35 developed democracies in the world (the membership of the OECD), Israel is the only one that has neither a regional nor a personal element, leading to less accountability to the voters and a bias towards nationalized issues that do not address the needs of underserved populations. To address this, we propose adopting a widely accepted electoral system among other countries (especially in Europe), which has also been recommended in the past in various forms by researchers, organizations, and committees in Israel.

The proposal is to divide the country into 12 constituencies, each of which will elect between seven and 17 members of Knesset, depending on the number of registered voters who reside in the constituency. In each constituency, voters will be able not only to cast ballots for their preferred party, but also to express a preference for several individual candidates, affecting these candidates’ placement on the list.

This method has several salient advantages that are particularly relevant for the challenges currently facing Israel.

First, it would strengthen the connection between Knesset members and voters, while simultaneously weakening, to some degree, their near-total dependence on their party leaders. The fact that Israel’s citizens vote only for electoral lists has always granted absolute power to political parties over the political future of Knesset members. In the past, however, there were various different forces that acted within these parties and influenced their behavior.

Today, in the vast majority of Israeli parties, the party leader wields almost total power. This is the case in “person-centered” parties such as Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid, Benny Gantz’s Israel Resilience, and Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu, but it is also true of parties that were not like this in the past, such as the Likud under Netanyahu and Shas under Arye Deri.

BY CONTRAST, in regional and personal systems, while members of parliament may serve as representatives of their party, they are also representatives of the citizens or constituencies that directly elected them, and they therefore also have an obligation to the much broader public, rather than just to the party and its leader. For example, it is possible that if such a system were in place in Israel during the protests of the judicial overhaul era, then some Knesset members from Likud – those representing more liberal areas, such as Tel Aviv, or those interested in winning the votes of more liberal Likud voters – would have been more outspoken in their opposition to the government’s legislative program regarding the judicial system, a break from Israeli-style party discipline.

Second, moving to such a system could reduce the severe political polarization afflicting Israel by creating “regional coalitions.” For example, one could hope that Knesset members from different parties who represent different sectors (Jews and Arabs, religious and secular) but who were elected from the area of Haifa would cooperate with one another in order to remove the polluting industries from the Haifa Bay; and that Knesset members elected from the outlying periphery would collaborate on promoting transportation, health, and employment in their regions.

This aspect holds great importance not only for solidarity in Israeli society, which is particularly essential during wartime, but also for the future of the country’s democracy: Studies show that severe political polarization is one of the biggest threats to democratic regimes.

And last, such a system would result in a slate of Knesset members with a clear political interest in representing the periphery, which is largely underserved, simply because they would be elected by residents of the periphery. There are plenty of examples of the difference this might have made in the recent past: Perhaps, if there were Knesset members who represented the western Negev prior to October 7, they would have insisted on reinforcing the civilian defense squads in the Gaza border region. Perhaps, if there were Knesset members representing the Upper Galilee, the pressure to enable evacuees to return to their homes (or at the very least, to give them better treatment) would have borne fruit. Perhaps, if there were Knesset members representing the southern Negev, Israel would have confronted the Houthis in Yemen in response to the very first rockets fired at Eilat, and not waited until the drone attack on Tel Aviv.

Today, the arguments traditionally made against regional elections no longer hold water. Israel is no longer a small country in terms of its population; it is as large as, or even larger than, many European democracies that use regional systems. Even tiny states such as Malta and Luxembourg, or those with very small populations such as Iceland, use this kind of electoral system. Neither is it possible to claim (especially after October 7) that all or even most of the main issues in Israeli politics are national.

In the age of asymmetric warfare, defense challenges and the responses they require are different from region to region. Finally, there is no reason to be particularly concerned about corruption: Corruption is always a problem, but there is no evidence that corruption at the local level is more severe than at the national level, and it is certainly more isolated and has less potential to cause large-scale damage at the local level.

As noted, reforming the electoral system is not simply a technical matter. The low levels of obligation felt by elected officials toward voters in Israel, the country’s sociopolitical polarization and over-centralization, and the under-representation of the periphery are some of the most urgent problems currently threatening the future of the state. It is unlikely that they can be overcome without a fundamental change in Israeli politics – which will necessarily involve reforming the electoral system.

The writers are experts at the Israel Democracy Institute.