Israel's Labor Alignment in the 1984 Elections: Catch-All Tactics in a Divided Society

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Some two decades have passed since Otto Kirchheimer put forward his seminal thesis concerning transformations within western multiparty systems. Parties, he predicted, would respond to increasing affluence, welfare policies, and reduction of social tensions by jettisoning most of their ideological cargo and turning into catch-all parties. Programs that provided rose-colored glasses would offer previews of happy days for all and sundry among ... prospective customers and would concentrate on proposals sufficiently general to prevent their being turned from electoral weapons to engines of assault against the party which first mounted them. Parties which failed to adopt such means would suffer electoral losses and be obliged to review their strategy.' To no small degree, the prognosis reflected the optimism of the Europe of the 1960s, as yet unshaken by stagflation and large-scale unemployment with all their social ramifications. Of late, it would seem that a more pertinent question has posed itself. Irrespective of the degree to which conditions have verified Kirchheimer's theory, it may be asked whether the obverse holds and catch-all parties in western multiparty systems, however they have developed, will suffer electoral losses unless they retrieve their ideological cargo and advocate clear-cut proposals to deal with the fundamental problems confronting society. Underlying this is a further question. How far can political entrepreneurs control the climate of opinion of the electorate in times of tranquility and in times of storm, and how much leeway can they allow themselves in their choice of electoral tactics? The aim of this paper is to help illuminate these problems through an analysis of the dilemma faced by the Israeli Labor Alignment since 1981 regarding the choice of its electoral strategy, as well as the decisions it arrived at on the eve of the 1984 parliamentary electoral campaign and their consequences. In the latter 1960s and early 1970s, the use of catch-all tactics enabled the Alignment and its main rival, the Likud, to draw into their fold ideologically diverse groups and to extend their electoral appeal to the nonaligned voters and members of the smaller parties. However, in the early 1980s the new ideological thrust of the incumbent Likud and mounting sociopolitical and economic tensions forced the Alignment to reconsider its strategy. Would the continued use of catch-all tactics enable it to tap the large reserve of discontented voters? Would it rather straddle the party with a problem of credibility and put it at a disadvantage in the competition against ideologically oriented rivals? We shall try to show that the decision in favor of a nonideological strategy played a significant role in producing the two surprises that turned the 1984 parliamentary elections into a landmark in the country's politics. On the eve of the campaign, analysts were one in predicting that, coming as it did against the background of a costly and protracted war in Lebanon and a deepening economic crisis, the election would be a showdown between the opposing philosophies representing