Strategic and Nonpolicy Voting: A Coalitional Analysis of Israeli Electoral Reform

Abstract

On March 18, 1992, Israel's twelfth Knesset legislated the direct election of the prime minister, fundamentally altering Israel's electoral system. Such large-scale electoral reform is rare in democracies.' Electoral reform requires that those who have been vested with power by a particular system vote for a new system whose consequences are uncertain. Efforts to explain the political causes of Israeli electoral reform leave critical questions unanswered. A theory of electoral reform must explain both the interests of the political actors involved and the timing of reform; it must specify the changes in the actors' interests or in the political system that led to reform. In the particular case of Israel's adoption of direct election of the prime minister, five empirical puzzles must be addressed. Why did the Labour party support the reform? Why did Likud oppose it? Why did small left-wing parties support the reform, small right-wing parties split, and religious parties oppose it? Why did the Likud leadership, which opposed the reform, lift party discipline in the final reading of the bill? Finally, the timing of the reform needs to be explained. An analysis that incorporates coalitional politics, strategic voting within a spatial policy environment, and voter preferences for at least some voters over nonpolicy issues such as candidate personality or charisma can answer these questions theoretically. It captures some of the richness of voting and campaign decisions. Candidates are not simply bundles of policy positions, and voters are not simply driven by policy considerations. Still, these elements are important in electoral choices and provide a basis for strategic behavior. This explanation addresses all five empirical puzzles in a way that a purely policy-based analysis, in which voters attach no value to nonpolicy characteristics of candidates, can not. Let us suppose there is an electoral system based on proportional representation/list voting with voters who have single-peaked preferences and are distributed on a unidimensional continuum such that some party's list of candidates is favored. The distribution of voters is not perfectly symmetric and, without loss of generality, is skewed to the right. The party of the median voter is the right-centrist party. If voters choose the party list they vote for strictly in terms of their spatial distance from the parties arrayed on the issue continuum, then the right-centrist party either will win on its own or will form a coalition with other spatially proximate parties.2 Noncentrist voters might behave strategically, voting for the centrist party clos-