In recent weeks, the struggle has been unfolding within the Likud over how the party’s candidate list will be determined for the upcoming elections.
According to reports, their party chair, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has seriously considered canceling the primaries and determining the list through a “selection committee” understood by many as a way of forming a body in which he himself would be the decisive authority.
In opposition to this initiative, elements within the Likud are firmly opposed to canceling the democratic process of primaries.
It is possible that this was no more than mutual arm-twisting intended to lead to the expected compromise, under which most of the list will be determined through primaries, while Netanyahu is allocated a large number of personal reserved slots.
Yet even this hypothetical compromise is problematic, given the very real predicament facing Likud’s incumbent politicians.
They currently number more than 40 elected officials: 32 members of Knesset and eight ministers who resigned from the Knesset and serve only in the government.
To them, one must add those who returned to the Likud from Foreign Affairs Minister Gideon Saar’s party, as well as new candidates and former politicians seeking to make a political comeback.
All of them will be competing for a much smaller number of realistic slots, and it is clear that many will find themselves outside the next Knesset. Every reserved slot granted to Netanyahu will therefore further increase the number of incumbents pushed out, which explains the intense unrest within the party.
Interestingly, the internal struggle in the Likud also reflects the built-in tension between the different methods for selecting candidates for the Knesset. On one side is the model in which the party leader personally determines the Knesset list.
On the other side are inclusive primaries – like in the Likud – in which all registered party members determine the makeup of the slate of candidates.
These, and essentially all methods in between, are permissible under Israeli law. The problem is that each of these methods has fundamental flaws. The leader-based method is far from transparent and may produce submissive Knesset members who display excessive loyalty to the leader, at times at the expense of their conscience and personal views.
Primaries, by contrast, despite their democratic potential, tend to produce Knesset members whose political fate is subordinated to a “base” of party members that rewards populist conduct at the expense of diligent parliamentary work.
Moreover, the system enables vote contractors to recruit, en masse and in an organized fashion, groups and sectors that do not necessarily represent the party’s electorate and that promote highly specific interests.
Reforming how Israel chooses its candidates
The challenges that arise from each method are not inevitable.
A necessary change in the electoral system for the Knesset could, on the one hand, reduce the negative side effects of primaries and, on the other, address the substantive democratic deficit in parties where the list is determined by the leader or by a selection committee, such as Yisrael Beytenu or Yesh Atid.
The time is ripe to adopt what is known as the “semi-open ballot” system, which is common in most democracies with a proportional electoral system like Israel’s.
Under such a system, when we go to the polling stations on election day, the names of the candidates will appear on the ballot papers in descending order, as ranked by each party.
Each voter will be permitted, though not required, to mark on the ballot several candidates whom they prefer. If a certain candidate crosses a given threshold of personal votes, that candidate will be able to improve their position on the list.
Such a change is expected to alter politicians’ incentive structure: the understanding that their political fate will be decided not only by the leader or by party members but also by those who vote their party into office will require them to direct their attention to this broader public as well.
In this way, the responsiveness and accountability of Knesset members toward their voters will improve.
The adoption of a semi-open ballot in Israel enjoys broad support across the political spectrum, both among civil society organizations and among the members of Knesset and their parties.
The broad support for an initiative that increases transparency and accountability among Israelis’ representatives in parliament may very well be implemented in the next Knesset.
The writer is a research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute and senior lecturer at Ashkelon Academic College.
Source:
www.jpost.com
