On 6 April, voters in Slovakia chose Peter Pellegrini for President over Ivan Korčok in a runoff election. Pellegrini is the candidate of Voice-Social Democracy (Hlas-SD) and an ally of current premier Robert Fico. He will replace Zuzana Čaputová of Progressive Slovakia (PS) as president. Because the governing coalition that formed after the 30 September 2023 assembly election already includes the Hlas-SD, this election result will bring to end Slovakia’s current period of cohabitation. Recall that “cohabitation” in a semi-presidential system is defined as a president and premier from opposing parties, and the president’s party not being in the cabinet.
The current cohabitation is post-electoral, in that the fragmented result of the assembly election left more than one viable coalition option, including one in which the president’s PS would have taken part. But the government that formed consists of Direction-Social Democracy (Smer-SD, headed by Fico), Hlas-SD, and the Slovak National Party (SNS), with the PS in opposition. Thus the cabinet meeting the definition of cohabitation was formed through inter-party bargaining after the election and not as a direct product of it, as if a single party or pre-electoral coalition opposed to the president had won the election. Now a president has been elected of a party that is already in the cabinet, ending the cohabitation once Pellegrini is inaugurated in June. (Korčok ran as an independent but was backed by PS.)
Pellegrini supports Fico’s preference for not aiding Ukraine further in its war against Russian aggression and occupation.
Pellegrini1 won 53.1% of the vote in the runoff. In the first round, Korčok had led 45.5% to 37.0%, with a third candidate (an independent, Štefan Harabin) way back on 11.7%. and none of the remaining seven candidates even reaching 3%. So it was already effectively a two-candidate race even in the first round, and yet the initial runner-up, Pellegrini, came from behind, obviously getting a greater share of the votes of trailing candidates than Korčok received.2 Turnout also was higher in the runoff, going from 2.25 million to over 2.65 million, thus almost 400,000 more votes cast than in the first round (based on results posted at Wikipedia).
The presidency of Slovakia has few formal powers. It is a premier-presidential system and even among that subset of semi-presidential systems, has a rather weak presidency. The more important election for Slovak policy orientation was thus the assembly election last September.
I was curious about the Italian name. Thank you, Wikipedia: “His great-grandfather Leopoldo Pellegrini came to Austria-Hungary to participate in the construction of the railway between Levice and Zvolen.” ↩︎
I know nothing about Harabin, but note that Wikipedia says “Harabin stated that if he become the Slovak president, his first international journey would be to Russia, instead of the traditional visit to neighbour the Czech Republic, because of their support for ‘fascist’ Ukraine in the 2022 Russian invasion,” citing an article in a Czech source. So it is hardly surprising that his voters might have preferred Pellegrini and allies of Fico generally. ↩︎
The V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) Institute has released its Democracy Report 2024, Democracy Winning and Losing at the Ballot [PDF]. V-Dem probably has become the most widely used measure of quality of democracy (or democracy’s absence, as in the case of autocracy). It has several strengths over other older measures, and like any index, weaknesses. This planting will not be about reviewing strengths and weaknesses, nor will it delve into the methodology. There are many places you can go for such information. I simply have some questions and concerns, focused on a few specific cases that are surprising to me.
V-Dem establishes several categories of regime, based on threshold values of its various scores. They are: Liberal Democracy, Electoral Democracy, Electoral Autocracy, and Closed Autocracy. There is also a “Grey Zone” between Electoral Democracy and Electoral Autocracy.
The report states, ““Notably, Israel lost its long-time status as liberal democracy in 2023.” It goes on (at p. 14):
The story in Israeli politics for the first nine months of 2023 was indeed efforts by the governing coalition to reduce the authority of the judiciary. This effort, however, failed–or at least has been placed on indefinite hold. The effort was essentially dormant already before the 7 October invasion and massacres by Hamas. The bill mentioned on “reasonableness” was the only part of the proposed package that passed. Left unsaid in the quoted statement is why such a measure is a key piece of evidence for descent into a lower category of democracy. And then what happened? The Supreme Court itself invalidated the new law! Between the mass demonstrations against the government’s plans, internal divisions in the coalition that led to multiple postponements of other bills in the package, and the court itself stepping in, one might consider 2023 to have been a stress test of liberal democracy in Israel that the system passed.1
Moreover, the movement the V-Dem measures picked up was pretty small. See the location of Israel at about the middle of the “top 20–30%” group. The grey dots and confidence intervals indicate the score in 2013, while the black indicates the score in 2023. This is hardly a dramatic headline-worthy drop–obviously there is substantial confidence interval overlap–and perhaps indicates a more general problem of translating continuous measures into categories.
As for other countries in this range, the one indicated in blue, Seychelles, is one that moved into the liberal democratic category and was previously an electoral autocracy. As the 2013 to 2023 comparison shows, this is indeed a major movement. Those in orange are “autocratizing.” I will admit to being surprised to see Greece in this category. Note that Israel is not in orange even though the report says it has moved one category down from liberal democracy. Those in orange actually show changes outside the metric’s confidence interval. So why the drama over Israel’s small score change?
The list of countries in the sub-category of “electoral democracy plus” is shown below. Note that Austria and Portugal are also countries that have lost their status as liberal democracy since 2013, according to V-Dem. This is baffling.2 Greece is indicated as experiencing an ongoing “episode” of autocratization,3 whereas Montenegro is improving.
India is classified as an “electoral autocracy” since 2018. This category is defined in the report as a country in which “Multiparty elections for the executive exist; insufficient levels of fundamental requisites such as freedom of expression and association, and free and fair elections.” This seems like an overstatement of the situation in India to me, although I am certainly no expert on India.
Mexico is in the “grey zone” meaning the confidence intervals on its scores overlap the categories electoral democracy4 and electoral autocracy. Here is a comment the report makes about the country: “Mexico has elections scheduled for June 2024, and tensions are high amid the gradual autocratization under President Obrador5 and the MORENA party. President Obrador is now accused of trying to rig the system in favor of his successor Claudia Sheinbaum. Large crowds are turning out to protest and to protect the independence of the electoral authority” (p. 41). Putting Mexico on an autocracy watch could be justified, but calling it in a grey zone where it might be right on the brink of falling out of the ranks of democracy does not seem right to me. Other countries in this grey zone currently include Albania, Botswana, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, and Zambia.
Index-making is hard. Even a flawed index can be valuable. I am concerned that some of these categorizations that I have highlighted here call into question the value of assigning categorical boundaries on this continuous measure. I do not agree that Israel has ceased to be a liberal democracy, have my doubts that Mexico and India are not (or are very nearly not) democracies at all, and am simply puzzled by Greece and Portugal losing their “liberal” status.
Notes
I do not know what to say about that last sentence in the excerpt, other than to doubt there is some actual change in this condition. Perhaps the experts surveyed are reacting to comments by the Minister of National Security (head of the police, among other functions), while failing (as the earlier sentences indicate) to notice that the courts are in fact still functioning as a check (as is much of the rest of the government, including the Prime Minister). In other words, some of this may reflect the hazards of relying on expert surveys. An aside: I was not contacted, although I have participated in expert surveys on other topics regarding Israel and I believe that I have been invited (but declined) to participate for V-Dem on another country in some past year. ↩︎
In a table at the end of the report one can see the component scores and identify which factor has contributed most to the change of category in a given country. For Austria and Portugal it is the “participatory” component that is mostly responsible. ↩︎
“Cyprus and Portugal fell from liberal to electoral democracy in 2023, while Austria and Greece made the same transition in 2021 and 2022, respectively” (p. 15). ↩︎
Electoral democracy is defined as “Multiparty elections for the executive are free and fair; satisfactory degrees of suffrage, freedom of expression, freedom of association.” Liberal democracy as “Requirements of Electoral Democracy are met; judicial and legislative constraints on the executive along with the protection of civil liberties and equality before the law.” ↩︎
Sic. His family name is actually López Obrador. ↩︎
It is day 160 of the war between Israel and Hamas. I want to look at some polling results over recent months among both Israelis and Palestinians. I prepared a series of slides for a recent semi-public talk I gave. I am not sure I will be able to post a recording, so I am posting some of the slides with a brief write-up here.
The frame for my presentation was about the possibilities for the future, by which I mean both short term (how the war might turn out) and longer-term. In the longer term, the questions center around the prospects for a so-called Grand Bargain. The outlines of such a bargain were sketched in an article in the NYT by Thomas L. Friedman in late January.
Friedman went so far as to call this supposed bargain “A Biden Doctrine” and it is, as the NYT headline said, big. It would involve normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia and some sort of “path” to a Palestinian state. Do Israelis see it is desirable? Thanks to the Israel Democracy Institute, we have polling conducted in February on that question. Is it possible? This is harder to answer, but spoiler alert–probably not unless that “path” is understood up front by all to be a long and winding one (with some high probability of being a dead end–again). What do Palestinians think about it? Alas, I am not aware of polling on that side that is specific to the Grand Bargain concept, but what we do have about recent public opinion on that side is not encouraging.
In addition to talk about a Grand Bargain and a Biden Doctrine, there are a whole lot of buzzwords flying around the media about the “day after” (itself a buzzword). We hear about a “reformed” or “revitalized” Palestinian Authority (PA), without real definition of what that would entail and how to achieve it. We hear about the formation of a “technocratic government” for the West Bank and Gaza Strip, although the Israeli plan for the latter territory–once Hamas is defeated there–is for some body other than the PA to take over. Perhaps “local officials” or “clan leaders” not connected to either Hamas or Fatah (the organization that dominates the PA). Another spoiler alert: Here there are actual spoilers. It should surprise no one that such leaders who step forward are at serious risk of being murdered by Hamas, such as just happened. The incident shows that they are at risk even for the narrower and humanitarian purpose of distributing aid, let alone being part of a replacement for Hamas for governing the territory.
But before we get to all that, how do Israelis think about the prospects for the current war?
Among the Jewish public, according to polling from the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI), confidence that Israel will “win the war” has declined rather sharply between October and February. In the early days following the invasion and massacres by Hamas, it was almost three quarters. By February it is not much more than half.
That seems about right to me. Some aspects of the war are going very well (dismantling Hamas battalions and internal Gaza war infrastructure). But full defeat of Hamas looks difficult to impossible—the terror organization will still exist in some diminished but active form in Gaza, and as we will see, is significantly more popular in the West Bank now than it was before 7 October.
Additionally, releasing/rescuing all the remaining hostages alive may not be feasible, although we can’t yet rule out another short-term pause of the active fighting (of, likely, at most several weeks) that leads to some releases. The goals of (1) defeating Hamas as a governing and military organization and (2) releasing hostages have been in conflict all along, and there is a divide within the Israeli public over which to prioritize. Following are two poll results for slightly different questions, and from different pollsters, about the tradeoff in the war goals.
Note that supporters of this government’s original parties (before Gantz’s National Unity joined after 7 October) tend to prioritize toppling Hamas over bringing home the hostages. (The original government formed after the 2022 election consists of the four parties listed at the bottom of the chart.1) Note also that supporters of Likud, the main party of the current government, and of which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is leader, is split, with just half prioritizing toppling Hamas when the question is phrased this way.2
But how you ask the question, and how you divide up the subgroups, matters. The JPPI poll makes the tradeoff clearer in its wording–asking if one of these can happen only at the expense of the other.
According to this poll, almost twice as many Jews prefer Hamas being defeated even if the hostages are not returned as support returning the hostages but leaving Hamas in control of the Gaza Strip.
So now let’s turn to the Israeli sentiment regarding the Grand Bargain. This question may be overly complex, but then so is any Grand Bargain. In any case, it asks whether as part of ending the war, with “long-term military quiet,” US “guarantees,” and peace agreements with Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, should Israel agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state?
Arab voters and voters on the Jewish left are pretty solidly in favor! However, they are minorities of the overall population. The Jewish right does not like this bargain at all, and the center is nowhere near being in favor, either. I did not see in the poll write-up the breakdown of Jewish Israelis by political leaning, but we know from recent elections, other surveys, and current polling about the next election that the percentage who define themselves as “left” is small. Any diplomatic plan that leads to a Palestinian state has to convince the Israeli public–that is, the center and at least a part of the right–that this is a good outcome for Israel.
What might help convince Israelis that establishing a Palestinian state is a good idea, or at least a tolerable outcome? Perhaps reform of the PA would do it. What do Israelis think about the prospects for reform?
On this, Israel’s Arabs and Jews broadly agree! They see reform of the PA enabling it to “effectively manage” the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a low-likelihood outcome. If there were such a state “in the foreseeable future” how do people feel about whether terrorism against Israel would increase or decrease, or stay the same?
Among Jewish Israelis, only the left (which, as noted, is a small minority overall) have a majority expecting that a Palestinian state will mean less or no terrorism. On the right, nearly 3/5 think a Palestinian state means more terrorism, and roughly the same share of “centrists” either agree with that or think it will stay the same, while just 29% of centrists think it will reduce terrorism. How does a Grand Bargain, or any other “pathway” to such a state convince Israelis that the future living next door to such a state will be safer than the past–and most importantly ensuring there can never again be another shattering incident like 7 October?
On the Palestinian side, Mahmoud Abbas has begun the 20th year of his 4-year term, having been elected in 2005 with no presidential elections held since. He appoints, and can dismiss, the Prime Minister and cabinet. Current PM Mohammad Shtayyeh and his cabinet announced their resignation in late February—allegedly a step towards “reform” but will changing the personnel near the top of the power structure really change much?
The Palestinian Authority is not a democracy, but it is not a full dictatorship either. There is a respected pollster who surveys opinion in the territories regularly, including since the war started (and including among internally displaced persons in the Gaza Strip). We will look at some results from one recent poll.
The formal governance structure of the PA consists of an elected presidency (long held by Abbas), a legislative assembly, and a prime minister and cabinet. The PM and cabinet are dually responsible to the president and the assembly. In other words, it is a president-parliamentary system (the subtype of semi-presidentialism with the stronger formal presidential powers). However, with no election for president since 2005, and none for assembly since 2006, clearly the actual authority of the leadership of the PA does not come from voters and the formal constitutional structure. Where does it come from? That is a hard question! It is certainly not one I am equipped to answer. But the tentative answer would be that it somehow comes from within the Fatah organization and the bureaucracy itself.3
“Reform” or “revitalization” thus can’t simply mean a new PM and cabinet. The recent resignation of the PM is not sufficient, nor is the intended replacement of the outgoing cabinet with a “technocratic government” terribly meaningful. A serious question is, what is a technocratic government, anyway? You can put highly educated people with specialized training who are allegedly apolitical and uncorrupted in ministerial positions, but still the question remains: where does their authority come from? Who determines their scope of action, and who determines whether they remain in power upon taking difficult decisions that might need to be imposed upon unwilling entrenched interests? Abbas acting unilaterally as President? A legislature that essentially does not exist? From the same bureaucracy and Fatah that put Abbas and his past PMs in power? Not too meaningful, and probably a dead end.
In any case, what are Palestinians thinking? The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (CPSR), directed by Dr. Khalil Shikaki, has done its most recent poll in December 2023. It compares party support with that registered at a poll in September 2023. Thus it conveniently captures both the immediate pre-war period and the wartime period.
The bottom lines are pretty discouraging. Hamas support has nearly doubled between September and December in the Palestinian Territories overall, standing at 43%. It is noteworthy, however, that is has barely increased in the Gaza Strip (from 38% to 42%). It suggests that feeling the full consequences of what Hamas rule can result in, Gazans are not being persuaded. On the other hand, their support of Hamas has not decreased. Meanwhile, in the West Bank, support for Hamas has nearly quadrupled. West Bank Palestinians are mostly cheering from the sidelines, without suffering the consequences, and they like what they see from Hamas. This is depressing. Emotional reactions by your orchardist aside, it does not augur well for a “revitalized” PA that might be able to decrease terrorism stemming from some future state it establishes. On the positive side, it is still not a majority supporting Hamas in either the West Bank or the territories overall.
The support for Hamas looks eerily like it did in 2006, the last time Palestinians voted in a national election.
Party
Party votes %
Party list seats
District seats
Total seats
Change & Reform (Hamas)
44.4%
29
45
74 (56.1%)
Fatah
41.4
28
17
45 (34.1%)
Others
14.2
9
4
13
The table summarizes the results of the January, 2006, Palestinian Legislative Council election. I have written a lot about this over the years–just visit the Palestinian Territories orchard block and scroll. The vast majority of plantings there–all the way back to the pre-electoral period in late 2005–are about those elections. And about the badly designed electoral system that produced a Hamas majority despite just 44% of the party vote.4 Yes, 44%, almost exactly the support level registered in the December, 2023, poll.5
Given such support for a political movement that is, according to its charter and repeated public statements, committed to eliminating the Jewish state rather than living in peace with it, we should hardly be surprised to learn that support among Palestinians for a “two-state solution” is not high.
The percentages who say they support such an eventual outcome actually ticked up between September and December, and are a little higher in the Gaza Strip than the West Bank. However, clearly we are talking about statistically insignificant differences. More to the point, only about a third of Palestinians living in the territories support the idea.
Clearly, if a postwar “revitalized” PA is to hold elections, at the very least they need to be held with a fully proportional system to avoid the exaggeration of extremist support that occurred in 2006! But I don’t see a viable path to holding elections at all as long as Hamas would be involved in any manner. Hamas is an obstacle to building a state, let alone a democracy. The process of building a state–or paving some “pathway” to a state–should not front-load elections. The first task would be to build legitimate (whatever that means) and functioning proto-state institutions and transform the political culture towards acceptance of peace with Israel. That was, of course, allegedly the role the PA was supposed to play when it was set up in the Oslo Accords. Thirty years on, we can probably declare that process a failure albeit not a total one. (The PA governance may be unpopular and corrupt, but it looks after Palestinian social needs better than Hamas has ever even tried to do in Gaza,6 and coordinates on Israeli security needs in the West Bank.)
Building a state is hard. There is a large literature on state-formation. I know only some of this literature and have commented before on its application to Israel and Palestine. Some conclusions can be drawn from such works, even if here I will be doing so overly broadly. Unless based solely on repression, a state needs some sort of conduit to the society it governs, even if it is not a democracy. Typically that comes from a mass party, or from building on existing social, often religious, institutions. The covers of selected books on the topic hint at some of the processes, including how long-term it can be. How might it play out postwar in Palestine?
Could there be a long-term path via “de-radicalization” of Palestinian Islamic institutions, such that perhaps they could form the basis for a peaceful and “legitimate” state? Currently much of this religious and social space is rather captured by Hamas (“the Islamic Resistance Movement”). This is where Saudi Arabia and UAE potentially can help, having tackled extremists within their own religious institutions. For their involvement to work it would probably mean Saudi leadership wants normalization with Israel and a defense pact with USA more than it wants real progress towards a Palestinian state. In other words, it has to be willing to accept a very vague “pathway” because this will take a long time and still might fail.7 Can this sort of grand bargain happen? Maybe, depending on how decisive the defeat of Hamas is, and how desperate the Saudis are for a deal, as well as on whether there is a change of the party composition of Israel’s government. But it would be foolish to bet on it!
I wish I could end on a more optimistic note, but it is hard to do so. We hear various US and EU officials speak regularly of not letting a good crisis go to waste, as if this is finally the opportunity to establish the framework for “two states living side by side in peace.” Normally, when an idea fails over and over, the idea might be cast aside as unworkable. The “two-state solution” has been around a long time–30+ years in the form of the Oslo Accords and nearly a century in the form of various “partition” plans for the old binational and imperially ruled territory of Palestine. No one actually has a clue how to bring it about, and as Israel’s ceremonial president (who is himself from the political left) Isaac Herzog recently said at Davos, “No Israelis in their right mind” are thinking of a “peace process” right now. In the face of public opinion on both sides, such as reviewed above, a two-state solution would have to be imposed. But exactly how do you impose something on people who do not want it? By force. As much as international actors want a “day after” plan now, honestly it has to wait till we see just what that “day” looks like. If Israeli military force were to deliver a genuinely decisive crushing of Hamas, maybe opportunities open up. Maybe, heading down a very long “pathway.” But if the current war ends in a murkier way, as currently looks likely, then I am sorry to say but all talk of “two states living side by side in peace” will sound to large swaths of the Israeli public like how Charlie Brown hears his parents and teachers speaking.
That is not to say the war is a losing effort. It is likely to end (and, yes, only some time after a significant operation in Rafah8) with Hamas no longer the effective governing authority of the Gaza Strip and its battalions and terror infrastructure, including its massive tunnel and bunker network, destroyed. Those are real achievements of the IDF that are well underway, ongoing, and important for future possibilities.9 But a political settlement towards a peaceful two-state “solution” is likely remain elusive.
Notes
Religious Zionism here means the alliance list that went by that name and included both a party with that name (led by Bezalel Smotrich) and Otzma Yehudit (led by Itamar Ben-Gvir). ↩︎
I am somewhat surprised that the two Haredi (ultra-orthodox) parties’ supporters break down so differently on this question, with the Sephardi Shas voters being more evenly divided while the Ashkenazi UTJ supporters lean more towards toppling Hamas than does Likud. Small sample sub-population caveats apply. ↩︎
I am thinking of some form of “reciprocal accountability” that is common in many authoritarian systems, whereby bureaucrats are agents of the political leaders (as in democracies) but the leadership also needs support of key bureaucratic actors in the absence of external accountability such as provided by institutionalized electoral competition in full democracies. But I am not able to claim knowledge of how this works in the PA, or indeed whether scholars have attempted to explain the PA structures of actual authority in this way. ↩︎
As explained in various past plantings, and shown in the columns of the table, half the seats were allocated proportionally across all the PA territories (similar to Israel’s system), and half were allocated in districts in a manner that was highly disproportional. The rule for the districted component was multiple non-transferable votes (MNTV): district magnitude (M) ranging from 1 to 9, with the voter allowed to cast up to M votes for individual candidates. Hamas won more votes than its main rival overall, but its voters also were more likely than those aligned with Fatah to use all or most of their available votes and to give them all to candidates of one party. The result was not because of Fatah having too many candidates (overnomination), as has been claimed by many pundits over the years, and was not mostly due to split voting for independent candidates (although the latter was a small factor). I have addressed these incorrect claims about why Hamas won in several of the earlier entries on the topic at this blog. ↩︎
Fatah support, on the other hand, has tumbled over the past 18 years. ↩︎
Hamas runs an extensive “charity” network, but the government it controls does not provide significant social services to the best of my understanding and the services by the “charity” are delivered on a clientelistic basis to Hamas supporters in the Gaza Strip rather than to the population at large. ↩︎
I am cynical, and I assume the Saudi leadership is no less cynical. I do not believe that they actually care substantively about the Palestinian issue. They would like it to go away. They certainly would love to see Hamas wiped out, even if they won’t say so. (Jordan’s leadership surely feels the same, too.) Saudi leaders mostly want that defense pact and the economic benefits of full relations with Israel (as the UAE already has, and which have held up through this war so far). But they need to seem to have extracted something before they will move. Maybe they will settle for something very vague that lets them sweep the issue under a very large carpet for now. Maybe not. Who knows. ↩︎
Whether “acceptable” on US and other actors’ terms or not. ↩︎
I am not going to mention (aside from this footnote) the highly likely second war–against Hezbollah This is almost surely coming. In fact, it is probably inevitable. The question is when. And if it is not imminent, does the country accept that a de-facto security zone on its side of the Lebanon border will remain depopulated till whenever that war has been concluded, or do people go back home soon and somehow accept that authorities will spot a terrorist invasion like that of 7 Oct. in time, if (when?) it comes? ↩︎
Update: The result ended up at 79 seats for AD, 77 for PS, and 48 for Chega (out of 230). That’s a largest party seat share of 0.343, where the seat product model (SPM) prediction for the electoral system would be 0.378, so 0.909 of expectation. Very low for Portugal, but only a little low for the SPM. See details and explanations below. There are also a few new points added at the end.
_____
Portugal has held a general election today, 10 March 2024. I will admit I had no idea this was happening, and I had filed away in my mind that Portugal would not have an election for a while, given that the Socialist Party had won an absolute majority of seats as recently as 2022. However, the government resigned after a series of scandals and the President exercised his constitutional authority to dissolve the Assembly of the Republic and call early elections (I am relying on the Wikipedia article’s “background” section).
Results show that the Democratic Alliance (AD) will replace the Socialists in government, but it will be well short of a majority of seats. The far-right Chega has made substantial gains, and is in third place. The AD includes the Social Democratic Party (PDS) which, despite its name, is a center-right party.
When writing about the 2022 election, I noted that the seat majority was reported as “unexpected” but is not a rare occurrence in Portugal. Over time, the mean seat percentage of the largest party in Portugal has been around 48%. The 2022 result was the fifth absolute majority in 16 elections since the establishment of the current democratic regime in 1976. However, I also noted that the country’s electoral system, while a fairly moderate form of proportional representation, should be expected to have higher party-system fragmentation than it generally has had.
Portugal’s electoral system has a seat product of around 2400. This is a modest seat product by standards of proportional representation, stemming from a moderate assembly size, S (currently 230; 250 before 1991), and a middle-range district magnitude, M (currently 10.5 on average), yielding a seat product, MS=2415. For such a seat product, the expected largest party seat share is 0.378, derived from the formula expecting this share to be (MS)–1/8. Thus Portugal’s actual largest party seat share has averaged 1.26 times the seat product model prediction.1 This indicates that while Portugal’s electoral system is not expected to produce a high degree of fragmentation (38% of the seats is a decent sized largest party2), actual Portuguese politics supports a more de-fragmented party system–at least so far–than what its electoral system could sustain.
As for votes, the associated formula of the seat product model implies we should expect the largest to have 35.4% of the votes, but the average has been 41.8% instead.
In this year’s election, the leading party (or alliance, AD) is at 29.5% of the votes,3 with Socialists at 28.7%, and Chega at 18.1%. (In 2022, Chega had only around 7%.) That is about as much on the low side of expectation as the former average was on the high side. It is noteworthy that the votes in this election are more fragmented relative to the SPM expectation than the seats are. In other words, the increased vote fragmentation is not fully reflected in the seat outcome. Perhaps this is due to the modest seat product overall (by PR standards, as noted) being made up of a few very large-magnitude districts and many rather small ones. Put another way, Portuguese voters may have voted–in this election–as if their system were more proportional than it really is.
All in all, this election has resulted in an assembly that is a little closer than the country’s average past election to the expectation from the seat-product model, given Portugal’s electoral system, albeit somewhat on the low (more fragmented) side. Whether vote fragmentation will continue to increase or will stabilize to match the (modest, as noted) assembly fragmentation will be an interesting thing to watch. How this turns out may depend to some degree on how the AD manages a minority government, how much influence Chega is seen to have in this parliament, and how much the growth in Chega support can be reversed in the future. Portugal has always been an interesting case of PR to me, but it has just become more so.
Precisely because of the importance of this question of how much cooperation there will be (if any) between AD and Chega, Vicente Valentim (on Twitter) suggests the post-election period could be a “defining moment” for the country.
Notes
The mean actual largest party seat share in a sample of 634 simple electoral systems is only 1.048 times the model prediction; for PR systems the model is even better, with a ratio of 1.033. So a ratio of 1.26 indicates a strong degree of politics being needed in addition to institutions to explain an outcome. Less than a quarter of PR elections have ratios that high or higher. ↩︎
The mean largest party seat share for the sample of 280 PR elections in parliamentary (or semi-presidential) democracies that I am working with happens to be 38.2%. ↩︎
That includes the list in Madeira that ran under a “Madeira First” label but included the PSD as its main component, as did the AD elsewhere. ↩︎
Elections for the European Parliament will be held in early June. The provisions for the elections now require thresholds in high-magnitude electoral districts.
All Member States must use a system based on proportional representation. In addition to the voluntary threshold for the allocation of seats of up to 5% at national level, Council Decision (EU, Euratom) 2018/994 established an obligatory minimum threshold of between 2% and 5% for constituencies (including single-constituency Member States) with more than 35 seats. This requirement must be met in time for the 2024 European elections at the latest.
Currently, the following Member States apply thresholds: France, Belgium, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Czechia, Romania, Croatia, Latvia and Hungary (5%); Austria, Italy and Sweden (4%); Greece (3%); and Cyprus (1.8%). The other Member States apply no threshold, although Germany tried to do so, but in two decisions of 2011 and 2014, the German Constitutional Court declared the country’s existing thresholds for EU elections (which were first 5%, then 3%) to be unconstitutional.
Most European member states use a single statewide district. These range in magnitude from 6 (Cyprus, Luxembourg, and Malta) to 96 (Germany1). The others that have district magnitude of 35 or greater are Spain (61) and France (81). Aside from the case of Germany mentioned in the quote above, Spain is the only remaining state that did not already have a legal threshold, or one in the stipulated range.2
The mean magnitude of the single-constituency cases is 24. Four states divide their territory into multiple constituencies: Belgium, Ireland, Italy and Poland. The mean district magnitude for this latter group of countries is just under 8. Overall, there will be 47 districts for 720 seats, making a mean district magnitude of 15.3 and thus a seat product of 11,016.3
(Please note various clarifications and corrections offered by readers in the comments section.)
There is an interesting twist on the single German district: “Seats are apportioned [sic–“allocated” would be better] to parties nationally. A party can choose to only stand in some of the 16 states and have its national seat count be subapportioned to those states. Only the CDU and the CSU have done this in previous elections.” (Quoted from a footnote at Wikipedia.) Also, if I understand other footnotes correctly, the seats parties win in Italy and Poland are determined nationally, despite their being “districts”; apparently a two-tier compensatory system. This is a level of complexity that calls into question the mean magnitudes I report below, but I am not going to attempt to adjust for this factor. ↩︎
It is interesting that Spain had no threshold despite the high magnitude. After all, Spain applies a district-level legal threshold (3%) in elections to its national parliament, which has real impact only in the two districts that have 30 or more seats. ↩︎
Whether the seat product model “works” or should even be expected to work for a supra-national parliament is not something I have ever entertained. ↩︎
Below is a graph lifted from Wikipedia showing polling trends for existing parties in Israel since the 2022 election. I marked it up with labels for the parties and a summary box of some alternative government coalition scenarios if the polling average at the end of January were translated into actual seats at an election.
It remains as of now that it would be possible to form a coalition that would consist of none of the original partners in the right-wing/Haredi government formed after the last election. Also possible is a government consisting of the two main centrist parties and the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties (UTJ and Shas). Benny Gantz’s National Unity Party is far ahead, as it has been since immediately after the Shemeni Atzeret invasion and massacre.1 NUP had already pulled ahead earlier in the year, during the protests against the government’s judicial overhaul, but their lead increased dramatically after the war initiated by Hamas.
Although it is not possible to say for sure from such aggregate data, it appears NUP’s initial gains in 2023 came about as much at the expense of Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid as of Likud, but evidently more from Likud since the war started. At the end of the plotted sequence, there is some decline in NUP and recovery by Likud. This will bear watching, but it would take a lot to reverse the trends we have seen over the past four months.2 As I pointed out as early in the war as 13 October, Israelis have shown how a public can rally around the flag without rallying around the leader. No doubt PM Benjamin Netanyahu thinks he can recover and preserve his political career. But it does not look good for him as of now.
Note down at the lower right of the graph how Otzma Yehudit (OY, appropriately enough) has grown sharply during the war. Superficially, this seems like a surge for the far right. However, it appears to be only a reshuffling of existing far-right voters. In November, 2022, OY ran on an alliance list with Religious Zionism (RZ). This list won 14 seats. On current polling, OY has 9 seats but a list of Mafdal3 and RZ is barely making it into the Knesset at 4 or 5 seats.4 So as a combined force they are actually level or down a seat (assuming RZ clears the threshold, or the two again run on an alliance list).
The left (as distinct from center-left) is doing terribly. On current polling, Labor would fall well below the threshold and Meretz would barely make it, at 4. Presumably they will run as an alliance, but even combined they might win only 4 or 5 seats.5
Note that not only could a government be formed without any of the governing partners arising out of the 2022 election result, but also without the Islamist Ra’am (which backed the 2021-22 “change” government), as well as without the left. My best guess, based on this polling, would be a more classic Israeli oversized coalition that would include the Haredi parties and maybe Labor/Meretz (if they make it in) and maybe also Ra’am. The important point is that Gantz would have multiple options for either a narrow centrist coalition or an oversized one, putting him in a very strong bargaining position.
There is thus a strong centrist tendency in terms of parties, with no evidence of hardline wartime sentiment fueling the far right, and Likud still reeling even if there appears to be a small uptick as of late January.
CAVEATS. It is very important to consider some caveats to all of this. First, obviously we are still far from knowing how the war will end, whether there will be an additional full-scale war with Hezbollah soon, and how the security situation in months’ time might affect these trends. Second, it is highly likely that there will be new right-wing parties and maybe new parties elsewhere in the spectrum that will enter once it is clear there will be an election. There are various scenario polls with specific leaders of either new or existing parties that are also being done by various polling firms. These are not considered here, and I think they mean relatively little as long as they are polling hypothetical party options. (But part of the point is that this current set of options is itself hypothetical! The party system of Israel has been known to be somewhat fluid.) Third, and a very big caveat, is that no election is due till late October, 2026. It is nearly impossible to imagine this government and Knesset lasting that long, but at the moment there is no clear path to an election in 2024. That may change.
The most likely way that an early election could come about remains a split in Likud, creating a new right-wing party with 5 or more current Likud MKs [but see further CAVEAT!]. I am not suggesting that is likely to happen any time soon. It simply is likelier to trigger an early election than any other scenario, in my assessment. The second most likely way is Itamar Ben-Gvir pulling his OY out. He has 6 of the 14 seats won on the list with RZ, and his defection would deprive the original narrow right-wing/Haredi coalition, formed after the 2022 election, of its majority. Ben-Gvir regularly threatens to leave over the government not being hardline enough. Would he really pull the plug? I do not think it can be ruled out, but it seems more bluff than reality. Perhaps at some point he will decide that the only way to preserve his polling gains (as noted, mainly at the expense of the other far-right party, RZ) is to be seen as the one who ended the current “too soft” government. As for the main other way the government could fall, on the current composition of the Knesset there is no path to a no-confidence vote, which would take 61 votes for a specific new government (“constructive vote”).
For the time being, the government is probably more stable than it looks. But that certainly could change, and clearly the public in the aggregate wants a change, based on what it is telling pollsters about voting intention.
Gantz and his NUP joined the government shortly after the massacres by Hamas. ↩︎
It is possible that Prime Minister and Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s constantly claiming that only he can prevent a Palestinian state is working. It is my assessment that the forces that have so far prevented the formation of such a state are the lack of a plausible agreement that both sides would consider acceptable, the deep intransigence of the Palestinian side, and the existence and threat of Hamas. But politicians like to claim credit for stuff, and Bibi has been PM during a long period in which a Palestinian state indeed has not happened–continuously since 2009, aside from the brief “change” government of 2021-22. It is not as if an alternative government now would be quick to agree to a two-state “solution,” and I have my doubts that this issue can save Bibi and Likud. But, as I often say, I never make predictions about Israeli politics! ↩︎
Mafdal is what remains of the venerable National Religious Party. One of its recent reincarnations was as Bayit Yehudi, formerly led by Naftali Bennet, who would go on to lead the “change” government but heading a different list at that time (Yamina). The various pieces of Israel’s “right of Likud” have really shuffled around a lot in recent years! ↩︎
The legal threshold is 3.25% of votes, which means no list will win fewer than 4 seats if it wins any. ↩︎
The last time that they ran together (2020), they did considerably worse than the sum of their previous parts. One or both will tend to lose votes to other parties for being allied with each other. ↩︎
I continue to find interesting the role of the “war cabinet” that was created within the Israeli government shortly after the Hamas invasion and massacre. As I noted before, it is fairly ad hoc (unlike the “security cabinet”), although there has been some evidence that its powers have been somewhat more formalized over time.
The role of the war cabinet within the wider government is important for various reasons, but one of the most important is that the far-right parties are not represented in the war cabinet. This is good for the war effort to the extent that international support is critical, as the far-right parties and their leaders are not shy about saying outrageous things about how they think the war should be handled.1
Predictably, this delegation to a small inner cabinet is causing political problems, not only from the far-right, but from within the Prime Minister’s Likud Party. From Lazar Berman (Times of Israel reporter) on Twitter:
Likud ministers at today’s cabinet meeting insist that any further decisions about a hostage deal would have to come before the full cabinet for a proper debate, and not have the smaller war cabinet make decisions then send them over for a rubber stamp, I was told.
The demand includes any further meetings abroad by Mossad chief David Barnea with international intermediaries. Justice Min Yariv Levin, Education Min Yoav Kisch, Transport Min Miri Regev, Foreign Min Israel Katz, and Diaspora Min Amichai Chikli all support that demand.
A further note from Berman’s thread, related to substantive policy and not specifically to the “seat at the table” problem of delegation:
They also express concern over the difficulty of a return to combat operations after a long cease-fire, and the identity of the terrorists who could be released from Israeli prisons in a deal.
On the first part of that, I will only say that this concern was expressed by several commentators at the time of the previous temporary ceasefire. It does not seem to have been a problem for the resumption of active combat. Maybe it would be this time, but I doubt it. The country remains, as best I can tell, quite unified around the objective of smashing Hamas to the fullest extent possible–as it should be. But there are divisions over how–or whether–to strike a deal that could see (some) hostages released. An easy guess is that even if such a deal is struck, Hamas will violate it and the war will resume at full force no later, and possibly sooner, than initially planned in the deal.
Thanks to Yuhui (Huey) Li’s kind invitation and hosting, there are now two interviews posted of me answering questions about Israeli politics in the context of the current war against Hamas. It is a two-part interview, recorded in late December. Each part is under ten minutes. Huey put them on a TikTok channel he maintains. With his okay, I have posted them on my own (little known?) YouTube channel. In fact, all the content on my channel is Israel-related as of now,1 with the only other video there being the talk I gave in April, 2023, about the judicial overhaul.
Whether or not you know Huey from TikTok, you might know him from political science. He has coauthored with me,2 and is the author of an important book about institutional design, Dividing the Rulers: How Majority Cycling Saves Democracy (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2019), summarized previously in this virtual orchard. He is also on Substack.3
For those who prefer reading to watching,4 below are some typed responses to some of Huey’s questions from a document prepared before we recorded (and somewhat lightly edited since). This is not a transcript, as we did the interview somewhat more spontaneously than this rigid Q&A suggests, and also had to cut quite a lot to fit in the ten-minute format. But this might be useful for those who would like more detail of my thinking, or would benefit from more context to the events we discuss. I have also added a few links (mostly to previous posts on this blog) and notes.
YL: As a parliamentary system with a large number of parties, Israel is supposed to have quick leadership changes.5 It did most of the time. What makes Netanyahu different?
MSS: This is a good question, and perhaps a puzzle at first, but there are some key explanations that I think help. First, in all but a few elections of the last 12 or more years, Likud has probably had the median-voter position or has been closest to the median of any of the relatively large parties. And that phrase, “relatively large” is really key here. In most elections, Likud gets just 25%–30% of the seats. But only on occasion (like in the three-election stalemate of 2019–2020) is there another party close in seat share. That brings me to the second big problem for replacing him: There is no “left bloc” in Israel. There are center-left parties and there are the Arab parties. Only one small party from the Arab bloc has been willing to enter coalitions with Jewish parties, and in fact the willingness of this party Ra’am (a conservative Islamist party led by Mansour Abbas) was an essential condition for the formation of the “change” government comprised of left and non-Likud right-wing parties that did replace Netanyahu for about a year following the 2021 election. Then there is the third reason—the Haredi (ultra-orthodox) parties that in recent years have been interested in coalescing only with Likud. They get around 12-13% of the seats, so that brings Likud’s reliable bloc up to almost 40%. That is pretty hard to beat, especially when 6-7 seats (about 5% of the total) are held by Arab parties other than Ra’am that will not join a coalition.
There are a couple of other things that deserve mention here. First, while Netanyahu has been prime minister since 2009 other than 2021-22, his coalition partners have changed quite a lot over the years. So there is more churn in government composition than it seems if you just look at the top. Every government but one (2013-15) has had the Haredi parties in it, so that is further evidence for lack of change over time. However, and this is an important point that is often overlooked, all his governments but one have had at least one party to Likud’s left as a partner. The one exception to that rule is the current one, formed about a year ago after the November, 2022, election. This government (not counting the opposition parties that joined the new “war cabinet” after 7 Oct.) was the first of Netanyahu’s in which Likud was the left-most party; usually it has been the party that was right-most (or nearly so) of those in the cabinet, with the most extreme right being in opposition. That is the real difference this time. It is a narrow right-wing, ultra-nationalist, and Haredi government, and very unlike anything seen in Israel before. (It is also worth nothing that the government formed in late 2022 did not win a majority of the votes. It got only 48% of the votes, and its Knesset majority was manufactured by the electoral system—or more specifically, but the fact that the Meretz party on the left and one of the Arab parties wasted votes by falling just below the 3.25% threshold. If they had made it over the threshold, most likely he could not have formed this government.)
The last point is to reflect on how it is that Netanyahu and Likud came to be at, or close to, the median position: Valence, as we political scientists say. He was seen as the one who could keep Israel prosperous and secure. He is often called “Mr. Security.” Israel under Netanyahu has been mostly at peace and without major terrorist attacks, other than the periodic flare-ups with Hamas and other terrorists in Gaza. These have mostly been small conflicts by Middle East standards that have ended quickly. Of course, this reputation was shattered dramatically on the 7th of October.
YL: If he relies on a lack of alternatives, why hasn’t a viable alternative emerged after these years?
MSS: Seemingly, one did. Benny Gantz, a former army Chief of Staff, first contested the April, 2019, election and was seen as a genuine alternative.6 However, through three elections he at best could roughly tie Likud in seats, and then that brought us to the problem mentioned earlier: any government without Likud has to either somehow span the left, Arab, and some part of the right (like the “change” government of 2021-22) or else it would have to span another major cleavage that we have only hinted at thus far—religion and state. If the Haredi parties’ seats are needed for a non-Likud alternative, somehow they have to be willing to compromise with the more staunchly secular opposition parties, especially Yesh Atid and Yisrael Beiteinu. Yesh Atid is the party formed by Yair Lapid (who was interim PM for a while in 2022 when the “change” government broke down). This party was formed around two issues—middle class cost of living and “sharing the burden,” meaning getting the Haredi community to draft into the army. This is an issue that the Haredi parties have always been able to dodge, as long as their partnership with Likud endures. The other strongly secular party, Yisrael Beiteinu, is led by Avigdor Lieberman. His voters are mostly immigrants from the former Soviet Union, and some of them, while Jewish by a broad definition, do not meet the strict definition that the Haredi rabbis dictate, mainly due to the various ways in which the Soviet Union suppressed religious expression and Judaism in particular. Because Israel has no civil marriage (or divorce, or other personal status policies), these constituents of Yisrael Beiteinu often face difficulty in ordinary life in Israel and would like to see policy changes that reduce the role of the religious establishment. So bridging these gaps is hard for any alternative government. It may be possible after the war, if current polling showing Gantz far ahead holds, and given that issues other than religion and state will be more salient.
YL: He seems to value his relationship with Russia, having talked to Putin twice since 10/07, let alone covering a building with their photo a few years ago. What’s the rationale? Did he expect Putin to be helpful?
MSS: This would mostly be due to the “deconfliction” mechanisms that Israel worked out with Russia, under which Israeli Air Force planes can operate over Syria without risking being shot down by Russian forces stationed there to prop up the dictator Assad. Israel regularly attacks Iranian forces and Iranian proxies (including Lebanese Hizbollah) that operate in Syria with the collaboration of the Syrian government. At least this seems to be the best explanation for Netanyahu’s relationship with Putin. This has broken down in the current war, and Russia has been very critical of Israel, is cozying up to Iran (partly because the latter supplies drones and rockets being used against Ukrainian civilians), and is all but openly siding with Hamas. The Israeli air force is continuing to carry out operations against targets inside Syria, and it is not clear to me to what degree tacit understandings may remain in place despite the public relationship no longer looking so cozy.
YL: Back to 10/07, what did Hamas try to achieve? Did they really expect Iran to formally join the conflict? Of course, the top leaders hiding in Qatar will be financially rewarded. But the mid and upper-level operatives in Gaza will no doubt get killed, so what made them comply?
MSS: I don’t claim to know what Hamas leaders were thinking as to the specific attack they ordered. It seems that most experts, and at least in public the US and Israeli governments, do not think Iran ordered the attack. The tactics bear all the hallmarks of Iranian training and strategy (particularly resembling something that has been long expected from Hizbollah out of Lebanon). But maybe Hamas’s military leaders in Gaza acted without warning their patrons in Iran first. Maybe without even coordinating with the Hamas political leadership in Qatar, although I certainly would not claim to know.
Hamas, like Iran, is openly committed to overthrowing the entire Israeli state. Hamas is basically a cult of permanent war and of blatant anti-semitism, considering Jewish presence a stain on Islam. So that they would do something like this is not itself surprising. The surprise—the shock—is that they had the capability to evade Israeli defenses and that they did this during a period when the conventional wisdom in Israel was that they were deterred and more interested in quiet than in a big war. But why precisely now—there are various theories, but I do not think anyone can say.
YL: Iran appears to have no intention of fighting Israel directly, but they were apparently in on the plan. What’s their objective? This may sound a little like a conspiracy theory, but could it be a part of a grand scheme to affect US elections? After all, nothing would be a better gift for the world’s dictators than the US becoming a dictatorship.
MSS: As I mentioned, I think we do not know that Iran was in on the plan. (It would not surprise me if they were, but in the absence of clear evidence, I feel no choice but to side with what the experts seem to believe.) I think if Iran—or Hamas—wanted to influence the US election, they probably acted too soon. A more proximate strategic goal is likely to prevent normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia,7 with the latter joining the Abraham Accords. I do not believe this is the main objective, especially given that Hamas clearly had been planning this attack for some time but it was only in recent months that the Biden Administration seemed close to brokering a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. But it probably is at least a factor in whatever strategic calculation went into the attack and its specific timing (especially if Iran was in fact behind it).
These videos are included in a post on Huey’s Substack. ↩︎
As an enticement to watching, let me note that you will get to see some of my collection of train photos in the background. There was a cat on my lap the whole time, too, but my talking managed to keep him sound asleep, so you do not get to see him, unfortunately. ↩︎
This is a key point of Huey’s book, mentioned above. And I concur. ↩︎
Benny Gantz led his party into a “unity” coalition with Likud following the third election of the 2019-20 period. It did not last long. ↩︎
On 30 September–exactly one week before the Hamas invasion and massacres–it was reported that a “basic framework” was in place with the Saudis willing to “put aside” their previous insistence that a Palestinian state be established as a condition of normalization. Obviously the attack had to have been planned long before that. In any case, perhaps the current war will only cause a delay. ↩︎
I wonder if Josep Borrell, the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, still supports EU policy on Israel and a potential Palestinian state. He said this week, “The United Nations recognizes and has recognized many times the self-determination right of the Palestinian people. Nobody can veto it” [emphasis added].
Yet EU policy is, officially, that the conflict can be resolved only by a negotiated peace agreement.1 I would imagine Mr Borrell knows that for a negotiated agreement to be put in place both parties must agree. Therefore, either of them can veto it. Whether or not the Palestinian side will ever see a proposed agreement it won’t veto (as it has done several previous times), it remains the case that any such proposal would need Israeli consent. In other words, the Israeli government has a veto.
Borrell has also previously said the “international community” would need to “impose” a solution on the parties if they are unable to come to terms. Such imperialist talk, as if white Christian Europe needs to force those Orientals to behave. In addition to asking him if he knows that negotiating parties retain veto rights over any potential bargain, I’d like to ask Borrell which EU countries are prepared to commit military force to impose his preferred solution against one or both parties not wanting it.
This was recently re-emphasized by none other than Borrell himself, reiterating support for the Oslo process and saying, “We can think of a renewable resolution that encourages the two sides to reach an agreement, first for Gaza but then also for the West Bank… [as] a step on a clear path towards a Palestinian state” ↩︎
This is true “wow” moment to start the new Gregorian year. The Israeli Supreme Court has ruled, on an 8-7 vote, to strike down the first installment of the government’s controversial judicial overhaul.
In what now seems like ages ago, but was only July, the Knesset had passed an amendment to the Basic Law: Judiciary that prevented courts from using the standard of “reasonableness” as a justification for overturning a government decision.
The amendment was immediately appealed and the Supreme Court held an unusual en banc hearing (usually it divides into smaller panels for individual cases). Two of the Court’s members from the more liberal wing, including its President, reached their mandatory retirement age shortly thereafter, but under the law still had till mid-January to be counted in decisions on any matters they had heard pre-retirement. So we knew a ruling was coming soon. There had been a leak a week or so that it would be 8-7 to strike down the amendment, as indeed it is. Just yesterday it was reported that one of the governing parties was proposing a bill that would have given the Court nine months from a hearing to issue a ruling. But the decision being announced today preempts any possibility of changing the law to buy time.
Interestingly, 12 of the 15 agree the court has authority to strike down a Basic Law, but only 8 agreed that this specific case was one in which exercising such authority was justified. The significance of the decision is that the court is effectively saying that the constitution itself can be subject to constitutional review. That is because a Basic Law is Israel’s constitution, in effect, and such laws have been treated as higher law by the Supreme Court through nearly thirty years of precedent. The political right generally disagrees, and that has been the motivation for the whole package of judicial overhaul measures that the coalition was advancing throughout 2023 till the 7 October massacres and resultant war changed the public agenda in a fundamental way. The “reasonableness” measure was meant to be just the beginning of the overhaul.
Although I hesitate to use warlike language in the current context, this is very much an escalation by the Supreme Court (or a parting shot by the members who just retired). That is not to say they are wrong to rule this way. (And the timing was out of their control unless the two retirees simply decided not to be part of the decision–at least in the absence of passage of a law like the proposed one mentioned above.) On the one hand, it is very unusual for a constitutional court to judge the constitution itself (as opposed to judging subordinate acts). On the other hand, when the constitution (i.e., any Basic Law) can be passed by a majority of the legislature, just like any law, it would be remarkable if a majority effectively had the right to declare any of its acts “constitutional” and therefore immune to judicial review.
There is not an easy answer here as to which position is “right.” Israel really needs a constitution that requires more than a regular majority to amend.1 But it does not have that, and here we are.
It need not be a full Constitution, with a capital C. It could be a “small constitution” or simply a revised package of basic laws covering specifically the operation of the political institutions, passed by a supermajority, and subject to being amended only with such a majority or other more complex procedure than ordinary legislation. The other thorny issues that have so far prevented the creation of a full constitution could remain outside such a document. Yes, what I am talking about is easier proposed than accomplished, but it is worth pushing for. ↩︎
A BBC headline from 12 December reads, “Aleksandar Vucic dominates Serbian election as vote nears.” Below the headline, it reads, “Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vucic, may not be standing in Sunday’s parliamentary elections himself. But his image and name are front and centre of his party’s campaign” even though “he is no longer officially the party’s leader.” The party of Vučić is the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS).
My immediate (and predictable?) reaction was, well, yes, of course. Presidentialization is a thing!
In my 2010 book with David Samuels, we discuss various ways in which assembly elections, and the parties that contest them, in pure or semi-presidential systems tend to be “presidentialized.” We show numerous dimensions of presidentialization in behavior and organization, but the unifying theme is the tendency for the presidency to dominate the party system even in many systems in which the president is not formally all that powerful. (Serbia has a premier-presidential system.) And, yes, even when the president does not hold any formal party leadership position. Despite these formal matters, an incumbent president is usually the most prominent party official (hence the de facto leader). As a result, an election campaign being about attitudes towards the president should be the default, not a headline event, even when the president himself is not on the ballot. The point is that, in effect, the president is almost always on the ballot–even if only indirectly–and the face of the party. In addition, leaders of other parties are often more or less running for president even if they are not actually at the moment running for president.
The article notes that most of the opposition has forged an alliance list, called Serbia Against Violence, to oppose the president. That is quite remarkable, and is a strong indicator of presidentialization in the sense of the campaign being about the president even though it is not a campaign for president. Serbia has a strongly proportional electoral system, with a single nationwide district of 250 seats (albeit a 3% threshold1). So there is not much incentive for pre-electoral pacts in the assembly electoral rules. But there is if you want to be able to make opposition to the presidency a centerpiece of your campaign, and to generate cohabitation by running jointly and attempting to beat the SNS.2
The election is 17 December. It is a snap election; the previous assembly election was in April 2022, in which the SNS won 120 of the 250 seats (48%, on 44% of the vote). The next largest party in that election had 38 seats. The presidency was last elected in April 2022, concurrent with the assembly election. Vučić himself won 60% of the vote.
Back in 2012, when Serbia’s elections also were concurrent, I said that Serbia was showing France how premier-presidentialism should work. Perhaps I would not say that now, given that Serbia has been said to have experienced “backsliding” in recent years. Moreover, the point then was about the relative timing of presidential and assembly elections and how they affect the electoral basis of government formation. Indeed, at the time I noted how the concurrent timing of assembly elections with the first round in Serbia made the entire process arguably less presidentialized than does the honeymoon cycle used in France. However, a snap election as soon in the term as this one is not only enhancing presidentialization, but simply smells a bit fishy. (See more thoughts on this in a comment.) That the opposition alliance is called “Serbia Against Violence” hints at some of the difficulties of the current political moment that Vučić is seeking to exploit with the snap election.
There are provisions for ethnic-minority lists to win seats without needing to clear the legal threshold. As for the regular threshold, note that while 3% may not seem high, it is high relative to such a large district magnitude, the simple quota for which would be 0.4%. ↩︎
A very interesting development reported today by Barak Ravid of Axios (in a Twitter thread) shows some further evolution of the relationship between Israel’s security cabinet (an inner team of ministers that is grounded in law) and the “war cabinet” that was set up as part of the process of bringing some (former) opposition parties into the decision making process after the war triggered by the 7 Oct. invasion and massacre by Hamas.
The substantive issue is a response to reported pressure from the Biden Administration to increase the amount of fuel allowed into the Gaza Strip. The procedural point of political significance is that the security cabinet approved a process by which the war cabinet will determine from time to time what the “minimal amount” of fuel to be allowed in will be. The reason this is significant is that it sidelines Religious Zionism leader Bezalel Smotrich and Otzma Yehudit leader Itamar Ben Gvir, both of whom are in the security cabinet and voted against this decision because they want no fuel allowed in, yet neither of them is in the war cabinet.
Back when this war cabinet was established with Benny Gantz’s National Unity party joining, I expressed the view that, contrary to reports at the time, it should not be considered a “unity government” and was not even clearly a “new government.” And part of the reason for my reservations was the informality of the arrangement–the security cabinet being the formal locus of power on war matters, not the new and seemingly ad-hoc war cabinet. But today’s decision would seem to formalize it, just a bit.
Whether or not the current arrangement is in fact a different “government” from the one that was formed just after the 2022 election, I am reminded of what I said at the time of the post-election government agreements: That the extreme parties (notably Otzma) might have a de-facto veto over policy, but even if it were codified in the coalition agreements it would not be binding, and could always be cast aside if the Prime Minister found a way to incorporate parties from the then-opposition into a wider coalition. Bit by bit this seems to be exactly what is happening, at least on key war-management decisions.
Meanwhile, some members of Gantz’s party have called for the party to leave the government, but the leader himself rejects the idea.
I have been reading a book called Does War Make States?, edited by Lars Bo Kasperson and Jeppe Strandsbjerg and published in 2017 by Cambridge University Press. The book, as its subtitle (see image below) implies, is focused mainly on Charles Tilly’s theory of the role of war in state-formation and reconsidering whether it is correct about the formation of states in early-modern Europe. Yet it also contains chapters on more recent state formation. It occurs to me that Israel would be an outstanding case study of successful state formation in the second half of the 20th century, and in a context of repeated military conflict. Yet the few mentions of the Israeli case–in this particular book, anyway–are actually quite dismissive and even factually incorrect, as I shall get to in this entry. But first, a digression: If you know my academic work at all (and most regular readers of this blog presumably are at least aware of my specialities), this title might strike you as not the sort of thing I’d normally read.
As a matter of fact, it is not, although I was quite interested in some of this wider topic in grad school (and I have a few publications on revolutions and incorporation of guerrilla movements into elections and states that you’d be aware of only if you really pored over my CV). I happen to have this book only because in recent years, whenever I earned an honorarium from a press for reviewing a submission (which typically can be taken as $X in cash or $2X in books from the press, because publishers understand academic incentives), I have let grad students submit a wish list of titles they’d like to have. I then fill up the honorarium as best I can with books for these grad students. I was on the committee of a student who recently wrote a dissertation questioning the famous Charles Tilly “bellicist” (or, better, “bellocentric”) thesis that is best summed up in the line, “war made the state, and the state made war.” (Check out this fascinating video of Tilly, who died in 2008, talking, approximately year before his death, about how he got interested in the topic of state formation.) One of my students–Ipek Çineli, who is now a Max Weber Fellow at the EUI–wanted this book, and I “borrowed” it to read it first. (She will get the book soon–promise.)
The book is really good! So it is somewhat unfortunate that I am going to post about a book I have read–something I have rarely done on this blog–mostly in the context of criticizing a couple of chapters within it. But that’s exactly what I am going to do.
I happen to be reading this book during a couple of quite significant wars–the Ukrainian fight against the Russian invasion and occupation of a chunk of its territory and the Israeli fight back against the Hamas pogrom and its rule over the terrorist staging area it has built in the Gaza Strip. So the themes are suddenly more relevant to me than usual, given my longstanding interest in Ukraine and especially Israel. Moreover, the topic of state building, particularly after wars, is a central concern for the “day after” in Gaza: How will a state or state-like set of institutions be established there that allows Israel to be safe and Palestinians to enjoy a measure of much-delayed freedom and dignity? There are also important questions about how the war for survival is remaking state institutions and the nation itself in Ukraine. Alas, this post won’t answer these questions. But such questions being on my mind made reading this book all the more relevant. Further, their being on my mind also made a couple of misunderstandings or dismissive remarks about Israel serve as even bigger and brighter red flags than might have been the case in other times.
I will post a couple of excerpts and then comments. (Apologies for the not great quality of my page scans.) The first comes from Chapter 7, “War, conflict, and the state reconsidered,” by Vivek Swaroop Sharma.
The main theme of the chapter is to question the role of war and violence as the main drivers of state-formation and political development in Europe. Specifically, it questions the “realist” conception of international relations that underlies Tilly’s account, and offers an “institutionalist” alternative. The idea of war building states assumes a “total war” but, the author argues, most wars in the emergence of European states were more “limited” and even guided by law and institutions (think chivalric codes). It’s a fascinating and convincing argument that I can’t do justice to in my quick summary.
Where the author sees total war and conquest occurring in state building is where Europeans engaged in religious conflict, such as conquering pagans in the Baltic region or fighting off Muslim powers in southeastern Europe. He contrasts this process, with its greater tolerance for “collateral impact” on civilians, with “dynastic” wars where minimizing involvement of civilians was preferred by those engaging in the fight. (After all, the victorious claimant to the throne would want to have the peasant labor to exploit.)
This brings us to the excerpted passage, occurring at pp. 213-14 right before the chapter’s conclusion. Note, in the 11th line of the excerpt, a single sentence on Israel and the “West Bank.”
This is the only mention of that territorial dispute in the chapter. It could hardly get the Israeli–Palestinian conflict more wrong, when situated in the paragraph’s context of how territorial conquest works. The Israeli presence is rather obviously not “converting” Muslims in the territory to Israeli “institutional identity” let alone to Judaism!1 More to the point, it also has entailed essentially no displacement, in the sense of transfer/expulsion of civilians to other jurisdictions. (I won’t get into the discussions of “indigenous populations” except to note it hardly applies to this territory in the way the author seems to intend, and it was indeed Jews who were previously expelled from this territory–and in some cases massacred–due to the invasion of the Jordanian and other Arab militaries in 1948.)
My appeal to scholars and others would be that if you don’t understand this conflict, please don’t throw a single sentence into an otherwise erudite essay, claiming it’s “very much the same logic” as your essay is demonstrating. It probably isn’t.2
The second excerpt comes from Chapter 8, “War and state in the Middle East,” by Dietrich Jung. This chapter is by an expert on the region, or at least on the Muslims of the region. Its main conclusion is that the Tilly thesis only very partially applies here. (And even that may be a stretch, but I’m not the expert.)
Unfortunately, the few brief mentions of Israel in this chapter are dismissive and lacking context. I don’t know the field of Middle East studies well, but I certainly sense that being dismissive and lacking context is how the field at large indeed treats Israel.
By dismissive, I mean even in such an otherwise innocuous a matter as how Israel’s conflict with its Arab enemies (in an actual war-impacted state-formation process!) is labeled: It is repeatedly called “the Palestine conflict” as though Israeli nation and state building were not relevant other than as perhaps something getting in the way.3
But most of all I want to call attention to these passages on pp 230-1:
The claim that the “nascent Palestinian state” was built largely “without direct contact to a population and a territory” is fair, although it’s odd there is no mention anywhere in the chapter of the period since the Oslo Accords when the Palestinian Authority has indeed had such contact (for now about three decades).
But the Israeli state had little contact with a population or territory as it was being built? This an extraordinary and simply incorrect claim. How about the Yishuv? Accounts of the Israeli War of Independence (or, pardon me, the Palestine conflict of 1948-49) typically emphasize how the Jewish community of Palestine was ready for war and state building because it had already been building state-like institutions among the settled Jewish population of the lands in question.
The point in the last paragraph of the excerpt about “political rents” being built up through international ties, allowing the building of “huge security apparatuses… directed against the regimes’ own populations” obviously does not describe the Israeli state. The latter indeed has built up a huge security apparatus. It also advanced well into the “second stage” of “nationalization” and “representative government.” Somehow the chapter missed the most Tillian example staring it in the face while bringing in “the Palestine conflict” as little more than a rent-extraction opportunity and constraint. The actual constraint “the Palestine conflict” has placed on the military behavior of “regional” (i.e. Arab) states has been through Israeli victory in successive foundational and consolidating wars, followed later by peace treaties with the two most important “confrontation states” (Egypt and Jordan—see p. 237, where the argument about “political rents” from the international system is applied very well).
In conclusion, we have here a book with an excellent set of essays on a key topic in historical sociology and its intersection with political science. Unfortunately, two of the chapters reference the Israeli case but in a way that is dismissive of the state itself and factually flawed. In one chapter, it is just a throwaway line that would have been better left out (or elaborated upon, if the author actually had a valid point here, which as I said I do not believe he had). In the other chapter, the Israeli case is seriously misunderstood–overlooking the importance of the Yishuv to state-building–while missing how Tilly’s phrase “war made the state and the state made war” might actually have fit one Middle Eastern country rather well.
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Postscript: There is likely some literature that places Israel into Tilly’s framework. I’d be surprised if there were not. But reviewing any such literature was not the purpose of this post, which was directed solely at responding to the brief mentions of Israel in this specific edited volume reassessing the Tilly thesis. Later, I did a basic Google Scholar search and did not come up with much of relevance, although there is a masters thesis the abstract of which says it applies Tilly to Israeli and Palestinian state-building, though I was not able to access the item. Tilly also wrote something himself about Middle Eastern states, but it is a short, polemical piece about the Gulf War of 1990–91 and not relevant to what I was searching for.
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Notes
Judaism, through most of its history up to the present, does not seek converts (no proselytization let alone forcible conversion), although it generally welcomes converts under certain conditions. The number of Muslim or Christian residents of the West Bank who have enquired about, let alone completed, conversion to Judaism must be an extremely marginal phenomenon. I am sure the author knows this, which only makes the inclusion of this sentence in this paragraph more puzzling.
The book includes another chapter by Sharma, coauthored with Philip Gorski, “Beyond the Tilly thesis: ‘Family Values’ and state formation in Latin Christendom” (Chapter 4). I wanted to include a short excerpt from this chapter’s conclusion, because I find the points about religious origins of bureaucracy and about “family values” really interesting. However, Word Press won’t let me paste images into a footnote, so I will just post links to the images (1, 2) for those who might be inclined to click.
Not knowing this field, I decided to do a quick Google Scholar search on the phrase, Palestine conflict, to see if it was commonly used. It seems not. Most of the search results, at least on the first few pages, were actually to “Israel/Palestine conflict” or similar. I found a few that were simply “Palestine conflict,” but only one that is clearly about the post-1948 Jewish state and its Arab-Palestinian opponents. The other two were mainly about the Mandate period, when it is arguably more appropriate, inasmuch as the territory under British rule (and in which there were both Arab and Jewish communities, with the overriding mandate being the creation of a Jewish “national home”) was indeed called Palestine.
The following is a guest planting about the Italian government’s constitutional reform proposal by Gianluca Passarelli, and it addresses various questions that we had in previous discussions of this topic (1, 2).
After the attempt made in 2016 when the parliament approved a reform promoted by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi (Democratic Party, centre-left) but that was rejected via a constitutional referendum, Italy seems to be dealing again with a shot to deeply modify its institutions. The reform is called by the new Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (Brothers of Italy, right-wing, first woman to cover that position) leading a neo-fascist party in a coalition with the League (far right regionalist party) and Forza Italia (Silvio Berlusconi’s heritage): the project aims to introduce the direct election of the head of the government.
After weeks of internal discussion and considering the political hostility and the citizens’ perplexity (it’s a divisive argument) for the introduction of a presidential regime, the right coalition moved towards a different option. However, instead of generating more clarity and a softer model, the proposal goes in the direction of assuring a direct election of the head of the government.
The document issued by the minister Elisabetta Casellati indicates that the head of the government will be “directly elected” by voters. Basically, in a way, the proposal resounds and mimics the Israeli experience of the model used between 1996-2001 after its adoption in 1992. But the similarities end here, at the “direct election”.
The electoral system for the Parliament (Italy has a bicameral system: Senate, 200 members, and House, 400 members) indicates so far a PR with bonus, a majority-assuring system that would confer 55% of the seats to the list(s) linked to the candidate to the premiership. But there is not a clear model, nor the indication of whether or not preferences would be allowed, which formula will be adopted, in how many districts Italy will be divided into.
According to the recently circulated draft, the project of constitutional reform would aim to modify three articles of the Italian Constitution, as follows. The presidential prerogative to appoint the PM (art. 92 Cost.) would change so that the President has to indicate the name of the candidate winning the elections. As head of the state, the President would keep the prerogative to appoint the ministers, albeit based on the premier’s indications. Moreover, one main hypothesis circulating is that were the PM to end his/her term before the legislature, the President should indicate a new head of the government by choosing among those elected in the list(s) of the candidate who won the elections. So, there is not the provision of a constructive vote of no confidence (as in an earlier version–ed.). And, due to the previous proposed changes, the reform would modify the norm regulating the vote of confidence and the motion of no confidence to the Government (art. 94 Cost.). Consequently, the presidential power to dissolve the parliament (art. 88 Cost.) is under discussion due to the provision that indicates the President has to appoint the head of the coalition who won the election and to appoint another politician from his/her majority in case s/he resigns. The President would become a sort of notary taking notes of political changes but without intervening. The proposal also would cancel the presidential power to appoint life senators, whilst those still in office would keep their seats as well as the past presidents of the republic that would become life senators.
As the proposal would move to the parliament for a political debate, we will probably know more about this new project of constitutional reform. In particular, the absence in the proposal of a minimum threshold to win the election and to obtain the bonus would likely pave the way to a pronunciation of the Constitutional Court. In fact, in 2015 Judges have already declared that a reasonable threshold should be included in the electoral reform (at the time it was 40%).
Finally, the text is a prelude to a new referendum in a few years because it is very divisive. However, we will see if the proposal will be modified to move towards a shared (two-thirds of the parliament) reform that will exclude a referendum.
This may be my longest post title ever, but it is a question I needed to know the answer to. When the result of the recent Dutch election came in, the gap between the plurality party and the second one was surprisingly large. The PVV of Geert Wilders did not quite win a quarter of the seats (37/150), which is a pretty small share for a largest seat-winner. However, the second largest party is well behind, with only 25 seats for the alliance list of the Green Left and Labour. It seemed to me as if it might be unusual for such a small largest party to have such a large lead.
As the graph below shows, indeed it is unusual. The graph shows on the x-axis the seat share of the largest party (s1), with the share of the second party (s2) on the y-axis. Plotted are about 200 elections in parliamentary democracies. The solid line marks s2=s1, which is obviously the upper limit. If the top two parties tie in seats, the election will be plotted on this line. Cases in which the leading party has less than a quarter of seats are labelled, as are cases where the leading party has over two thirds or the second party is at less than about an eighth, as well as a few others that I’ll note below.
The dashed line represents s2=s1–0.05. As we can see, across the entire graph there are many cases with gaps bigger than 0.05 (i.e., a 10-seat difference if the parliament had 200 seats), but a gap at least that large is very rare if the largest party has less than 25% of the seats. In fact, aside from the Netherlands 2023, marked in magenta, there are only three such elections: Israel 2006 and Belgium in 1961 and 1995. We could give an honorable mention to Denmark 1973, where the leading party had 25.7% and the second party had 15.6%.
Of course, there is a crucial difference between the recent Dutch election and the other cases in which a leading party with only around a quarter of seats or less nonetheless had a five percentage-point lead in seats. In the Dutch case the leading party is a radical party, whereas in the other cases the leading party was one of the mainstream parties. The largest party in Denmark in 1973 was the Social Democrats, the main party of the center-left, while in the two Belgian elections it was one of the main center-right forces (Christian Social in 1961, Flemish Christian Democrats in 1995). The largest party in Israel in 2006 was Kadima, the centrist party formed by Ariel Sharon with the main purpose of building support for his unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. (Centrists do not always have good ideas, but I digress…)
Thus the outcome of such a weak leading party yet such a substantial lead over the next party is indeed unusual. It is even more unusual in that it is a party with extremist positions rather than a party of the center, around which various smaller parties would vie as potential coalition partners. Given the size of the lead, Wilders is in a relatively strong position, while given his extreme policy stances he is by no means assured of parlaying his lead into a prime ministership. And, of course, having less than half of a parliamentary majority is by definition rather weak, even before the ideological positioning is considered. The broad right won big, but it is too early to say that Wilders and his PVV have won in any meaningful sense of what it means to win an election in a parliamentary democracy.
Fruits and Votes 