If there is consensus on one point concerning the forthcoming Israeli elections, now scheduled for May, it is that the major parties will experience further erosion of their support. Since Labor and Likud had both already taken a beating in the 1996 elections, this bodes ill for the ability of either party to govern. It was Netanyahu's fractionated and fractious coalition (and his own veering between positions taken by different elements within it) that brought him down halfway into his term. If, as seems likely, the next elections make whoever is elected Prime Minister dependent on an even larger and stronger assemblage of minority parties, the outlook is for yet greater conflict and instability.

In the 1996 elections, Labor sank from 44 seats (which it had won in 1992) to 34, while the Likud (although its standard bearer won in the direct election for Prime Minister) won only 32 seats. While this was the same number of seats the Likud had won in 1992, given that the Likud in the interim had absorbed the right wing party Tsomet, which had won 8 seats in 1992, this too represented a significant drop.

The conventional wisdom is that the major parties' poor showing was an unintended consequence of changes in the election law. In 1996, for the first time, the public voted directly for the Prime Minister. The idea was to strengthen the hand of the Prime Minister, and foster fewer and larger parties, but the change in the electoral system had the reverse effect. Under Israel's system of proportional representation, any party obtaining 1.5% of the vote obtains at least one Knesset seat. The head of the party scoring highest is invited to assemble a governing coalition, that is, one controlling at least 61 of the 120 Knesset seats. In the past, this meant that a voter wanting a voice in choosing the Prime Minister had an incentive to cast his ballot for either Labor or the Likud, since one or the other would surely be asked to put the governing coalition together. But now the voter could comfortably split his vote, casting his vote in the direct election for Prime Minister and also for whichever party, large or small, best represented his views.

While this explanation no doubt does much to account for the voter shift to small from large parties in 1996, there may also be more fundamental factors at work. The explanation certainly does not account for the further splintering that seems inevitable in 1999. After all, one might have expected that public and politicians alike would have been chastened by the unstable aftermath of the last election and hasten back to the fold of the larger parties in an effort to restore stability.

To understand the growing instability in Israel's government, it may be helpful to step back and look at the basic structural characteristics of her political system. In his 1976 book Parties and Party Systems, politi-
cal scientist Giovanni Sartori classified Israel under the category of "polarized pluralism," a peculiarly unfortunate combination of features in certain systems of proportional representation tending to result in a fragmented polity threatened with chaos. Features of polities plagued by "polarized pluralism," according to Sartori, include 1) the presence of five or more "relevant" parties (relevance does not refer to the party's size but to its value as a coalition partner or its blackmail potential) 2) an "anti-system" party, i.e. one that does not accept the basic legitimacy of the system 3) bilateral oppositions which cannot join forces because each is closer to the governing party than to each other 4) an ideological culture. Israel has many more than five "relevant" parties; it has two (Arab) anti-system parties; it has bilateral oppositions, with parties on the left of the governing party unable to join parties on its right; and it has a strongly ideological culture.

Israel, Sartori wrote, was sui generis because, despite having all the features of a system that tends to chaos, it nonetheless maintained a cohesive and stable polity--in 1976, it will be remembered, Israel had been ruled by Labor without interruption or even serious challenge since the state's inception. (Almost all of the other examples of polarized pluralism cited by Sartori, including Weimar Germany, the Fourth French Republic, and pre-1973 Chile, had disintegrated.) To Sartori, the explanation for Israel's unique ability to maintain equilibrium despite such a system was obvious: the constant threat to the country's existence imposed severe limits on dissent and united the population. A further significant factor, in Sartori's view, was the weight of international pressures which reduced Israel's options.

And indeed, in the decade following 1976, it seemed as if Israel was moving steadily toward what Sartori describes as the normal pattern for stable democracies with systems of proportional representation --"modified pluralism" in which party coalitions alternate (in Israel's case between Labor and Likud), the number of relevant parties is smaller, and the ideological distance between parties is narrow.

The Oslo accords brought this process to an abrupt halt. If, in the 1970s, Sartori could describe Israel as a baffling case that fit no category, it now begins to show all too clearly the typical results of polarized pluralism. Take the presence of anti-system parties. Oslo encouraged Israel's Arabs to assert their national goals

(Continued on p.4)

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