Knesset
Introduction
Israel’s electoral system is a party-list proportional representation system. Each eligible voter (every individual older than 18) may cast a ballot with the name of the list/party of their choosing, or an empty ballot. Upon completion of the election period the votes are summed and two key metrics emerge:
- votes per parliament seat
- an electoral threshold of votes a party/list must meet for its votes to count towards a seat.
Then each party/list receives a number of seats (out of 120) proportional to the number of votes it received, with any excess votes divided among the parties based on the D’Hondt/Bader-Ofer method;1 The parties then deliberate and attempt to form a coalition that would meet –and hopefully exceed– the majority requirement (>=61 seats).
The system was formed in such a way to enable representation of every religio-political constituent group in the nascent state of Israel, as well as to encourage collaboration across and co-option of said groups. That being said, as time passed fulfillment of sectarian interests triumphed over co-option and collaboration in Israel’s parliamentary culture. This analysis approaches the 2019–2022 Israeli electoral deadlock as a combinatorial problem: given the actual distribution of Knesset seats, which coalitions were mathematically viable, and which parties held structural pivot power? By doing so, and juxtaposing the analysis against the contemporary electoral results at each stage, it may be possible to see how much power had been “siphoned” from voters by politicians, who might have acted according to their own interests.