Strategic and Non-policy Voting: A Coalitional Analysis of Israeli Electoral Reform

I examine why a majority of Israel’s legislators voted for direct election of the prime minister, reforming the electoral system that vested them with power. The analysis incorporates coalitional politics, strategic voting, and voter preferences over non-policy issues such as candidate charisma. The model generates novel hypotheses that are tested against empirical evidence. It explains five empirical puzzles that are not fully addressed by extant explanations: why Labour supported the reform, why Likud opposed it, why small left-wing parties supported the reform, small right-wing parties were split, and religious parties opposed it, why the Likud leadership, which opposed reform, lifted party discipline in the final reading of the bill, and why electoral reform passed at the particular time that it did.