At the end of a lengthy and very interesting article about the coalition bargaining since Israel’s election, the following paragraphs offer interesting insight into Meretz’s party-list dynamics:
Meretz is waiting for the final vote count in the hope that Zehava Gal-On (number four on the Knesset list) will get into the Knesset.
Gal-on, an outstanding parliamentarian and a staunch human rights fighter, volunteered two months ago to give her third place slot, which she won in the party’s primary, to the new candidate Nitzan Horowitz. Meretz’s plunge to three Knesset seats left her out.
Horowitz, formerly Channel 10′s foreign correspondent, was asked by former colleagues Yaron London and Mordechai Kirschenbaum on Wednesday whether he would quit for Gal-On. He said he would not “deal with personal issues.”
If Horowitz doesn’t quit for Gal-On, several people in Meretz will demand party leader Haim Oron’s resignation, Meretz sources said. He is the man behind the flop called The New Movement Meretz and foisted the new candidates onto his party leadership.
It would be immoral, improper and outrageous for Oron to continue serving as Meretz leader in the Knesset, while Gal-on remains out of it, the sources said.
Subsequently, it has been learned that the original seat allocation likely would hold.* If an elected MK resigns, the next available candidate on the same party’s list takes the seat.
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* This item also includes some of the fine details of the electoral system, including that it takes about 28,000 votes, given the turnout in this election, to win a seat. The party closest to approaching the 2% threshold this time was the Green Movement-Meimad, which is more than 40,000 votes short. Regarding the surplus-vote agreements:
Excess voting arrangements allow parties with more than the necessary minimum to enter parliament, but less than the votes needed to nab an extra seat, to allocate “excess” votes to an allied party.
“No good deed goes unpunished.” – Clare Booth Luce
Incidentally, I recalculated the distribution of Knesset seats among individual lists, that is disregarding all surplus vote agreements (while assuming that voters would have cast their ballots in the same manner), and the resulting change in the composition of the Knesset boiled down to Kadima and Likud getting an extra seat each at the expense of Labor and Shas, which would have lost one seat apiece; all the other parties would have obtained exactly the same number of seats they actually won in the election.
Seed planted by Manuel Alvarez-Rivera — 12 February 2009 @ 19:44
Well, for good measure I’ve calculated the notional distribution of Knesset seats without surplus vote agreements in the previous two elections, and while in both instances the agreements made little difference in the distribution of Knesset mandates, an interesting pattern emerges.
In 2006 Labor-Meimad would have gained an extra seat – lost by Likud – while in 2003 Likud and Shinui would have gained a seat apiece at the expense of Shas and Mafdal, which would have lost one mandate each.
In other words, the surplus agreements gave extra seats to Shas and Mafdal in 2003, to Likud in 2006 and (as noted in my previous comment) to Labor and Shas in 2009. Moreover, in each of these cases the party getting the additional seat had a surplus vote agreement with a smaller party that ended up with the same number of seats it would have otherwise won in the absence of such an agreement.
Now, the reason why the surplus vote agreements seemingly favor the larger parties within a list combination is very simple: Israel’s electoral system operates entirely under the largest average method, that is the D’Hondt rule – even though the Bader-Ofer Law that governs the distribution of Knesset seats gives the appearance that the D’Hondt rule is only invoked for the allocation of remainder seats.
Nonetheless, the distribution of Knesset mandates can also be obtained by applying the D’Hondt rule, first to qualifying lists or list combinations (the qualifying threshold being applied list-by-list for the latter) in order to allocate all Knesset seats, and then within list combinations to apportion mandates won by each combination among its constituent lists. I applied the D’Hondt rule in the manner previously described to the results of the 2003, 2006 and 2009 general elections, and in each case the distribution of seats was identical to that obtained under the Bader-Ofer Law.
At any rate, while it’s true that surplus vote agreements help parties win additional seats, these usually work to the advantage of the larger party within the agreement, due to the semi-covert use of the D’Hondt rule. That said, the overall impact is fairly modest, given that all 120 Knesset seats are apportioned on a nationwide basis.
Seed planted by Manuel Alvarez-Rivera — 12 February 2009 @ 23:37
Very interesting, Manuel. I would think that D’Hondt for remainders, following allocation by quotas, would necessarily be the same as D’Hondt throughout.
(I have been using your site a bit today; in fact, just at the time I saw your comment, I was waiting for a page to load at Global Economy Matters.)
Seed planted by MSS — 13 February 2009 @ 00:31
I agree, Matthew: allocation by quotas, followed by D’Hondt for remainders is actually one of several ways to implement D’Hondt, but I’m not sure that method is as well known (or for that matter as immediately obvious) as the more familiar procedure of dividing votes by 1, 2, 3 and so on to obtain the highest quotients.
That said, I realize that in a country like Israel where you can literally have a dozen lists qualifying for Knesset representation, the procedure laid down by the Bader-Ofer Law probably made it easier to calculate the distribution of seats in the years before personal computers and spreadsheet applications became commonplace.
(By the way, I hope you found what you were looking for on my websites or the blogs where I post articles.)
Seed planted by Manuel Alvarez-Rivera — 13 February 2009 @ 01:12
I should have not hedged so much in my previous comment. (It was, of course, a fruiting hedge!) I have known about allocation by full quotas, followed by D’Hondt for remainders, as equivalent to full D’Hondt since grad school. Rein Taagepera taught me that. I can’t recall whether we discuss this in Seats and Votes, but I think we do. I know Rein mentions this fact in his 2007 book.
Indeed, it would have been much easier to do by hand than full D’Hondt division! In fact, it was precisely in that context that Rein taught me to use that procedure if I wanted to figure out a D’Hondt allocation for large M!
Seed planted by MSS — 13 February 2009 @ 16:45
What parties and how many seats would they have gain seats at this election if the electoral threshold were higher?
If the threshold were set at 5%, would it encourage more stability in the Israel Knesset?
Wouldn’t it disenfranchise the Israeli Arab Parties if the threshold were increased? It seems odd that Israeli Arab Parties have never holded the balance of power in an Israeli Knesset like the Orthodox Jewish Parties do.
Seed planted by Suaprazzodi — 13 February 2009 @ 18:49
Couldn’t the Arab parties sign up to a list-pooling agreement? Would their combined votes reach a 5% threshold?
Seed planted by Tom Round — 13 February 2009 @ 19:56
If a five percent threshold had been in place in last Tuesday’s election in Israel and had parties nonetheless chosen to run the same lists and obtained exactly the same number of votes they actually won, the distribution of Knesset seats would have been as follows:
Kadima – 37
Likud – 35
Yisrael Beitenu – 19
Labor – 16
Shas – 13
That said, I seriously doubt that some of the smaller parties – such as the two Arab lists, which polled a combined 5.9% of the vote – would have chosen to run separately with a higher threshold in place. Moreover, I’m fairly certain that even if Israel’s parties had opted to run with the same lists, the distribution of votes would have been different, since the smaller parties would have found themselves tactically squeezed by the higher threshold.
Seed planted by Manuel Alvarez-Rivera — 13 February 2009 @ 20:37
Haaretz reports:
Also, MK Avshalom Vilan says discussions about the future of Meretz should wait till it is clear what the future of Kadima is.
A split in Kadima seems plausible, to me. The party was formed solely to advance Ariel Sharon’s career and to push the policy of unilateral withdrawal from occupied territories. Neither of those reasons remains relevant, fo course. On the other hand, Kadima did decently in this election.
Can it survive in opposition, if that’s what the party decides?
Seed planted by MSS — 15 February 2009 @ 18:59