Objective

Under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, Likud—Israel's most successful political party in the past 50 years—transformed from a highly institutionalized leader party into a personal party. This study explores the personalization of Likud and its various manifestations and analyses the causes of this process and its consequences.

Methods

A case study. Both quantitative and qualitative analysis.

Results

Although the Likud party leader's formal roles, powers, and authorities did not change significantly, many informal developments enhanced the firm grip Netanyahu held on the party. Netanyahu manipulated leadership contests, and they became uncompetitive; the party's internal institutions were almost nullified and became no more than a rubber stamp to Netanyahu's interests; and Likud's representatives in the Knesset were transformed into a group of submissive cheerleaders.

Conclusions

We conclude that essential, routinized procedures within Likud were abandoned in favor of personalization of decision making; the “value” of the party organization was replaced with that of a single leader as perceived by important internal party actors and the electorate; and that other parties perceived Likud as personalized. On all fronts, the Likud underwent a personalization process. Moreover, the personalization of Likud, the ruling party, contributed to Israel's democratic backsliding.

In this chapter, we develop a comprehensive typology, alongside measurements of personalism and collegialism, of cabinets and governments in democracies. The scholarly literature identifies and addresses the personal and collegial elements within governments in democracies, but falls short of proposing a comprehensive typology and compatible measurements. We present what we call the Cabinet-Government Model, which includes two perspectives: a narrow one that focuses on the cabinet and a wider one that also relates to the interaction of the cabinet with other political institutions (parliament, election, bureaucracy, party) and thus refers to the government as a whole. After listing the ideal types of collegial and personal governments, we chart its measurements. We then analyze 28 democratic governments using materials from various databases and constitutional sources. The analysis identifies a high level of variation in personalism between cabinets and governments throughout the democratic world, demonstrates that a focus on the cabinet alone is not sufficient for capturing levels of personalism of governments, and paints a more nuanced picture than the hitherto-simple categorization of parliamentary, presidential, and semi-presidential governments.

After briefly presenting a classification of collegial and personal parties, this chapter outlines three useful indices of centralized personalism in parties at the country level. They examine (1) the formal power of the party leaders, based on the codification of party regulations; (2) an estimation of the centrality of the party leaders in their parties, based on an expert survey; and (3) an estimation of the centrality of the ruling party leader, based on a codification of historical narratives. The chapter ends with a demonstration of the validity and usefulness of these indices. It presents bivariate analyses (1) of the relationships between levels of party personalism in democracies and government system types – identifying less personalism in parliamentary systems, though the difference is highly significant and quite strong only regarding ruling party personalism, and (2) of the relationships between levels of party personalism in democracies and various democrtaic aspects (age group, quality of the democracy, democratic culture). All correlations for all indices are moderate and significant: older democracies (first and second wave), more liberal and free democracies, and democracies with a strong democratic political culture are found to have less personal parties.

The introductory chapter frames the conceptual and theoretical bases for the distinction between personal and collegial democracies that our book proposes. It presents three pure types of democratic institutional order: centralized-personal, collegial, and decentralized-personal. It then shows how the classification of personal versus collegial democratic orders corresponds with prominent theories and approaches to studying politics. Next, it briefly explains the book’s conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions, and its recommendations for sustaining democracy in an era of personal politics. Also, it acknowledges the major limitation of the research – the difficulty of clearly identifying centralized personalism in some cases and decentralized personalism in others. It ends with a short synopsis of each of the chapters that follow.

After pointing out the main contributions of each chapter, the concluding chapter offers an integral look at the patterns that appear when investigating personal and collegial democratic institutional orders. It finds that each regime has specific dosages and combinations of collegialism and personalism. Personalism, especially of the centralized type, is negatively correlated with democracy. Thus, our recommendation is to balance collegialism and personalism between and within institutions and especially counter (and, if possible, decrease) centralized personalism.

This book examines two patterns of democracy – collegial and personal – through a comprehensive comparison of political institutions. It develops a conceptual, theoretical, and methodological basis for differentiating collegial and personal democracies. Central institutions in democracy are classified according to their levels of personalism and collegialism, including political parties, candidate selection methods and electoral systems, legislature, and cabinets and governments. The book presents preliminary findings concerning the causes for this variance between the two democratic regime types. The book will be of key interest to students and scholars of democratic institutions, personalism and personalization, political parties and, more broadly, democracy.

Democracies in general and political parties in particular have undergone political personalization in recent decades. The power balance between politicians (one or many) and the team (the party as a collegial entity) has changed, and existing party typologies are no longer suited to the analysis of today’s democratic politics. Although some new personalized party types have been added, what is missing is a systematic attempt to contrast them with the collegial option. This article proposes a new classification of political parties to fill the lacuna. It includes five ideal types of parties: two personalized-decentralized types, referring to collections of separated autonomous activists or to separated autonomous individual politicians (plural); a collegial type, which is about the centrality of the team and is based mainly on collective authorities and collective decision making; and two personalized-centralized types, referring to the centrality of an individual politician in her capacity as the party leader or that of a specific individual who “owns” the party.

This volume examines political parties in Israel between 1992 and 2021. In addition to our interest in the parties and party reform, a primary motivation for writing the book was the desire to fill a lacuna in the research literature. Several works have dealt systematically with Israeli political parties from their inception in the Yishuv period through the first half of the 1990s, but no comprehensive study has been done on their history since then. Many articles have examined voting patterns for the various parties, especially in the book series The Elections in Israel, edited by Arian and Shamir (and later by Shamir and Rahat), and the parallel series Israel at the Polls. Some studies have focused on several aspects of the parties’ operations, whereas others have focused on a single aspect such as their procedures for selecting Knesset candidates and leaders, their decline and disconnection from society, their functioning on the local level, and their membership patterns. However, there has been no comprehensive, systematic study of all the parties represented in the Knesset in the past three decades.

Intraparty candidate selection methods are the drivers of many topics of interest to political scientists. Their operationalization, however, is made complicated because they tend to involve multiple selectorates that differ in their levels of inclusiveness and centralization and that play various roles within the process. This complexity poses a challenge for large-n comparative studies. Drawing on the Political Parties DataBase Round Two to analyze candidate selection methods in 184 parties from 35 democracies, we highlight the inadequacy of the currently available measures to correctly account for this complexity in large-n studies and offer improvements on this front. Specifically, we propose a continuous measure of inclusiveness that better captures the complexity of candidate selection methods and a new measure of complexity to facilitate future analyses into this feature. We recommend that scholars in other cross-national projects consider adopting similar or improved coding strategies in order to better capture these complexities.

הבחירות בישראל – 2021-2019 הוא הספר ה־ 16 בסדרת הפרסומים "הבחירות בישראל". שלא כקודמיו, שהתמקדו במערכת בחירות אחת, הוא נסב על ארבע מערכות בחירות ארציות שהתקיימו בישראל בין אפריל 2019 למרץ 2021 – שלוש בפחות משנה, וארבע בשנתיים. מדובר באירוע חסר תקדים בישראל ויוצא דופן בעולם הדמוקרטי. תקופה זו של בחירות תכופות התאפיינה בכהונה נמשכת של ממשלות מעבר, בשינוי תדיר של כללי המשחק, בחוסר משילות בשל שיתוק המערכת הפוליטית ומשרדי הממשלה, ובראש ממשלה מכהן שנחקר, הואשם והועמד לדין על עבירות של שוחד והפרת אמונים. מדובר אפוא בו בזמן במשבר פוליטי, חוקתי ותפקודי. אירוע זה גם הביא לידי ביטוי מרוכז ודרמטי את משבר הדמוקרטיה בישראל.