The 2022 Israeli elections stand out as a turning point in the country’s political history. Following a period of unprecedented political instability, the right-wing government formed following the elections—Benjamin Netanyahu's sixth government—was the most radical in Israel’s history.This book examines the 2022 Israeli elections through various theoretical perspectives and diverse research designs and data sources. The first part scrutinizes various aspects of Israeli democracy related to the elections. These include ideological and affective polarization, cleavages, voter turnout, involvement of citizens and civil organizations in election campaigns and the nature of the government that was established following the elections. The second part of the book presents studies of parties that participated in the elections: those that declined (Labor), those that ascended (Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit), and those that ascertained their power (United Torah Judaism and Shas). A valuable addition to the Elections in Israel series, the book—written by leading scholars of Israeli politics and society—touches on key themes, including political personalization, polarization, populism, the radical right, party decline and adaptation and democratic backsliding.The book will be of particular interest to students and researchers of Israeli politics and society—especially relating to the events of 2023 and the war in Gaza—as well as to social scientists interested in these political phenomena and their effects on democratic countries worldwide.

This chapter examines the patterns of decline in support for the Israeli Labor Party across social groups. The transformation of Labor from a ruling party into a small marginal party is one of the most conspicuous phenomena in the Israeli party system of the past 30 years (1992–2022). Based on official election results, we compare the overall nationwide change in Labor's support to its support across six social groups: Israeli Arabs, Former Soviet Union (FSU) immigrants, development towns, well-off central cities, kibbutzim and settlements in the Occupied Territories. Within the overarching trend of decline, some meaningful variations emerge. Among several groups, support for Labor experienced a sharp decline as early as the 1990s, while in others it occurred in later years. Furthermore, on occasions, when Labor succeeded in boosting its support among some electorates, it lost support among others. In these cases, the identity of the party leader was an important factor in explaining voting patterns among the different groups.

The chapter uses election research in Israel as a test case to examine whether research reflects major developments in politics. Specifically, it explores whether the research of Israeli politics reflects the findings that in Israel personalization has been particularly deep and comprehensive, permeating all arenas: institutional, behavioral and the mass media. To examine the expression of personalization in research, it analyzes studies that appeared in the series The Elections in Israel. The personalization of Israeli politics identified in many empirical studies – and found to be much deeper than in other democracies – is not reflected in the way that politics is presented in these studies. The Elections in Israel books adhere instead to the party paradigm. However, the election series documents the trend of centralized personalization, and institutional developments – the adoption and abolition of direct election – did affect the expressions of personalization in the series.

In this study, we investigate how two crucial political institutions – the electoral system and the intraparty candidate selection method – incentivise elite personalistic campaigning behaviour. We offer two contributions. First, we show the interactive effect of the two institutions on elite behaviour in campaigns, unlike most of the extant literature that focuses on parliamentary activity. Second, we apply the distinction between leader-focused (centralised) and individual-focused (decentralised) personalism to candidate selection methods. We argue that selection methods dominated by the party leader and ones employing primaries, two types of selection methods usually seen as opposites on established scales of candidate selection, are actually similar in their effect on politicians’ personalistic behaviour during electoral campaigns. Using a dataset combining candidate surveys and expert coding of party selection rules, we analyse 9320 candidate responses from 101 parties across 16 democracies. We demonstrate that primaries-based selection methods correlate with more personalistic behaviour than collegial selection methods under party-centred electoral systems but with less personalistic behaviour in the most candidate-centred electoral systems. Leader-dominated selection methods similarly correlate with more personalistic behaviour than collegial ones only in closed-list PR systems, while their effect is insignificant in more candidate-centred systems. Our findings have wide-ranging implications. They call into question the conventional conceptualisation of candidate selection methods and their effect on politicians' behaviour. They also refine the scope of intraparty institutions’ impact, limiting it to party-centred electoral systems. Conversely, our findings serve as a reminder that students of electoral systems investigating their effects on elite behaviour must, at least in party-centred electoral systems, take intraparty institutions into consideration.

This mini-review examines scholars' responses to the question, "What constitutes a new party?" It proposes a path out of a situation in which there is no one standard answer to this question, or even a dominant answer. The absence of a standard or dominant answer creates an interesting setting for theoretical and methodological creativity. At the same time, the situation is problematic: with no agreed answer, large n studies that differ in how they define and operationalize party newness are not comparable. And because political parties are central actors in democratic politics, this situation negatively affects comparative politics research. An agreed answer (or answers) is especially critical for studies that analyze stability, continuity, and change of party organizations, party systems, and the political system as a whole. This article reviews the approaches to party newness and identifies their main features. No one approach seems to be substantially preferable to the others. Thus, the way forward is to establish a database that will include the data already produced on party newness. Such a database will enable comparison of the different codifications and measurements and systematically examine their similarities and differences.

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.

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.