The hyper-election period of 2019–21 marked the climax of Benjamin Netanyahu’s rule and with it the transformation of the Israeli party-system. While most commentators read the political situation as personalisation of the ‘Yes Bibi’/‘No Bibi’ polarisation, this article argues that ideological analysis is necessary to understand the dynamics of the four elections and their structural effects. It argues that the dominant issue on the left/right continuum over the past 50 years – the Palestinian-Israeli conflict – gave way to an internal cleavage between Israel’s nature as a ‘Jewish and democratic state’. Netanyahu’s trial only intensified the National Camp’s thesis of the Deep State, accusing the Left, the civil service and the judicial system of being ‘undemocratic’ and condescending of ‘the people’s will’ while the centre-left bloc defended the ‘Jewish and democratic’ Israel, accusing the Right of offering a ‘Halachic state’. Thus, while the Right emphasised the Jewish people, and Netanyahu’s natural partners were the religious and Haredi parties, the centre-left bloc focused on ‘Israel before all’ (to use the newly formed Blue-and-White party’s slogan). Ideological realignment is thus the key to understanding the changes in Israeli party-system.

The side-by-side development of democratic theory and of collaborative governance seems to be cut of the same cloth; yet it might take the fashion of challenging the nation-state and weakening the role of the state and the civil service one step too far. In order to ensure the emperor is not naked under his new cloths, a critique of the relationship between participatory democracy and collaborative governance is undertaken in this chapter. After analyzing the major models of democracy and transformations of the civil service/state relations, the chapter outlines some of the main challenges of injecting participatory means into the heart of the policy-making arena. Assessing the daring project of collaborative governance, the chapter sets out the problems and puts forward the hopes for enacting participatory models of democracy as part of evolving governance without weakening the role of the state and the representative system in the process.

Democracy, as we understand it, is a process of collective decision- making among persons, which issues in collectively binding norms for the society of those persons. It is a process of decision- making in which persons participate as equals in determining the legal and conventional norms that bind them and in which the group of persons, taken collectively, are sovereign. Democracy can be understood as a descriptive term, referring to political societies that actually exist, or as a normative ideal for the evaluation of political societies. Our focus in this chapter is primarily on the basic moral principles that can justify this egalitarian process of collective decision- making and on the challenges to understanding and realizing this ideal in the modern world. After an initial account of the basic principle and the social and institutional realization of this principle, we address the challenges to articulating and implementing this principle that arise due to the reality of economic inequality and the religious, ethnic, gender, and racial pluralism of modern societies, and to the fact that state- based democratic systems operate within a larger global society. We then discuss and evaluate the appropriateness of democratic institutions, procedures, and organizations to translate the moral principles into the structural grammar of present- day democracies and to what extent they can guarantee the fundamental principles and normative promises of democracy. As we will see, the ideas of equality and sovereignty at the base of democracy cannot be fully appreciated without a grasp of the pluralism, complexity and global interconnectedness of modern societies.

Populism is often described as a thin-centered ideology, an underdeveloped worldview which can be found both on the extreme right and radical left, in authoritarian and democratic regimes alike. This paper goes against the grain arguing that rightwing populism of the dominant conservative party in established democracies developed a fully-fledged ideology which is irreducible to the quest for power or the desire to rule. Crucially, it encompasses a distinct notion of democracy which is hostile to rights-based theory yet forwards a discourse which is discernible and unique, reinterpreting the will of the people and majority rule. It further mixes neoliberal economics-cum-politics with neo-conservative nationalism and upholds a particular idea of the people and the state. Crucially, it forwards a concept of governability which centers on the government as the bearer of sovereignty encroaching upon the role of the parliament, courts and the gate-keepers, including the public media. This paper analyzes the 2015 Israeli election as a case in point. Ideological analysis, we argue, can explain for example why the most inciting government against the Arab Israeli citizens has also put forward the most radical 5 years plan for economic rehabilitation of non-Jewish minorities. The tension between neo-conservatism and neoliberalism shapes this domain. While national nuances are crucial, they still function as an ideological family so that a great deal can be learnt from one exemplar to the other.

This chapter examines what sort of influence, if any, the social protest had on the party system. It argues that the protest has influenced both the economic dimension, especially its "social justice" aspect, and the collective identity dimension. The chapter demonstrates the decline of the security axis and the rise of the economic and identity axes in the 2013 elections. The 2013 elections embodied the spirit of the social protest, introducing the notion of "the new Israelis," the trademark of who is that they act in the name of public interest and clear policy. A crucial aspect of that crisis is the related decline of trust in major democratic institutions in advanced democracies and the reduced role of political parties in mediating civic interests. The impressive responsiveness of the parties to the protest, the main demand of which was to fix Israeli democracy, may have eroded the trust of the people in their representative democracy.