Abstract
The economic weaknesses of Israel’s periphery have attracted media attention and have shifted upwards as a priority in the national agenda. There has been a heightened awareness of gaps between the haves and the have-nots and of growing inequality. One important facet of the public debate on issues of centre and periphery has been the degree of professionalism of the leaders running local government compared to that of their counterparts in the centre. In this paper, there is an examination of the relationship between three variables – periphery, professionalism and (to a lesser extent) local government stability. A vicious cycle has been identified which seems to perpetuate the economic and political weakness of local government in the periphery.
Introduction
In recent years, the various weaknesses of Israel’s periphery have attracted increasing media attention and moved up the national agenda ladder, at least as far as declared intentions go. 1 One important facet of the public debate on issues of centre and periphery has been the degree of professionalism of the leaders running local government compared to that of their counterparts in the centre. After all, it is the heads of local government in the periphery who are supposed to lead the process of narrowing down the gaps between periphery and centre. This is a widely hoped-for outcome these days, with the current quest for social justice and heightened awareness of gaps between the haves and the have-nots and of growing inequality.
The present paper links together three variables: periphery, professionalism and – to a lesser extent – local government stability. An examination of the relationship between these three variables leads to a somewhat pessimistic conclusion regarding the future of Israel’s periphery. A vicious cycle has been identified which seems to perpetuate the economic and political weakness of local government in the periphery.
The Periphery variable in this paper is based on the Ministry of Interior’s Periphery Index (Av, 2008), 2 defined as a weighting of the potential accessibility index according to proximity to the boundary of the greater Tel Aviv area. It is graded from 1 to 5 (1 = highly peripheral, 2 = peripheral, 3 = medium, 4 = central and 5 = very central). The variable as published relates to 2004.
The Professionalism variable was presented, for example, by Horkin et al. (2001), who suggested the operationalization of a dichotomous variable, which takes on one of two possible values: the model, referring to an incumbent elected head of a local authority who is able to pass off as a ‘professional’ (the inhabitants are happy with his – and local authority’s general – performance), even when the objective economic indicators relating to education, finances and real-estate do not vindicate this. The model ‘is able to mislead the average voter and brings into question his level of sophistication and objective rationality’ (op. cit., p. 40). The second value, the professional, relates to an incumbent elected head of a local authority that succeeds in improving its objective economic figures.
Professionalism was extended from a dichotomous to a typological variable in Horkin’s article, ‘Survival of the Fittest Incumbents: The Model of Integrated Performance and the Re-election of Elected Incumbents in the 2003 and 2008 Local Elections in Israel’, presented at the 2009 Conference of the Israeli Political Science Association (Horkin, 2010).
With the operationalization of the typology, the two types, the model and the professional, gave rise to two continuums, where an incumbent head of local authority who is neither a model nor a professional is called an ‘amateur’, and one who is both is called a ‘star’ (see Figure 1).
Star, model, professional and amateur, based on the integrated performance model.
The data used to construct the components of the model-and-professional typology are from 2007, the year preceding the 2008 elections. The amateurs, the models, the professionals and the stars were heads of local authorities who ran for re-election in 2008. For further details on the variables and the mathematical manipulations underlying the typology, see Horkin (2010).
The Local Government Stability variable refers in the simplest terms to the chances of re-election for an incumbent head of local authority re-running for office in the 2008 elections.
The results of the research indicate the existence of a somewhat pessimistic Gordian knot when it comes to the local authorities in Israel’s periphery. The more peripheral the local authority is, the higher the likelihood of its head being an amateur or model. The more centrally located the local authority is, the higher the likelihood of its head being a professional or a star.
The model’s chances of being re-elected in the 2008 elections (82%) exceed those of the star (81%), the professional (57%) and the amateur (43%) (Horkin, 2010: 130).
The chances of winning the 2008 elections for an incumbent head of local authority that is categorized as a model and is up for re-election are very high, as mentioned above. Out of 11 heads of local authorities characterized as models (with high perceived performance and low objective performance), 10 re-ran for office and nine (90%) got re-elected. The latter group included only one model from the centre (Bat Yam), as opposed to eight from the periphery.
The painful conclusion from the above is that it is in fact the local authorities located in the periphery, which are more likely to elect models at their head, that exhibit greater government stability, since the model’s chances of re-election are higher than those of any other type within the model-professional typology. This fact perpetuates the economic weakness of the peripheral authorities. This might even attract more models to vie for the position of local authority head in more peripheral local authorities, setting back their level of economic development further down the road.
At the theoretical level, the findings from this research reinforce the bounded rationality school as it pertains to perceived performance over the objective rationality school as it pertains to the objective performance and proven economic development on the ground.
Theoretical background
Two schools have dominated the behavioural research of these past decades in their various constituent disciplines: the objective rationality school and the bounded rationality school. Outstanding scholars from each have been awarded Nobel Prizes: Aumann (1995, 1997, 2005), Aumann and Dreze (2008) and Sims (1980, 1987, 1993, 2001, 2003) are among the leading proponents of the objective rationality school; Simon (1982, 1985) and Kahneman (1982, 1988, 1994, 2000, 2005, 2011) are among the key proponents of bounded rationality.
Under the objective rationality theory, the individual voter at both the micro and macro levels shoulders a formidable task. He becomes a kind of a super computer, capable of handling huge information loads, processing them and using them as a basis for highly informed and well-founded decisions. Researchers who adhere to this school have a hard time accepting intuition, emotionality, ego, habits and obedience to authority as legitimate and common decision criteria at play in the median voter’s mind. Individuals are seen as identical or largely similar in their decision-making process. At its base, the objective rationality school assumes an ideal voter as its basic model, rather than the typical voter commonly encountered.
The bounded rationality school is much more flexible in its treatment of the individual voter at the micro and macro levels. The following actions and decisions are accepted by its proponents as completely rational:
An action that is inconsistent with other goals that are seemingly more important. An action that is not based on correct facts, or which ignores relevant facts. An action resulting from wrong conclusions arrived at by the individual undertaking it, based on the facts available to him. An action undertaken with disregard to other important courses of action. Failure to predict a future situation because the individual, clouded by expectations, overlooked some important piece of information.
One possible way to sum up the flexibility of this school in its approach to individuals at both the micro and macro levels would be to say that any decision or action criterion, as strange as it might appear to the beholder, would be accepted as rational if it meets at least one of the two following conditions:
It will be employed by a sufficient number of individuals at the same point in time (cross-sectional consistency); It will be employed a sufficient number of times by the same individual in the course of his lifetime (time-series consistency).
The quantitative definition of ‘sufficient’ is, of course, subject to different subjective interpretations.
In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow
3
from 2011, Daniel Kahneman pits the two schools against each other in a kind of beauty contest, where bounded rationality ends up winning the ‘beauty queen’ title in explaining human behaviour. According to Kahneman (2011), human thinking involves two systems:
System 1: bounded rationality – unconscious, automatic, usually not employed voluntarily (intuition, intentions and emotions); System 2: objective rationality – slow, conscious thinking (voluntary actions).
Kahneman characterizes the individual’s decision making as a gradual process, where System 2 receives suggestions from System 1, changing them very slightly, if at all. He claims that apparent parallels to these two systems can be found in the writings of Aristotle – passion (System 1) and reason (System 2) – and Freud, in the form of the unconscious mind (System 1) and the conscious mind (System 2).
His conclusion is, therefore, that at both the macro and micro levels, intuitive processes override and perpetuate rational objective processes, which come into play at a later stage and usually provide justifications for the intuitive processes.
Research findings
A calculation of Spearman’s correlation between the periphery variable (1–5) and the professionalism variable (amateur – 1, model – 2, professional – 3, star – 4) yielded a strength of association of 0.43 at a significance level of 0.001. In other words, the closer the local authority is to the centre, the closer will its head be to a star, and vice versa: the further removed the local authority is from the centre, the closer will its head be to an amateur.
A Chi-square test involving distance from the centre (very peripheral and peripheral as one category; medium, central and very central as a second category) and the professionalism variable gave a strength of relationship of 12.41 at a 0.006 significance level. The strength of the relationship according to Cramer’s V test is 0.455.
Relationship between distance from the centre and professionalism.
There is not a single cell in the table with an expected frequency of less than 5.
The table clearly suggests that, in peripheral local authorities, the frequency and percentage of amateurs and models combined (20, 60%) greatly exceeds those of professionals and stars combined (13, 40%). It is also clear from the table that, in central local authorities, the figures for amateurs and models combined (5, 18%) are significantly lower than those for professionals and stars combined (22, 82%).
Re-election chances by types of incumbents according to the professionalism variable in the 2008 elections.
Source: Horkin (2010: 130, Table 11).
The most surprising finding emerging from Table 2 is the significant 25% gap in re-election probabilities between the model and the professional in favour of the model! It is also interesting to note the almost equal probabilities (81% compared to 82%) for the model and the star in terms of the re-election chances of these two sub-types within the professionalism variable.
In the 2008 elections, as noted in the Introduction section, the re-election chances of an incumbent head of local authority categorized as a model and re-running for office are extremely high. Out of 11 heads of local authorities characterized as models (with high perceived performance and low objective performance), 10 contended in the elections and nine (90%) got re-elected. Only one model, from the centre (Qalansuwa), 4 based on the dichotomous division into centre and periphery presented in Table 1, was not re-elected. Of the nine re-elected, there was only one model from the centre (Bat Yam), whereas eight belonged to the periphery. All models from the periphery that re-ran for office in the 2008 elections, eight in all, got re-elected. This puts the re-election chances of the model from the periphery at a staggering 100%!
Discussion and conclusions
The findings from the present study are interesting from a theoretical perspective and with respect to the schools of objective rationality and bounded rationality. One might say that the periphery relies more strongly on the first, intuitive system, whereas the centre relies more strongly on the second system, in voting for their respective heads of local authority. Instead of claiming the existence of two systems at work in succession (a time-dependent decision-making process), our study found two systems corresponding, each, to specific geographic areas (a space-dependent decision-making process) at the same point in time.
The findings pertaining to the relationship between periphery, professionalism and re-election provide evidence as to the existence of government stability in Israel’s peripheral local authorities.
The term government stability normally carries a positive connotation in a democratic system, at least up to the point where a single party or individual remain in power for too long. Government stability increases, to a certain extent, the chances of implementing and achieving significant projects, which naturally take a relatively long time to complete.
The research findings above show that in some situations, local government stability is in fact detrimental to the chances of a given political entity of improving its economic situation.
The research findings can also be tied to findings from the national elections in Israel and even support them. Even though the periphery continues to suffer from economic inferiority and a relatively low priority on the national agenda, its voters have, for some reason, persisted in their salient support for the coalition-building ruling party in the parliamentary elections for several decades now.
Many different explanations have been offered for this phenomenon of supporting models at different political levels, that is, people who ‘fail to deliver’ in the economic field and continue to turn an indifferent eye to the ever growing societal gaps between rich and poor, periphery and centre. However, they can all be attributed at the highest theoretical level to the bounded rationality school, which emphasizes the individual’s and the general population’s tendency to overlook objective economic data when making decisions that are crucial for their lives and the obvious account they take of subjective information that falls within the realm of psychology and its various shades and factors (emotion, intuition, habit, obeying different kinds of authority, etc.).
The operationalization of the professionalism typology is based on cross-sectional analysis, pertaining to both objective information and perceptions, comparing local authorities at the same point in time, 2007 in the present study. Such operationalization does some injustice to the peripheral local authorities, considering their initial weakness relative to local authorities in the centre in the three bases used to assess objective performance: education (success in matriculation examinations), finances (surplus/deficit in the regular budget) and real-estate (building new housing units). On the other hand, residents of the periphery can be reasonably assumed to have a lower initial level of expectations with regard to objective performance than residents of the centre, giving peripheral local authorities a relative advantage over their centre counterparts in this respect. The perceived performance component would thus actually benefit the more peripheral local authorities, offsetting their relative inferiority when it comes to the objective performance component.
Be that as it may, future research is also suggested in order to look into the professionalism typology using time-series/longitudinal analysis, in addition to our cross-sectional analysis. This would make it possible to observe objective and perceived improvements over time, beside the cross-sectional comparison of objective and perceived performance between different local authorities.