Government–opposition relations in a fragmented,personalized,and multidimensional setting: The case of Israel

Abstract

Patterns of legislative activity in parliamentary regimes have long been defined by political parties and the division between government and opposition. However, several trends in recent years may challenge this distinction by mitigating the electoral connection between parliamentary behavior and electoral competition. Issue multidimensionality, party system fragmentation, and political behavioral personalization, while common to most established democracies, have been extremely pronounced in Israel. Analyzing all legislation votes taken in the Knesset between 2003 and 2014, this article uses the Israeli case to demonstrate how a fragmented opposition and the prevalence of highly personalized, nonpartisan private-member legislation, result in deviation from the familiar government–opposition divide and diminish opposition parties’ vote-seeking behavior in parliamentary votes. As an extreme case of trends that are gaining ground in most established democracies, this case study contributes to the understanding of the effects of general changes to the political system on legislative behavior.

Keywords

fragmentation Israel legislative voting opposition polarization

Introduction

Legislative activity in parliamentary regimes is often thought to be dominated by political parties (Mattson, 1995). Thus, the division between government and opposition—and not necessarily ideological preference—is usually the most important factor determining voting patterns in the plenum, as parties use the parliamentary arena to compete, always with an eye to the next elections or the next government formation. In recent years, however, political parties have encountered several challenges. New issues and cleavages have emerged in recent decades which do not squarely fit the general right–left dimension rise in political salience. Party system fragmentation has increased, together with a decline in the power of mainstream parties and the emergence of new parties. Finally, personalization processes have encroached upon democratic political arenas, leading among others to a rise in private-member legislation and potentially challenging the parties’ hold on legislative agenda. How might these developments transform the familiar government–opposition divide in parliamentary voting, which has hitherto held sway in Western legislatures?

This article looks for an answer in Israel, where these trends are, and have been for a while, more pronounced than in most established democracies. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Israeli political arena has undergone substantial institutional and behavioral personalization and extreme party system fragmentation (Kenig, 2005; Kenig and Tuttnauer, 2017; Shomer, 2015). In these years, the number of private-member bills submitted and enacted rose to levels unheard of in most established parliamentary democracies. Furthermore, following the outbreak of the Palestinian violent uprising in 1987 (The “Intifada”), the dovish–hawkish divide regarding Israel’s relations with the Palestinians gained even more importance than previously in defining political cleavages, as opposed to the socioeconomic right–left division prevalent in most other established democracies. These patterns, I contend, are not endemic to Israel, but are extreme cases of trends that have been gaining ground in most Western democracies.

This article analyzes parliamentary voting in the Israeli parliament—the Knesset—between 2003 and 2014, focusing on the behavior of opposition parties vis-à-vis the government. The analysis, which encompasses all legislation votes taken in the plenum during that time, shows that the actions of the Israeli opposition are incompatible with theories that assign vote- and office-seeking considerations greater weight in this regard than those relating to policy (e.g. Hix and Noury, 2016). Put differently, voting patterns in the Israeli parliament appear to deviate from the usual government–opposition divide. Opposition parties show no signs of strategic vote-seeking behavior when voting on bills. This is because most legislative votes in the Knesset relate to private-member legislation and pertain mainly to issues marginal to the general electoral competition. As such, an opposition party’s stance in most votes, while decided by the party, is regarding bills which are the product of a personalized, nonpartisan activity.

The article proceeds as follows. The first section surveys the literature on the government–opposition conflict in legislatures of parliamentary democracies. A conclusion of most studies examined is that the divide between government and opposition is usually a more important factor in determining the voting pattern in parliament than the ideological differences between the various parties. Next follows an explanation of the mitigating effect on the dominance of the government–opposition divide of issue multidimensionality, party system fragmentation, and political personalization. The third section presents some of the defining features of the Israeli political system as extreme cases of more general trends in the democratic world. The fourth section describes the data and methodology employed in the article. The results of the main analyses are detailed in the fifth section. The final section contains a discussion of the findings and corroborates the conclusions based on several external sources.

Government–opposition relations in parliamentary voting

As of late, the patterns of parliamentary voting have been at the center of many scholarly investigations. Opinions differ on whether parliamentary consensus—the frequency in which the coalition or governing party and the opposition vote in unison in parliament—has been increasing (Andeweg, 2013; Katz and Mair, 1995), decreasing (Andeweg et al., 2008; Loxbo and Sjölin, 2016), or remained largely unchanged (Giuliani, 2008; De Giorgi and Marangoni, 2015). Most researchers, however, concur that reasons for conflict cannot be reduced to ideological differences and that in parliamentary democracies, the divide between government and opposition is a more important determinant of parties’ voting behavior than ideology or policy preferences (Bräuninger et al., 2016; Dewan and Spirling, 2011; Hix and Noury, 2016; Louwerse et al., 2016).

It is self-evident that parties which are members of the governing coalition will vote en-bloc, inasmuch as coalitional unity is usually mandated by coalition agreements and is essential to the government’s durability and success (Bowler et al., 1999; Laver, 1999). While the coalition may lack perfect cohesion—not all coalition members will necessarily share ideal preferences on every matter—the coalition can enforce unity of action through disciplinary mechanisms. Opposition parties will also rarely be perfectly cohesive in their preferences. Unlike the coalition, however, the opposition has no need or ability to enforce unity. Thus, lack of cohesion among opposition parties will readily result in disunity. When Opposition parties do vote in concert against the government, it is usually not out of a policy-seeking strategy, aimed at gaining policy (legislative) outputs as close as possible to the party’s preferences. Rather, they operate according to a vote-seeking strategy aimed at maximizing votes in the next elections. The rationale underlying these strategies is that opposition parties must distinguish and distance themselves from the government as (the chance of) elections arrive, to attract potential voters.

Vote-seeking strategies have been found to influence the positions of opposition parties regarding a given bill. For instance, whether the initiator of the bill is affiliated with the government or with the opposition affects the likelihood of conflict between the two sides, for government-sponsored bills give rise to more conflict than those initiated by the opposition. Additionally, the more prominent a subject is in the media, and the more the opposing views regarding it align with the coalition–opposition divide, the more likely the opposition will be to oppose a government-backed bill on that subject (De Giorgi and Marangoni, 2015; Giuliani, 2008; Mújica et al., 2006; Steinack, 2011).

In sum, the literature points to two considerations that govern a party’s position on a given bill, other than the bill’s substance: (1) who initiated it and (2) how important the issue is, either to the party itself (a factor that the literature often dubs as salience) or to the system at large. The aforementioned literature expects that, for an opposition party, the two considerations will increase in importance over ideological considerations when a bill’s initiator is clearly affiliated with the government, and when its issue is highly politicized.

As mentioned in the introduction to this article, in recent years, three trends have given rise to challenges for parties in legislatures around the Western world: issue multidimensionality, party system fragmentation, and political personalization. One might wonder whether and how these trends increase or diminish the relative importance of vote-seeking considerations within the government–opposition relations. I now move to address the potential effects of these processes.

Issue multidimensionality

Issues that lie outside the major dimension that is the object of the competition in elections will tend to give rise to less conflict than the more pressing ones (Mújica et al., 2006). Hence, when all issues in the parliamentary arena align with, or relate to, the main issue dimension, the government–opposition conflict should be at its highest. Conversely, when the legislative agenda comprises issues that are mostly outside the main dimension, the consideration of vote-seeking will retreat to the background and conflict between the government and the opposition should decrease.

Party system fragmentation

A party system with a large number of parties reduces parliamentary conflict, for several reasons. First, such a system gives better representation to niche parties, whose raison d’etre usually concerns issues that are outside the mainstream. This will strengthen the mitigating effect of issue multidimensionality on government–opposition conflict. Second, fragmented systems tend to be marked by what Mair (2002: 93) calls an open “structure of competition,” that is, one that allows numerous and innovative coalition compositions and thereby encourages cooperation between current rivals—who, in the future, might find themselves partners. Third, fragmented systems are, by definition, populated by smaller parties, which are less likely to present a viable alternative to the government. Finally, a more fragmented system entails a more fragmented opposition, whose constituent parties have less incentive or ability to work in concert against the government, and this, in turn, leads to fewer votes along the government–opposition divide.

Personalization

Political personalization has been defined as a “process in which the political weight of the individual actor in the political process increases over time, while the centrality of the political group (i.e. political party) declines” (Rahat and Sheafer, 2007: 65). Personalization may manifest in various arenas and activities, such as media coverage of politics, institutional changes to candidate selection, and electoral campaigns. Since this study has the behavior of legislators as its focus, the most useful manifestation of political personalization is the politician’s behavioral personalization. Behavioral personalization may affect the opposition’s vote-seeking confrontational behavior, because opposing a bill purely on account of its being associated with the government makes sense only to the extent that such a link is clearly possible. Governmental bills unambiguously come from the government and represent its preferences. Such bills are therefore the most obvious objects of contention rooted in vote-seeking. Bills initiated by private members, on the other hand, are not as easy to place within the coalition–opposition configuration. For example, a bill submitted by a coalition backbencher would plausibly be identified as a “coalition bill” in Germany, where coalition parties dictate their backbenchers’ private-member bills (Brunner, 2013). Conversely, in a system where the government or coalition parties are not involved in drafting and tabling such bills, identifying private-member legislation as “coalition” legislation is much less clear-cut. By the same token, identifying a bill initiated by an opposition legislator as an “opposition bill” would make more sense if parties dictate their representatives’ initiatives than when representatives act independently. A personalized political system of the latter kind usually gives more leeway to individual legislators in setting agenda and initiating legislation (Shomer, 2015). Consequently, in a personalized environment, bills initiated by coalition (opposition) backbenchers are not fully associated with the government (opposition) and should not give rise to confrontation on the grounds of vote-seeking.

In light of the above discussion, the likelihood of conflict between government and opposition is inversely affected by the following factors: (a) the extent to which issues that are marginal to electoral competition dominate the parliamentary agenda; (b) the fragmentation of the party system; and (c) the personalization of the legislative behavior.

Issue multidimensionality, fragmentation, and personalization: Israel in a comparative perspective

As already stated, in the last decades, the Israeli political scene has been marked by an extreme fragmentation of the party system and behavioral political personalization. In addition, partisan positions on issues uppermost in the Israeli political agenda have not been aligned with the usual socioeconomic, left–right cleavages. To a varying extent, these trends can also be found in most Western democracies, but in Israel, they are extremely pronounced.

Issue multidimensionality

The ubiquity of the traditional left–right political division in the world of established democracies was noted by Benoit and Laver (2006): “[T]here is no doubt that the notion of a single ‘left–right’ political spectrum is both widely understood by informal political commentators and widely used by many who theorize about politics” (Benoit and Laver, 2006: 188). In Israel, however, the left–right contrast is more about foreign affairs than economy, welfare, or class politics. Issues related to foreign and security policies have always been of great importance in the Israeli politics, but the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has come to dominate the country’s political agenda only in the 1980s (Arian, 1975, 1986; Shamir and Arian, 1999). This subject was at the center of the political debate throughout most of the period covered in this article. A possible exception is the 2013 elections, which revolved around socioeconomic issues, as a social protest movement had drawn the public attention toward the increasing cost of living, and especially housing, during the summer of 2011 (Arian and Shamir 2008; Shamir and Arian 2004; Shamir and Arian 2011; Shamir 2015). The public-opinion rift regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, as well as the corollary cleavages between nationalistic–religious and liberal–secular groups, do not overlap with the economic left–right division that as a rule holds sway in the agenda of other democracies (Arian et al., 2011). The upshot is that a similar set of views on the welfare state has been shared by a secular dovish party such as Meretz and a religious hawkish party such as Shas, or by an Arab secular nationalist party such as Balad, and a Jewish religious nationalist party such as HaBait HaYehudi (previously the National Religious Party (NRP); Benoit and Laver, 2006; Volkens et al., 2016).

While many democratic polities still behave in unidimensional competition, in recent decades, several new issue dimensions have gained salience across the globe. This trend was facilitated in part by the emergence of post-material values and their entry to political agenda in the 1970s and 1980s (Inglehart, 1981), the breakdown of the soviet union and formation of new democracies (Huber and Inglehart, 1995) and the progressive European integration through European Union treaties (Rauh and De Wilde, 2017). Some issue dimensions, such as environmental policy, have fallen under the socioeconomic left–right dimension. Others—most notably European integration in European democracies—appear to land orthogonally to it (Benoit and Laver, 2006; Hix and Lord, 1997; Hooghe et al., 2002).

Party system fragmentation

The Israeli party system has always been regarded as pluralist multiparty. As of the late 1990s, however, it has undergone extreme fragmentation, attributable to various social processes, political realignments, and electoral reform (Kenig and Tuttnauer, 2017). Thus, during the 1980s, the two largest parties held roughly 80% of the parliament, but during the 2000s, their share dropped to as low as 38%. Concomitantly, the effective number of parties increased from 3.1 in the early 1980s to 8.7 in the early 2000s. Quantitatively, this shift is exceptionally drastic, yet the trend itself is not unique. For example, in their analysis of 19 democracies between 1966 and 2015, Kenig and Tuttnauer (2017) showed that, in 11 of the countries sampled, fragmentation was at its highest between 2006 and 2015, with an average effective number of parties of 4.0 compared to 3.4 between 1966 and 1975.¹ In all but two democracies—the newly democratic Portugal and Spain—fragmentation was highest in 1996 onward. Similarly, Dalton et al. (2000) found a general trend toward greater fragmentation in 20 advanced industrial democracies and demonstrated that it had accelerated as of the 1980s.

Personalization

A trend of increased personalization of politics in recent decades has been noted by scholars studying Israel specifically as well as other democracies (Balmas et al., 2012; Rahat and Sheafer, 2007). A prominent feature of (behavioral) personalization of parliamentary politics is a rise in the rate at which private-member bills are submitted and adopted (Rahat and Hazan, 2001). In Israel, despite a very party-centered electoral system (Hazan, 1999), behavioral personalization led to the success of private-member legislation at truly staggering rates (Galnoor and Blander, 2013). In the data analyzed here, in the 16th–19th Knessets (2003–2015), 18125 private-member bills were introduced and 5348 of these were voted on in the plenum. Private-member legislation has been responsible for 47% of all bills enacted during that period. To put this in comparative perspective, consider Brunner’s (2013: 13) data drawn from Andeweg and Nijzink (1995: 171) on 15 European democracies. In these countries, the average percentage of enacted bills emanating from private-member legislation stands at 12.5%, far behind Israel in this regard, with the only exception of Portugal (60%).²

It is important to keep in mind, however, that private-member legislation did not always dominate the Israeli parliamentary scene and that, of late, this pattern seems to be gaining prominence in other parliaments as well. Before the early 1990s, the rates of private-member legislation in Israel were low and on par with other established democracies (Blander and Klein, 2002). However, since the early 1990s, both the Israeli political system and the Israeli society have been subject to strong personalization processes, which culminated in the adoption of primaries in both the mainstream and smaller parties, and ultimately led to the dramatic increase in private-member legislation discussed above (Hazan and Rahat, 2010; Rahat and Sheafer, 2007). This trend is not unique to Israel. Thus, Rahat and Kenig (forthcoming) analyze the relative weight of private-member legislation submission across 22 countries, comparing data from the 2000s to earlier periods. Their findings show that the share of private-member legislation among all bills submitted has increased in 12 countries and has decreased only in 4.

In the preceding sections, I have argued that, in the political arenas of established democracies, issue multidimensionality, party system fragmentation, and political personalization should lead to less conflictual attitudes of the parliamentary opposition vis-à-vis the government. Extant comparative and Israel-focused studies show that while common to many countries, these trends find extreme manifestation in the Israeli society and political system. The next section details the data used in the current study to test the above generalizations in the Israeli context.

Data and methodology

Data

This study relies on a data set of parliamentary votes taken from the Knesset website (The Knesset, 2017). The data set comprises all votes, either roll call or electronically recorded, held in the Knesset plenum between August 2003 (the earliest date for which votes are available electronically) and July 2014 (when the data was collected, roughly coinciding with the end of the second session of the 19th Knesset). Besides the position of each participating MP, the data for each vote includes the type (e.g. legislation readings), the title, and identification details such as date, seating, and vote number. The overall number of votes held during the period investigated stands at 16008, of which 9269 are legislation votes (excluding qualifications, i.e. amendments put to a vote during the second reading).

The Knesset’s voting data do not include information about the type of a bill voted on or the affiliation of its initiator(s). So, a random sample of bills taken from the Knesset Legal Bureau’s National Legislation Database (The Knesset, 2017), which contains the needed data, was merged with the votes data set. Overall, 1122 of all 18125 bills submitted in the 16th Knesset through the 19th Knesset were sampled and matched, resulting in a sample of 443 votes (henceforth, the sampled vote data).³

Independent variables—vote level

All votes were coded as preliminary/first reading (the data made it impossible to separate the two), second reading, or third reading. Votes were also divided into issue categories based on the titles. To this end, relying on an exploratory factor analysis, a lexicon of trigger words was compiled manually, resulting in the following 17 categories: budget, constitution (pertaining to political institutions such as the Knesset, the government, political parties, elections or the constitutional basic laws), economy, education, environment, health, housing, interior (including municipalities and law enforcement), labor, penal code, telecommunications, transportation, welfare, citizenship, religion, security, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. These categories were then further conflated to six groups: budget, constitution, economy, interior, security/religion (corresponding to the main political dimension (Arian et al., 2010), and “other.”

Party-level controls

Following Tuttnauer (2018), several party features were incorporated into the analysis, all of them tapping a party’s ability to challenge the government. Seat share is the number of seats held by a party, divided by the total seats in parliament. Governmental experience is measured in a similar fashion as the proxy for office-holding standards employed by Schumacher and colleagues (2015), that is, by dividing the number of days a party was in government (as either the formateur or a coalition partner) by the total number of days of its existence. Ideological distance from the government is the distance between a party’s position on the ParlGov (Döring and Manow, 2016) database’s left–right index (ranging between 0 and 10) and the coalition’s size-weighted average position. A dummy is used to indicate whether a party is on the government’s ideological side (e.g. a right-wing opposition party and a right-wing government) or not. Another dummy variable identifies all Arab and predominantly-Arab parties ⁴ as representatives of the major ethnic-national minority in Israel.

General controls

Three variables, constant for all parties in a given vote, were included. First, I control for coalition duration, as extremely short-lived cabinets may not live to see many controversial votes, or—conversely—may be short-lived because the government tried to promote highly controversial policies. Second, I control for coalition size, as large coalitions may deter small oppositions from seriously challenging the government. Third, I control for the possible effect of the summer 2011 social protest, which focused on issues such as cost of living, housing prices and welfare services, on the assumption that it might have encouraged the opposition to adopt a more confrontational stance on socioeconomic matters. The control variable is a dummy equal to 1 for all votes taken after August 31st 2011, and 0 for all votes before that date.

Dependent variables

The main analysis includes two dependent variables. The first is a modified version of the coalition–opposition voting measure devised by Louwerse et al. (2016: 6, equation 1). It receives a maximum value of 1 if all members of the opposition vote contrary to all members of the coalition, and a minimum of 0 if there is no relationship between being in opposition or coalition and the way a member voted. However, this measure is mathematically incapable of handling unanimous votes, which are rather frequent in the Israeli Knesset. Since unanimous votes are clearly cases in which there is no relationship between affiliation and vote position, I imputed a value of zero for all such cases.⁵

It must be noted that the coalition–opposition voting measure has an advantage and a disadvantage. On the one hand, it is similar in style to the ones used in other studies (Giuliani, 2008; Louwerse et al., 2016), which allows the findings of this research to be assessed in a comparative perspective. On the other hand, the measure gauges the behavior of the entire parliament or the entire opposition.⁶ Insofar as oppositions are rarely unitary political actors, this method more often than not is inadequate (Mújica and Sánchez-Cuenca, 2006). This is especially the case in Israel, where the party system is extremely fragmented and polarized. Accordingly, another variable was constructed, one at the party-vote level. For each vote, a position was calculated for every participating party, by averaging across all its voting MPs, such that it ranged between −1 (against) and +1 (for). The per-vote party positions obtained were used to calculate the average government positions for each vote (weighted by seat-share), also ranging between −1 and +1. These values were then used to construct conflict dummy variable coded as 1 if a party’s (rounded) position was opposite to that of the governing coalition, and as 0 otherwise.⁷

Results

Descriptive statistics highlight this article’s main arguments. As Table 1 shows, 67% of the votes within the sample vote data pertain to private-member legislation, with roughly equal measures of these bills initiated by the opposition, the coalition, and a cooperation of both.

Table 1.

Knesset votes by bill origin (sample data).

Bill type and origin	Votes
Private-member	297 (67.0%)
Opposition	105
Cross-aisles	94
Coalition	98
Government	143 (32.3%)
Committee	3 (0.7%)
Overall	443 (100%)

The above discussion indicates that government legislation, accompanied by the opposition’s reactive behavior, is not prevalent in the legislative agenda of the Israeli Knesset. This pattern is inconsistent with most models of legislative activity. The overwhelming predominance of private-member legislation in Israel is attributable to opposition-led initiatives and cross-aisles cooperation, as well as entrepreneurial activity by coalition backbenchers. In what follows, I show how this larger share of private-member legislation affects the opposition’s propensity for conflict-seeking and adduce support for the argument that private-member legislation is indeed a nonpartisan, “personalized” activity. But first a discussion of the issues addressed by the various bills is in order.

Table 2 presents the votes in the full data set, as well as in the sample, broken down into categories according to the issue addressed by a given bill. Importantly, security/religion, which is the most politically important dimension in Israeli politics, accounts for only about 10% of the votes. In Israel, security and religion define the main political dimension over which parties debate and compete in elections (Arian et al., 2011). Thus, votes on the legislation concerning security/religion issues can be expected to spark the greatest controversy. The relatively small share of such votes is surprising indeed.

Table 2.

Legislation vote issues, the entire data set, and sampled data.

Issue	All legislation votes	Sampled votes*
Issue	All legislation votes	Government	Private-member	Overall
Constitution	402 (4.3%)	0 (0%)	13 (4.4%)	13 (3.0%)
Budget	736 (7.9%)	17 (11.9%)	4 (1.35%)	21 (4.8%)
Security religion	938 (10.1%)	13 (9.1%)	34 (11.45%)	47 (10.7%)
Interior	1561 (16.8%)	26 (18.2%)	56 (18.9%)	82 (18.6%)
Economy	3583 (38.7%)	65 (45.4%)	115 (38.7%)	180 (40.9%)
Other	2049 (22.1%)	22 (15.4%)	75 (25.2%)	97 (22.0%)
Total	9269 (100%)	143 (100%)	297 (100%)	440 (100%)

Note:*Excluding committee bills.

Two main differences emerge between the government- and private-member legislation. First, private-member legislation rarely deals with budgetary issues—which stands to reason, given the weight of the government in determining the budget and the procedural restrictions put on the submission of private-member legislation with budgetary implications (Maor, 2011; Shomer, 2015). Second, it seems that the government treats legislation on constitutional matters as a taboo. This finding may stem from two factors. The first lies in the nature of Israel’s political culture. The second is the composition of governing coalitions in Israel, which usually consist of both large and small parties. These may differ sharply on matters of political reform, making the passing of such legislation through the government much more cumbersome than via private-member initiatives. In fact, coalition agreements may explicitly grant smaller partners the power of veto over political reforms (Rahat, 2008; Rahat and Hazan, 2011). Apart from these two issues, however, no statistically significant differences are found between government- and private-member legislation.

Finally, let us consider the effect of fragmentation on the behavior of the opposition vis-à-vis the governing coalition. In the sampled voting data,⁸ 239 of the 443 votes (more than half) were unanimous. Of the remaining 204 votes, in which the opposition and government did not vote in unison, the opposition itself displayed cohesion (Rice index of 0.9 and above) on 54 votes (26.5%). In striking contrast, of these 204 votes, the government acted in concert on as many as 151 (74%). All in all, the opposition as a whole confronted a unified government (Rice index of 0.9 and above for both) in the so-called “opposition mode” (King, 1976) in just 41 of the 443 votes sampled, which represent only 9.3% of the sample data set.

To sum up the descriptive statistics, private-member legislation accounts for most legislative voting in the Knesset, divided fairly equally among the opposition, coalition backbenchers, and cross-aisles initiatives. Furthermore, only a small fraction of the legislative activity pertains to the core political issues that shape the party system and the government–opposition divide. Finally, the opposition rarely confronts the government in unison—bolstering the case against treating parliamentary oppositions as unitary actors, in contrast to governing coalitions and individual parties. The implications of these observations for the opposition’s behavior are examined below.

Table 3 shows the results of two regression analyses. Model 1 presents a linear regression on the coalition–opposition voting measure, while model 2 presents a logit regression on conflict vis-à-vis the government at the level of a single party-vote. As independent variables, both models include the issue category, the origin of the bill voted on, as well as its type (roll call, reading). Likewise, both models include general controls, none of which emerged as significant in either of them.⁹ Model 2 also adds party-level controls, inasmuch as it is estimated at the party-vote level.

Table 3.

Coalition–opposition voting and party-level confrontation.

		(1)	(2)
	Variables	Coalition–opposition voting (vote level)	Conflict (party-vote level)
Bill issue	Issue = Budget	0.514***	2.634***
		(0.087)	(0.546)
	Issue = Economy	0.018	0.219
		(0.035)	(0.345)
	Issue = Interior	0.061	0.370
		(0.042)	(0.357)
	Issue = Constitution	0.405***	2.405***
		(0.100)	(0.592)
	Issue = Security/Religion	0.126**	1.098***
		(0.051)	(0.360)
Bill origin	Private-member: opposition	0.080*	0.207
		(0.045)	(0.297)
	Private-member: cross-aisles	−0.084**	−0.864**
		(0.038)	(0.358)
	Private-member: coalition	−0.085**	−0.941***
		(0.035)	(0.324)
Vote type	Roll call	0.429***	2.638***
		(0.090)	(0.366)
	Second reading	−0.137***	−1.115***
		(0.032)	(0.299)
	Third reading	−0.113***	−0.859***
		(0.032)	(0.274)
Party features	Seat share		−7.615
			(4.920)
	GE		−0.040
			(0.442)
	GE × Seat share		8.774
			(6.018)
	Ideological distance		0.166***
			(0.059)
	Government side		0.090
			(0.185)
	Arab party		0.664***
			(0.212)
	Controls	Yes	Yes
	Constant	0.399***	−1.607
		(0.115)	(1.240)

	Observations	440	1916
	R ²	0.293

Note: GE: government experience. Robust standard errors in parentheses.

***p < 0.01; **p < 0.05; *p < 0.1.

The subject of the bill has a significant and substantial impact on both the extent of coalition–opposition voting and the likelihood that an opposition party will adopt a stand against the government. As expected, issues relating to security/religion tend to draw more conflict than the baseline category, which is “other”. It is further evident that confrontation is more likely over legislation about budgetary matters—which is not surprising considering that these bills largely decide a government’s future. Equally plausible is the finding that bills dealing with constitutional reforms lead to more conflict, as these usually have direct ramifications for the prospects of parties and politicians themselves, as well as for the power relations between all these actors. Much less obvious, however, is the result pertaining to bills on economic issues, which in other countries are perhaps the most contentious. In the Israeli Knesset, while these bills account for roughly 40% of all legislation votes, they give rise to the least controversy.

Figure 1 shows the probabilities predicted based on model 2 for parties to vote against the government’s position, with all party-level and general controls at their means (except for the Arab party and post-August 2011 dummies, which are 0), and the vote dummies set to non-roll-call first reading. Panels A through D show the probabilities for each issue, respectively (except for the base category “other”, and the budget category which contain almost no private-member bills). Within each panel, the probabilities are given for legislation initiated by the opposition, across aisles, by coalition backbenchers, and by the government. The probability of conflict over security/religion is higher than over both economy and interior by roughly 10% points, but is still expected to be below 50% (under the above-listed specifications). The only issue over which the probability of conflict exceeds 50% is constitutional reforms.

Figure 1.

Probability of conflict by legislation issue and origin.

Also evident from Figure 1 is that the probabilities of conflict over legislation initiated by the opposition and the government are almost identical and that cross-aisles and coalition legislation are consistently less controversial. This is likewise apparent from models 1 and 2 presented in Table 3. The reason behind this finding lies in the nature of the government’s reaction to the opposition’s initiatives. To demonstrate this, I test models similar to the ones presented in Table 3, but with two simple binary dependent variables: whether or not the government supported a bill (replacing the coalition–opposition voting measure in model 1), and whether or not each opposition party supported a bill (replacing the party vote-level conflict variable in model 2). The findings of interest are shown in Figure 2, and the full regression results are in Online Appendix E (Supplemental Material).

Figure 2.

Probability of legislation being supported by origin.

It transpires that the government is almost as likely to support private-member legislation proposed by its backbenchers as by the entire coalition, but much less likely to support opposition-initiated legislation. The opposition parties, on the other hand, do not seem to distinguish private-member initiatives in terms of party affiliation, but are less supportive of government-initiated bills. The upshot is that the conflict between government and opposition is more intense over either opposition- or government-led legislation, and less so over legislation initiated by coalition backbenchers. Two less central, albeit noteworthy, observations are in order. First, the likelihood that opposition parties will support government legislation is higher than that the coalition will support legislation initiated by private members from the opposition. Second, based on the regression results, whether or not the government supports a bill does not depend on the issue at hand, but this factor is relevant for the attitudes of the opposition.

Finally, it must be pointed out that model 2 presents no evidence that party features that determine opposition parties’ ability to challenge the government influence their behavior. In analyzing a cross section of 16 European countries, Tuttnauer (2018) shows larger parties and ones with more government experience to be more confrontational and attributes this tendency to their enhanced ability to challenge the government. In the Israeli case investigated in the present study, however, these features did not produce a significant effect.

Discussion

This research has tested the assumption that the opposition in the Israeli Knesset operates contrary to current theories in legislative studies that attribute parties’ behavior more to vote- and office-seeking considerations than to those relating to policy. This anomaly is explained by the fact that most legislation in the Knesset is initiated by private members and is therefore highly personalized, nonpartisan, and relating to issues outside the domain of the electoral competition.

This rather complex argument rests on four premises, which the analysis sets out to validate. First, private-member legislation must account for most legislative activity in the Knesset. Second, such legislation must be personalized and nonpartisan, or at least viewed as such by the opposition. Third, it must address predominantly issues that are on the margins of the electoral controversy. And fourth, the above three factors should render vote- and office-seeking considerations less influential over the opposition’s behavior than those related to policy.

The analyses have shown that these four conditions do indeed obtain in the Israeli parliamentary arena. The predominance of private-member legislation is attested by the findings whereby (a) it accounted for 67% of the votes sampled and (b) opposition-affiliated private-member legislation accounted for 45% of the votes sampled. The personalized nature of Israeli private-member legislation is evident in the finding that, as long as a bill comes from private members, the opposition does not seem to assign importance to its initiator’s partisan or government/opposition affiliation. It should be stressed, however, that bill origin does play a large part in the coalition’s stances regarding private-member legislation. The coalition tends to treat its backbenchers’ bills almost as favorably as government legislation, while being much less supportive of opposition members’ bills. The difference between the behavior of the opposition and the coalition may be explained by difference in priorities, and in power. The Israeli opposition seems to prioritize policy over (electorally driven) competition. The coalition leadership, while interested in limiting the magnitude of private-member legislation in general, has to accommodate its own backbenchers’ interests and needs and thus supports their endeavors, but has a much lesser need to accommodate the opposition’s preferences.

Next, the Israeli Knesset’s private-member legislation—and in fact, its legislative activity in general—was shown to address overwhelmingly questions relating to economy and interior. This pattern may be observed in the parliaments of most established democracies as well. In Israel, however, unlike those countries, the issues pertaining to economy and interior are not central to the electoral competition.

The personalized, nonpartisan character of private-member legislation in Israel is corroborated by additional sources of information. The PartiRep MP Survey (Deschouwer et al., 2014), which includes elite surveys involving legislators from various countries, found that Israeli politicians are more independent than those from other countries in taking parliamentary initiatives without their party’s authorization (see Online Appendix F in Supplemental Material). The survey also demonstrated that they tend to see politics as more about personal competition than a confrontation of ideas.

Another research into private-member legislation in Israel is Maor’s qualitative study, which details the various factors and interfaces a legislator needs to take into account when initiating a bill (Maor, 2011), including working vis-à-vis state bureaucrats, cabinet members and fellow legislators. Yet, neither Maor herself nor her numerous interviewees draw a distinction between bills initiated by coalition- and opposition-affiliated legislators. In Maor’s study, the main interface involves an individual legislator or a group thereof vis-à-vis the coalition leadership and the government, rather than an opposition party facing the coalition, or even another party.

For the purposes of the present study, I have also conducted four interviews with current and former leading members of four opposition parties. All the interviewees conceded that private-member legislation is not subject to party dictates, and that it is motivated by either policy seeking or intraparty reselection incentives. Most importantly, all four interviewees contended that their respective parties reacted to legislation—both private-member and governmental—based on its substance rather than source.¹⁰ This pattern is also attested by the quantitative data of the analysis presented here: opposition parties support private-member legislation regardless of its initiators’ affiliation; ideological differences between an opposition party and the government increase the likelihood of confrontation, whereas features related to a party’s ability to compete with the government have no effect.

Moreover, it appears that opposition parties resort to strategies designed to accentuate conflict and gain a competitive advantage less frequently if the party system is fragmented. Thus, the results show that the fragmented Israeli opposition is rarely in a position to act cohesively vis-à-vis the government. Populated mostly by small parties and acting within an open-structured competition, the opposition has but slim chances to replace the government. A more promising path to office, in these circumstances, may be to join the government. This pattern is apparent in the rather frequent moves on the part of the main opposition party in the Knesset—in the period studied here, either Labor or Kadima– to join the government as a junior partner. Between 1999 and 2015, such an attempt occurred at least once during each Knesset term.

What are the implications of the Israeli case for the wider democratic world? Across Western democracies, political systems are becoming increasingly more fragmented and personalized. Differences in opinions regarding such issues as Europeanization, immigration, regionalism, globalization, and political skepticism, which are steadily gaining prominence, no longer align with the left–right axis, which formerly partitioned the political space. Accordingly, the Israeli case suggests that the legislative arenas of countries affected by these trends will be less and less divided along the government–opposition line and will present less and less activity in the so-called “opposition mode” (King, 1976). This does not mean that we can expect an ideological convergence of the different sides or a decrease in animosity during electoral campaigns. Rather, as this article has argued, there may be less and less connection between the issues which parties choose to contest during electoral campaigns and the ones their representatives in parliament choose to address.

Supplemental material

Supplemental Material, pp-2017-0143-File005 - Government–opposition relations in a fragmented, personalized, and multidimensional setting: The case of Israel

Supplemental Material, pp-2017-0143-File005 for Government–opposition relations in a fragmented, personalized, and multidimensional setting: The case of Israel by Or Tuttnauer in Party Politics

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this article were presented on June- July 2016 at the Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences, the 3rd General Conference of the ECPR Standing Group on Parliaments in Munich, and the 6th Annual General Conference of the European Political Science Association in Brussels. I thank Gideon Rahat for his advice and data, as well as Chen Friedberg, Reuven Y. Hazan, Orit Kedar, panel participants and two anonymous readers for their remarks. I alone remain responsible for all errors.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflict of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Or Tuttnauer

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online

Notes

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