Abraham Diskin

Comparing Strategic Voting under FPTP and PR

Based on recent work that suggests that voters in proportional representation (PR) systems have incentives to cast strategic votes, the authors hypothesize that levels of strategic voting are similar in both first-past-the-post (FPTP) and PR systems. Comparing vote intentions in majoritarian elections in the United States, Mexico, Britain, and Israel to PR elections in Israel and the Netherlands, the authors find that a substantial proportion of the voters desert their most preferred candidate or party and that patterns of strategic voting across FPTP and PR bear striking similarities. In every election, smaller parties tend to lose votes to major parties. Because there tend to be more small parties in PR systems, tactical voting is actually more common under PR than under FPTP. The findings suggest that whatever the electoral system, voters focus on the policy consequences of their behavior and which parties are likely to influence policy outcomes following the election.

The Politics of Electoral Reform in Israel

This article falls into three main sections. The first outlines the basic features of the Israeli electoral system established in 1949, with minor amendments in the allocation formula (in 1973) and the electoral threshold (in 1992). The second covers unsuccessful proposals to reform Knesset elections in the periods 1949-77, 1977-90, and 1990 to date. The last section explains the causes of the introduction in 1992 of direct elections for the prime minister, and evaluates their possible conse quences. Since its first Knesset (parliamentary) elections in 1949 Israel has employed an electoral system with a single nationwide district, a propor tional representation allocation formula, and a strict list ballot. The basic alternative considered by Israeli politicians was the employment of a mixed system. Although reform proposals have been raised since the establishment of the state of Israel, no major change of the system has taken place until the March 1992 reform of the Government Basic Law. Following Israels only successful vote on no-confidence, the Knesset adopted a governmental reform according to which the prime minister will be elected directly by voters. The directly elected prime minister must gain, however, the Knessets confidence in his or her government. The present nature of the reform is such that a possible conflict between the prime minister and the Knesset may lead to a political and constitutional catastrophe.

Why Democracies Collapse: The Reasons for Democratic Failure and Success

Most studies of democratic stability are based within either the socioeconomic or the politico-institutional tradition, but usually not on both. This article combines the two approaches. In all, 11 variables associated with democratic stability are divided into four groups (institutional, societal, mediating, and extraneous) and examined in 30 cases of democratic collapse and 32 cases of stable democracies. Five variables prove to be the most influential on the fate of democracies. When a country scores negatively on four of these five variables it is almost doomed to collapse. Some of the variables prove to be correlated in an opposite way to that which has been suggested in the literature.

Strategic Abandonment or Sincerely Second Best? The 1999 Israeli Prime Ministerial Election

The Israeli election for Prime Minister in 1999 featured five candidates. Three, including a major, centrally located candidate, Yitzhak Mordechai, withdrew from competition during the two days before the voting. Mordechai withdrew in large measure in reaction to the strategic decisions of voters, that is, some voters who favored him deserted his candidacy as his poll standings declined. We use surveys conducted during the 1999 campaign to estimate models of strategic voting behavior based on the multicandidate calculus of voting. We find that strategic voting in the Israeli, majority-with-runoff electoral system closely resembled the level and nature of strategic voting found in the more nearly pure plurality systems for which the statistical models were originally developed. The result is support for the reasoning Mordechai provided for his decision, illustrating the interlocking nature of strategic decisions between candidates and voters.

Generalized Raiffa solutions

We define a family of solutions for n-person bargaining problems which generalizes the discrete Raiffa solution and approaches the continuous Raiffa solution. Each member of this family is a stepwise solution, which is a pair of functions: a step-function that determines a new disagreement point for a given bargaining problem, and a solution function that assigns the solution to the problem. We axiomatically characterize stepwise solutions of the family of generalized Raiffa solutions, using standard axioms of bargaining theory.

The 1999 Knesset and prime ministerial elections in Israel

Abstract This election note delineates the outcome of the 1999 elections in Israel, in which the Prime Minister was directly elected — for only the second time — concurrently with the parliamentary election. It then analyzes the election results produced by Israels unique electoral system, and assesses their immediate ramifications.

Political Distances between Knesset Members and Coalition Behaviour: The Peace Agreements with Egypt

During the 1960s great attention was given to the theoretical field of coalition behaviour. Among the pioneers, Gamson and Riker introduced ideas borrowed from game theory and suggested the term ‘minimal winning coalitions’.’ In such coalitions there are no unnecessary partners. If one of the members (for example, political parties) defects, it immediately becomes a losing coalition for it does not control a majority anymore. Gamson, Riker and their followers proposed that such coalitions are more likely to occur because the usually fixed total amount of payoffs is distributed among coalition members in proportion to their power. Hence, any addition of ‘unnecessary’ parties directly reduces the amount of payoffs to be held by ‘necessary’ parties. Subsequently, in a famous empirical study Browne proved that although payoffs are distributed in cabinet coalitions in proportion to the parliamentary power of the participating parties, and although most coalitions in parliamentary systems usually enjoy majorities (the exceptions were Denmark and Italy), minimal winning coalitions occur only in rare cases.’ Dodd proved, however, that the more similar is the size of a coalition to the size of a minimal winning coalition, the longer is its d ~ r a t i o n . ~ The focus then shifted to new theoretical ideas suggesting that the network of policy distances among the different actors is a major predictor of coalition formation. Axelrod, De Swaan and Taylor proposed that coalitions with ‘minimal range’ and/or ‘closed coalitions’ are more likely to OCCUT.~ Range refers to the ideological distance between the two most extreme participants in a possible coalition. In a closed coalition, party A and

Coalition formation in the Arab world: An analytical perspective

The purpose of the article is to examine the applicability of several well‐known theoretical concepts from the theory of coalition formation. The attempt to apply the term winning coalition to the system of inter‐Arab relations raises problems which derive from the fuzzy boundaries of the system, from the sovereign status of the states involved, and from difficulties in measuring the states’ respective weights. The attempt to apply coalition theories based on the idea of policy distance also proves unfruitful, since most inter‐Arab coalitions are neither minimal range nor closed coalitions. Despite their dependency on the ideas of winning coalition and policy distances, however, the concepts of pivotal party and permissible coalition appear‐when revised—applicable to coalitions in the Arab world. The analysis of coalition formation in the Arab world reveals the existence of three main types of coalitions: (a) declarative coalitions; (b) non‐winning coalitions; and (c) minimal winning coalitions, which ten...

Coalition Formation Decision Support System

Many democratically elected representative governments around the world require the formation of a coalition to create a government that is expected to be durable and stable. Creating such a coalition is far from trivial. This research describes a computerized coalition formation decision support system that attempts to meet this challenging task and formally rank possible coalitions. We use theories from political science and utilize insights from artificial intelligence to build the tool. We demonstrate the tool’s utility and validity empirically by comparing historical coalitions to predictions made by the tool. Tests show that we are able to recommend quite accurately durable coalitions and assess which coalitions would most likely be unstable.

The Measurement of Voting Power as a Special Case of the Measurement of Political Power

Felsenthal and Machover have made substantial contributions to the measurement of voting power. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that the notion of political power is actually a quite general one of which voting power is one instantiation. In this brief paper, we consider political power in the general sense and propose a definition. We will show that when applied specifically to voting power, our definition is a generalization of Banzhaf’s definition.