Unnatural partners: coalescence in Israeli local government

ABSTRACT

A prominent finding in coalition formation literature is that the underlying political rationale at the subnational level largely follows that of the one revealed by the classic literature on national coalitions. The Israeli political system is extremely centralized, with a local government that is highly dependent on its national counterpart. One could expect such a setting to result in local party behaviour that closely resembles the national one. However, as we show, this is far from being the case. We analyze 34 municipal coalitions in the 17 largest Israeli cities. After establishing that Israeli municipal politics fly in the face of classical coalition formation theories, we turn to explain this discrepancy with a qualitative analysis of interviews with 5 formatuers and 8 councillors. We conclude that mayors face low costs of adding surplus coalition partners, while standing to gain from wider legitimacy, weaker opposition, and constrained future competition. At the same time, municipal lists have strong resource- and policy-related incentives to join the coalition while compromise is met with low political costs. The result is an overwhelming predominance of oversized coalitions and partnerships which would be highly improbable at the national arena.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Or Tuttnauer is a postdoctoral guest researcher at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research, University of Mannheim. His research interests are legislatures and cabinets, political parties, electoral institutions and Israeli and European Politics.

Avital Friedman is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is also a researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute. Her fields of research include comparative politics, party politics, Israeli politics and political personalization.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2020.1727483.

Notes

1 An impeachment is only possible as a complex, semi-legal process involving the national government. An additional scenario of early elections for, possibly, both the mayor and the council following a failure to pass the annual budget is legally possible but, again, involves a decision by the national government, and to our knowledge has been exercised only once in history, in 2020. Instead, the ministry of Interior usually appoints a special committee to govern until the legally mandated elections.

2 This includes lists running on a double brand (e.g. Meretz-Labor). Another example are the local branches of Israel Our Home, each replacing “Israel” with the name of the respective city.

3 We also ran all empirical analyses considering only lists with a national brand as nationally-affiliated, yielding similar results in all cases.

4 It should be noted that none of the oversized coalition formations can be attributed to a minimal-winning coalition enlarged by the need to accommodate a small mayor’s party.

5 Both calculations exclude parties whose local branch was represented in less than two municipal councils in our data.

6 4 interviewees were mayors. One was the head of council who had acted as formateur on behalf of his mayor. See Table A4 in the online appendix for further information.

7 Two mayors emphasized that they were, by design, the only connecting link between the council and the municipal bureaucracy, exploiting their unique position to make sure other portfolio holders do not deviate too much from their policies.

8 The important portfolios vary between municipalities, but usually include the education, housing, and culture portfolios.

9 In case no mayoral candidate gained at least 40% of the votes, a second voting round is held after two weeks, in which the two leading candidates compete. A second voting round was conducted in 4 of the 34 municipal elections studied here.

10 See Table A5 in the online appendix for further information.