Bound by Tradition: The Exclusion of Minority Ethnonational Parties from Coalition Governments—A Comparison of Israel and Canada

Abstract

Attempts to build a coalition government whose survival depends on support from ethnic minority parties have resulted in both Canada and Israel in widespread public disapproval and political turmoil. In turn, such arrangements have been deemed untenable even though otherwise powerful political elites had an interest in minority party inclusion. The comparable outcomes in these two cases are intriguing because the two parliamentary democracies differ in general characteristics that much of the scholarship claims should produce different outcomes, including the electoral system, conceptions of national identity, and regional environment. Using the most different systems method, with a similar value on the study variable but with dissimilar background conditions, we argue that inherited political traditions in both countries engendered widespread perceptions that minority party inclusion diverged from the ‘appropriate way of doing politics’ and was thus unacceptable.

Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to the journal's editors and to Aviad Rubin, Csaba Nikolenyi, Ilan Danjoux, and Alon Burstein for their comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

1. Following the 1992 elections, the coalition consisted of Labor, Meretz, and the religious party Shas, providing the government with a Jewish majority. It was only in September 1993 that Shas bolted from the government, leaving it reliant on the support of the Arab parties.

2. The two main criteria that Horowitz (1985, pp. 291–294) uses to identify whether a political party is ethnic is its support base and the type of demands it makes.

3. Conducted on an annual basis (except for 1995), the surveys demonstrate the Jewish–Israeli majority's consistent objection to the inclusion of Arab parties in the government since the surveys began in 1993.

4. For public opinion data about the peace process, see the index constructed by Yaar and Hermann (2008).

5. Coalitions did occur a handful of times at the provincial level, see Stewart (1980) and Hicks (2013).