The elections for Israel's nineteenth Knesset were held on January 22, 2013. This volume offers an in-depth analysis of Israel's 2013 elections from various perspectives. It presents an up-to-date picture of the complexity of Israeli democracy, and its challenges, achievements, and failures. The chapters in this collection shed light on different facets of Israeli democracy. Yaron Ezrahi provides a sceptical perspective on prospects for democracy. Gayil Talshir explains the party system's slowness to respond to citizen demands and to social movements. Michal Shamir and Keren Weinshall-Margel explore the politics of the right to be elected to the Knesset. Nir Atmor and Chen Friedberg highlight the decline in participation in Knesset elections in the Periphery versus the Center. Assaf Shapira and Gideon Rahat reveal the complexity of inter-party democracy. Dganit Ofek analyses the stability of government coalitions. Gal Levy examines Mizrahi Jews and the Shas Party. Mtanes Shihadeh discusses the voting patterns of Israeli Arabs. Asher Cohen focuses on religious Zionism and the success of the renewed Jewish Home Party. Michal Shamir and Einat Gedalya-Lavy document a gender gap in voting. Elections in Israel 2013 analyses the give-and-take between the public and its leaders that is at the heart of elections. In doing so, it illuminates the role of elections in providing representation for different groups in Israeli society and in giving voice to their political choices.

The 2013 elections took place less than two years after the overwhelming wave of social protests of summer 2011. At first, the election campaign did not raise much public interest, but the emergence of new players and young political forces energized the political race. Polls conducted throughout the campaign greatly deviated from the final results, which eventually enabled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to form a cabinet again, despite a loss of 11 seats for his list. This book describes and analyses a variety of political and sociological developments in Israel both before and after the elections. These include the nature of the campaign, the developments in the National Camp, among religious Zionists, the ultra-Orthodox parties, and the Russian vote. Furthermore, it assesses the impact of media, including new media. The variety of subjects makes the book suitable for undergraduate and graduate students in Middle-Eastern, Israeli, and Jewish studies, as well as political science and liberal arts in general. Israel at the Polls has been updated and published regularly for thirty-five years, providing readers with up-to-date analysis and continuity of scholarship. This book offers a long-term assessment of Israeli politics. This book was published as a special issue of Israel Affairs.

The newest volume in the Elections in Israel series focuses on the twentieth Knesset elections held in March 2015 following the collapse of the third Netanyahu government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s main opposition party, the Zionist Camp, ran a negative personalized election campaign, assuming that Israelis had grown tired of him. Netanyahu, however, achieved a surprising and dramatic victory by enhancing and radicalizing the same identity politics strategies that helped him win in 1996. The Elections in Israel 2015 dissects these and other campaigns, from the perspective of the voters, the media and opinion polls, the political parties, and electoral competition. Several contributors delve into the Left and Arab fear mongering Likud campaign, which produced strategic identity voting. Other contributions analyze in-depth the Israeli party and electoral systems, highlighting the exceptional decline of the mainstream parties and the adoption of a higher electoral threshold. Providing a close analysis of electoral competition, legitimacy struggles, stability and change in the voting behavior of various groups, partisanship, personalization and political polarization, this volume is a crucial record of Israeli political history.

The 16th book in The Elections in Israel series, this book covers an extraordinary political event of having four national elections in two years, which were much (but not all) about one person, "King Bibi." Analyzing Israel’s national elections from 2019 to 2021, this book argues the four elections became, to a large extent, a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu, the incumbent prime minister and head of the Likud party, facing investigations, a hearing, and indictment on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. Thus, the first part of the book is dedicated to political personalization and to Netanyahu himself. The second part of the volume covers the traditional actors in parliamentary elections: voters, parties, and the mass media. The book relies on empirical analysis, including extensive use of the Israel National Election Studies data; on theoretical rigor; and on the contextualization of the elections from comparative and long-term perspectives. The book should interest students and researchers of Israeli politics and society, electoral studies, and the crisis of democracy more generally. Many chapters will be of interest to political science, communications and sociology students and scholars who study themes that are prominent on the academic and public agenda including political personalization and personalized politics, populism, party decline, and democratic backsliding. Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Political parties regularly change and adapt in response to ever-changing circumstances. Until now these changes have frequently prompted both scholars and the media to suggest a whole new type of political party, and over time the number of models and types has proliferated to the point of confusion, contradiction, and a loss of explanatory power. In this sophisticated yet accessible study, André Krouwel rejects this mélange of models as inadequate. He utilizes a wide range of data sources to analyze the ideological, organizational, and electoral change undergone by more than one hundred European parties in fifteen different countries, from Scandinavia to the Iberian Peninsula, between 1945 and 2010. The result is one of the most comprehensive empirically grounded studies to date of the genesis, development, and transformation of political parties in advanced democratic states.

What do Beppe Grillo, Silvio Berlusconi, Emmanuel Macron (and also Donald Trump) have in common? They are prime examples of the personalization of politics and the decline of political parties. This volume systematically examines these two prominent developments in contemporary democratic politics and the relationship between them. It presents a cross-national comparative comparison that covers around 50 years in 26 democracies through the use of more than 20 indicators. It offers the most comprehensive comparative cross-national estimation of the variance in the levels and patterns of party change and political personalization among countries to date, using existing works as well injecting fresh cross-national comparative data. In the case of party change, it offers an analysis that extends beyond the dichotomous debate of party decline versus party adaptation. In the matter of political personalization, the emphasis on variance helps in bridging between the high theoretical expectations and disappointing empirical findings. As for the theoretically sound linkage between the two phenomena, not only is this the first study to comprise a comprehensive cross-national examination, but it also proposes a more nuanced understanding of this relationship. Comparative Politics is a series for researchers, teachers, and students of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu. The series is edited by Emilie van Haute, Professor of Political Science, Université libre de Bruxelles; Ferdinand Müller-Rommel, Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Leuphana University; and Susan Scarrow, John and Rebecca Moores Professor of Political Science, University of Houston.

Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State carries an Introduction by the editor and eight articles (five translated from earlier Hebrew publications), by Aharon Barak, Haim H. Cohn, Menachem Elon, Ruth Gavison, Asher Maoz, Ariel Rozen-Zvi, Aviad Hacohen and Aharon Lichtenstein, discussing the legal problems (both secular and halakhic) involved in the categorisation of Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State.