Israel: Legislative Debates in a Personalized Parliament

Or Tuttnauer, Chen Friedberg

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

This chapter investigates the factors affecting floor access in the Israeli national parliament—the Knesset. Although Israel is a parliamentary democracy with a proportional, closed-list electoral system, the Knesset's rules of procedure give little control to parties over floor access. Analyzing over 46,000 speeches over three terms between 2009 and 2019, even in debates where party leadership does have control over who takes the floor, we find no strong evidence that such control is used to give more speech time to highly ranked representatives. This is at odds with predictions made by others in two ways: First, in that the parliamentary rules do not reflect the electoral incentives of party leadership; Second, in that parties do not appear to utilize whatever ability they possess to control their representatives' speechmaking.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Politics of Legislative Debates
PublisherOxford University Press
Chapter24
Pages484-504
Number of pages21
EditionBack, Hanna; Debus, Marc; Fernandes, Jorge M.
ISBN (Electronic)9780198849063
ISBN (Print)9780198849063
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2021
Externally publishedYes

Publication series

NameThe Oxford Politics of Institutions Series

Keywords

  • Closed-list electoral systems
  • Israel
  • Legislative speech
  • Parliaments
  • Personalisation

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