ABSTRACT
Established in 1948 as a parliamentary democracy, Israel has a 120-member parliament, the Knesset, which is elected by a closed-list system of proportional representation with the entire country serving as one constituency (Rahat & Hazan, 2005). The closed-list system does not allow the voters in the national elections an opportunity to influence the composition of the candidate lists. It is a multiparty system in a multicleavaged society (Lijphart, 1993), with an average number of parties in each Knesset that is usually never fewer than a dozen (Rahat & Hazan, 2005). Parties were the dominant actors in the Israeli polity in the first decades after independence (Galnoor, 1982; Horowitz & Lissak, 1989).
