ABSTRACT
The chapter compares the processes and institutions by which two Israeli national unity governments, those formed after the 1984 and the 2020 elections, attempted to build political consensus between the rival adversaries in the country’s party system. In spite of crucial differences in their formation, size and composition, the two unity governments approached consensus building in similar ways. Yet, while the 1984 unity coalition was successful, consensus building in the latter failed miserably producing one of the shortest-lived of all Israeli cabinets. The chapter argues that a combination of two factors, both of which were absent in the case of the 2020 Likud-Blue and White government, account for the success of the 1984 Alignment-Likud unity coalition: (i) the explicit public legitimation of the prospect of a unity government by key players in the political system; which, in turn, led to (ii) a fair institutional design of the coalition agreement that allocated the spoils of office between the rival blocs in a highly proportional way while preserving mutual veto and parity between them.
