Israel’s eleventh knesset election

Between 1949 and 1984 there have been eleven elections for members of Israel’s parliament or Knesset. With no written constitution, various constitutional practices, traditions, and patterns have emerged to direct the electoral system. Foremost among these is the formation of a multi-party democracy in which no single party has yet won a majority of votes, thus requiring continual governance by multiparty coalitions. Each of the eleven Knessets has included ten to fifteen diverse parties or electoral lists. From among these three principal political trends-labor, orthodox religious, and right-of-center nationalist-have dominated the parliament with a gradual movement toward Knesset domination by, labor and the nationalist right. Several trends observed in Israel’s ninth and tenth Knesset elections were reinforced by the results of the eleventh. Intraparty squabbles over places on the electoral list and factionalization also characterized the 1984 campaign.