Blog 7

            According to Durverger’s Law, the effective number of parties in any electoral district is a result or reflection of the electoral rules used in that district. According to Durverger’s Law, single member district pluralities result in only two effective parties whereas proportional representation creates more. Taking a look at Israel’s electoral policies can give us a hint if this law is accurate at least in Israel.

            In Israel they elect 120 seats every four years. The district magnitude is 120 because they only have one district. They use a proportional representation system by direct election to fill the seats. When people vote, they actually vote for a party in a closed list system. This means that the party leaders choose who runs in the party in the top spots. This means that if the party wins only one spot, it has already been figured out by the party leaders who will fill that seat whereas if the party gets several seats it has already been decided who will fill them. All of the candidates in each party are placed in order. This list is also used when a vacancy arises between elections. The next person on the list will fill the seat. Israel has a proportional distribution using the d’Hondt method. From the information I got, this method entails dividing all the votes for each party by one, two, three, four all the way to how many seats are possible, from all of these numbers, the highest numbers are given the seats. This is much easier to understand if you have a graph. Israel has a 2 per cent threshold meaning that a party must have obtained at least two percent of the vote to be equated into the d’Hondt. They had twelve parties who received more than two percent of votes and about twenty that didn’t. Assuming I did my calculation correctly, I got that there are 6.7 effective parties in Israel. I left out any parties that got less than one percent of the vote. 

            It seems as if Durverger’s Law is applicable to Israel. They have a proportional representation system and have several effective parties. Discovering if Durverger’s Law is consistently true across all countries or at least the majority of counties would take a lot more research. This would lead us to exploring the more important question of why or why not the manner of election affects the number of effective parties.