Summary
In Arend Lijphart’s usage as Dowty applies it, a model of democracy for deeply divided societies in which power is diffused and shared by proportionality rather than exercised as undiluted majority rule; Dowty argues Israeli democracy works this way in practice, and that traditional Jewish politics already inclined toward it (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 250-340, lines 620-640).
Details
-
Consensus democracy, Lijphart’s institutional model, is characterized by executive power-sharing, executive–legislative balance, a multiparty and multidimensional party system, proportional representation, federalism and decentralization, strong bicameralism, and written and rigid constitutions (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 250-330).
-
Consociationalism names the broader set of power-sharing practices, formal and informal: grand coalition, segmental autonomy, proportionality, and mutual veto (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 285-335).
-
Dowty’s classification of Israel: clearly among the more “consensual” regimes on the executive-parties dimension (multiparty system, uncompromising proportional representation), but “majoritarian” on the federal-unitary dimension (centralization, unicameralism, an unwritten constitution); the formal picture misleads, because most important policy decisions emerge from bargaining among branches of government, quasi-governmental bodies and major social groups, giving Israeli democracy important informal consociational features — grand coalitions, autonomy, proportionality, mutual veto, pluralism and social bargaining (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 300-340).
-
Dowty traces the style to Jewish political tradition rather than to formal structures of British or other provenance: competition between different centers of authority, the lack of defined hierarchy, the proliferation and influence of organized groups, and bargaining and power-sharing marked the Kehilla’s politics, so that Jewish communities exemplified many characteristic patterns of consensus or consociational democracy before theorists identified them (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 620-640).
-
Dowty’s Chapter 3 finds the consociational pattern already in the Zionist movement and the yishuv: power-sharing, decentralization, mutual veto, coalition-building and multidimensional politics in the World Zionist Organization; in the yishuv, society organized into separate camps with their own institutions sharing power and distributing benefits proportionately by bargaining — “compound polity” or “segmented pluralism” in other writers’ terms — with grand coalitions rather than simple majority rule, and proportionality extended by the “party key” to jobs, funds and immigration certificates (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 874-973).
-
Dowty’s Chapter 4 completion qualifies the classification: despite remaining consociational elements — proportional representation with the party key, and mutual veto especially in religious matters — Arend Lijphart classified the Israeli government of the Ben-Gurion period as only semi-consociational, while Medding maintains its majoritarian elements were at least temporarily dominant (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1670-1695).
-
More-than-minimal coalitions are Dowty’s chief institutional evidence in the state period: since independence Israel has been governed about three-quarters of the time by coalitions larger than a Knesset majority required, and on three occasions (1967-1970, 1984-1988, 1988-1990) the two major blocs together formed a Government of National Unity (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1614-1632).
-
Proportionality, for Dowty, extends well beyond the electoral system — entrenched for the Knesset in the Basic Law of 1958 — to deputy speakerships, committee places, offices, budgets and institutional resources divided by the party key (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1620-1650).