The Elections in Israel, 2019–2021
Michal Shamir editor Gideon Rahat editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published:27th Oct '22
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
The 16th book in The Elections in Israel series, this book covers an extraordinary political event of having four national elections in two years, which were much (but not all) about one person, "King Bibi."
Analyzing Israel’s national elections from 2019 to 2021, this book argues the four elections became, to a large extent, a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu, the incumbent prime minister and head of the Likud party, facing investigations, a hearing, and indictment on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. Thus, the first part of the book is dedicated to political personalization and to Netanyahu himself. The second part of the volume covers the traditional actors in parliamentary elections: voters, parties, and the mass media. The book relies on empirical analysis, including extensive use of the Israel National Election Studies data; on theoretical rigor; and on the contextualization of the elections from comparative and long-term perspectives.
The book should interest students and researchers of Israeli politics and society, electoral studies, and the crisis of democracy more generally. Many chapters will be of interest to political science, communications and sociology students and scholars who study themes that are prominent on the academic and public agenda including political personalization and personalized politics, populism, party decline, and democratic backsliding.
Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.
The convoluted spectacle of four Israeli elections within two years poses a forbidding challenge to analysts. In this welcome continuation of The Elections in Israel series, Michal Shamir and Gideon Rahat meet this challenge with resounding success. Not only do the essays in this volume cover the elections themselves authoritatively, but they put this passage of Israeli politics into a data-rich historical and comparative perspective. Of particular note, the elections serve as a laboratory for analysis of the Netanyahu era and the personalization of Israeli politics that it embodies. The book also includes striking insights on challenges to Israeli democracy in the context of worldwide erosion of democracy. This volume should be on the reading list of both experts and casual students of Israeli politics.
Alan Dowty
Past President, Association for Israel Studies
This is the sixteenth volume in the series The Elections in Israel, an impressive academic endeavor initiated by the late Prof. Asher Arian in 1969. The articles in these volumes propose multi-faceted analysis of the political situation, of voting patterns, and central issues that were on the agenda in each election campaign. But, even more so, they document the changes that have taken place in Israeli society, political culture and its characteristics, and in the essence of Israeli democracy.
These volumes have brought together leading social scientists from Israel and other countries and placed the election results and their analysis under the microscope in order to propose in-depth insights into politics and society in Israel. The latest volume covers the four elections of 2019-2021 which all took place within a two-year span. This was undoubtedly an intellectual and empirical challenge confronting the editors Prof. Michal Shamir and Prof. Gideon Rahat that they have successfully overcome. The final product includes the work of senior and junior scholars highlighting a painful lesson that teaches us much about the fragility of a democracy in crisis, about a divided society, about the radicalization of internal and external conflicts, and about dramatic transformations in Israeli political culture. This is essential reading for all who value democracy and concerned about its future.
Hanna Herzog
Professor Emerita, Tel Aviv University, and co-Director of the Center for Advancement of Women in the Public Sphere, Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, Jerusalem
Four elections in two years is an amazing set of circumstances for any polity to weather. Shamir and Rahat have done a wonderful job, taking us through this landscape. They navigate us through the plus ça change of the increasing personalization of elections and plus c’est la même chose of four elections with similar outcomes and traditional bases of campaigning and voting.
John Aldrich
Pfizer-Pratt University Professor
Department of Political Science
Duke University
.
ISBN: 9781032213392
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 725g
292 pages