The Elections in Israel 1999

5. The Continuing Electoral Success of Shas: A Cultural Division of Labor Analysis

5 The Continuing Electoral Success of Shas A Cultural Division of Labor Analysis Yoav Peled Introduction As far as Shas was concerned, the election campaign to the Fifteenth Knesset was conducted under the shadow of the conviction and then the sentencing of the party’s political leader, Aryeh Deri, for bribery charges (Bilsky, 2001). In spite of these events, or perhaps because of them, Shas succeeded in raising its Knesset delegation from ten to seventeen members and became one of the three largest (albeit medium-size) factions in the house. Like in past election campaigns, this impressive achievement had not been predicted by the pollsters , who expected Shas to only retain its power (see, e.g., Plotzker 1999a, 1999b, 1999c; Shalev and Kis, in this volume).1 In this chapter I wish to explore the social origins of Shas’s continuing electoral success, and consider its implications for our understanding of interclass and interethnic relations in Israel. The questions I will seek to answer are (1) What accounts for the sudden surge in Mizrahi political mobilization in the mid-1980s? and (2) Why has this mobilization taken place under the religious ideological banner of Shas, rather than under some other ideological formula? My consideration of the second question, especially, will be informed by Anne Swidler’s suggestion that the causal significance of culture for political action does not lie in “defining ends of action” by supplying it with values and norms. Its significance lies, rather, in “providing cultural components [or “tool kits”] that are used to construct strategies of action.” Thus, “Explaining cultural outcomes . . . requires not only understanding the direct influence 99 I am especially grateful to Michael Shalev and Sigal Kis for providing me with statistical data, and to Yaron Tsur, Shlomo Deshen, Moshe Shokeid, Yehuda Shenhav, Oren Yiftachel, the two editors of the present volume, and Horit Herman-Peled. of ideology on action. It also requires explaining why one ideology rather than another triumphs (or at least endures). And such explanation depends on analyzing the structural constraints and historical circumstances within which ideological movements struggle for dominance” (1986, 273, 280). Analyzing the “structural constraints and historical circumstances” behind the political-cultural phenomenon of Shas requires a theory that can (1) explain the persistence and growth of ethnic identification in a modernizing society, where both the prevailing assimilationist theories of ethnicity and the prevailing nation-building ideology predicted its gradual demise; and (2) offer a conceptualization of the relationship between social structure and political culture. I believe that a modified version of Michael Hechter’s “cultural division of labor” model would be most suitable for this purpose (1975, 1978).2 The cultural division of labor (CDL) model posits a stratification system in which groups marked by cultural differences are located differentially along both the horizontal and the vertical axes. Vertical differentiation, or “segmentation ,” occurs to the extent that particular groups are occupationally specialized ; horizontal differentiation, or “hierarchy,” occurs to the extent that particular groups are concentrated at the lower or upper echelons of the occupational ladder (Hechter 1978). The location of a particular group within the CDL is not determined by its culture, however, but by the timing and circumstances of its encounter with industrialization. Cultural markers are used only to identify particular groups as belonging to particular niches in the CDL. Thus, “the task of perpetuating the structure of inequality falls to ideas about cultural and racial differences” (Verdery 1979, 378). The more pronounced the CDL, the greater will be the tendency for ethnic solidarity to prevail over other forms of solidarity, for two reasons: 1. The rigidity of the CDL determines the extent to which members of culturally defined groups would interact with one another, rather than with members of other groups in society. Endogamous interaction leads to in-group solidarity and to the maintenance, or development , of distinctive cultural patterns. 2. The CDL is usually legitimated by an ideology of the cultural superiority of the dominant group in society. Thus, for the groups at the bottom of the ladder, a reassertion of their own cultural identity may serve as a counterideology, a vehicle for “socialization, as well as political mobilization, contrary to state ends” (Hechter 1975, 37; 1978). Hechter’s theory was designed to account for the persistence of ethnic boundaries between the core English region of Great Britain and its Celtic periphery. While it has since been applied in a number of different case 100 Yoav Peled...