The Elections in Israel 1999

2. Were Voters Strategic?

2 Were Voters Strategic? Paul R. Abramson and John H. Aldrich Multicandidate contests always provide the opportunity for strategic voting, and the Israeli prime ministerial election began as a five-candidate contest. But of the five candidates approved by the Central Elections Committee, only three had any chance of winning: Benjamin Netanyahu, the incumbent prime minister who led Likud, Ehud Barak, the head of One Israel, and Yitzhak Mordechai, leader of the newly formed Center Party. For most voters strategic considerations would be reduced to a comparison of these three candidates. Although Mordechai eventually withdrew from the contest, he had strong credentials. As a former minister of defense, he had considerable political experience . Being of Kurdish origin, and being born in Iraq, also gave him a special appeal to Jews from Asia or Africa, or whose parents were from Asia and Africa, the so-called Sephardim. Early in the campaign, pundits thought Mordechai had a reasonable chance of winning if he could come in first or second and face either Netanyahu or Barak in a head-to-head contest. But very few expected him to come in first or second. Mordechai faced the problem of many centrist candidates: he may have been the second choice of many voters, but the first choice of relatively few.1 The two remaining candidates were seen as having virtually no chance of winning. Benny Begin, running as the head of the National Union, claimed to be the true heir of Herut, the party that his father, Menachim Begin, had led. In practice, he drew relatively little support and that came primarily from voters who would otherwise have supported Netanyahu. The Christian Arab, Azmi Bishara, running as the head of Balad, acknowledged at the outset that he had no chance of being elected. 33 We are grateful to Asher Arian and Michal Shamir for providing the survey data we analyze in this chapter, and to Matthew L. Diamond, Renan Levine, and Thomas J. Scotto for their assistance with the data analysis, and to Renan Levine for his suggestions. This chapter examines the strategic preferences among the Israeli electorate during the 1999 prime ministerial contest, focusing on comparative evaluations of Barak, Netanyahu, and Mordechai. Israelis are often seen as sophisticated consumers of political information and if voters anywhere are likely to vote strategically they are likely to do so in Israel. So we cannot claim that Israel provides a deviant case to demonstrate that voters act strategically (Eckstein 1975). All the same, often political scientists cannot demonstrate what they believe to be true. Fortunately, the surveys conducted under the supervision of the editors of this volume, Asher Arian and Michal Shamir, contain several questions that will allow us to demonstrate that Israeli voters were guided by strategic considerations during the 1999 prime ministerial contest. What Is Strategic Voting? William H. Riker defines strategic voting as “voting contrary to one’s immediate tastes in order to obtain an advantage in the long run” (1986, 78). Riker (1982) argues that strategic voting would be particularly prevalent in plurality-vote win systems in which voters might decide to vote for their second or lower-placed choice so as to avoid wasting their vote on a candidate who has little chance of winning. But the Israeli direct election for prime minister is a runoff system in which there is a second election if no candidate wins a majority on the first ballot. Under a runoff system many voters may vote their true preference on the first ballot, expecting to have an opportunity to vote for one of the two top candidates in a second ballot. Although the Israeli system for choosing the prime minister calls for a runoff, in the two elections in which the system has been used the voting has involved a headto -head contest between two candidates. In 1996, only two candidates competed since Netanyahu persuaded two potential candidates, David Levy and Rafael Eitan, not to run. He did this by incorporating Levy’s Gesher list and Eitan’s Tzomet list into the Likud list, giving them a large number of “sure seats” to keep them out of the race. In 1999, however, the number of candidates was reduced from five to two only in the two days preceding the election . But the decision of the candidates to withdraw as Election Day approached was based upon polling information that strongly suggested that they would do very poorly on the first round, and that Barak might win...