-
4. Social Cleavages among non-Arab Voters: A New Analysis
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
4 Social Cleavages among non-Arab Voters A New Analysis Michael Shalev with Sigal Kis This chapter takes issue with the authoritative literature on the politics of social cleavages in Israel. It presents the results of three different types of empirical analysis of partisan choice among non-Arab voters in Israel.1 Using methods and data that have rarely or never been exploited in Israel, as well as modified versions of the standard multivariate analysis of survey data, we offer an empirical reassessment of voter behavior that departs substantially from previous research by attributing a major role to class along with other social cleavages. Based on a systematic comparison of election surveys carried out over the last three decades the editors of this volume, Michal Shamir and Asher Arian, recently concluded that the distinction between secular and religious Jews is the predominant social division, followed by the ethnic split between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim. They described “the economic cleavage” as “weak to begin with” (1999, 270), and reported multiple regressions predicting the division of votes between the right and left bloc that yield insignificant results for socioeconomic indicators in most periods. While this particular article by Arian and Shamir is their latest and most comprehensive review of the evidence, it is representative in this respect of their decades of earlier 67 Yoav Peled and Oren Yiftachel provided much of the inspiration for this study. Valuable advice or assistance was received from Aaron Benavot, Abraham Diskin, Nadav Gabay, Ahmad Hleihel, Charles Kadushin, Michal Peleg, Zeev Rosenhek, Michal Shamir, Sigalit Shmueli, Natasha Volchkina, Gad Yair, and an anonymous reviewer. We thank the Sapir Center at Tel Aviv University and the Silbert Center at the Hebrew University for their financial support. This chapter is a condensed version of a longer paper with the same title, containing additional results and more extensive methodological details. This paper is available from the first author’s website at http://student.mscc.huji.ac.il/⬃method/voting.htm, or in hard copy as Discussion Paper No. 2-2000 from the Pinhas Sapir Center for Development at Tel Aviv University. work (beginning with Arian 1972) and with other research on electoral behavior in Israel (e.g., Diskin 1991). The apparent irrelevance of class to voting flies in the face of both evidence of the persistence of class voting in other societies (Manza, Hout, and Brooks 1995) and everyday knowledge about Israel. Political commentators and rankand -file citizens alike are well aware of the sharp polarization of voting between North and South Tel Aviv, between exclusive neighborhoods like Saviyyon, and peripheral localities like Ofaqim—in short, between the well-to-do and the poor. True, this polarization encapsulates ethnic as well as class differences, but it is hard to believe that class voting per se is merely epiphenomenal. It cannot be denied that most political parties in Israel fail to explicitly articulate class cleavages and that there is a marked absence of subjective class consciousness among voters. Still, as C. Brooks and J. Manza (1997) have pointed out, class voting and class politics are theoretically distinct and they need not (and in the American context do not) covary empirically. One obvious possibility is that in Israel class interests and cleavages have been submerged in—but not eliminated by—the politics of ethnicity, nationalism, and collective identity. Historically Zionism and the national conflict, and related peculiarities of the Israeli Labor movement, left a vacuum of political agents willing and able to speak for the disadvantaged in the language of class conflict. Despite this, the political alienation of the Mizrahim from the “labor establishment” and their gravitation toward the hawkish right have sometimes been interpreted as reflecting a hidden agenda of class conflict (e.g., Farjoun 1983; Peled 1989; Swirski 1984). This view has been challenged by scholars who interpret the ethnic vote as a reflection of status or identity politics more than class politics (Herzog 1985; Shapiro 1991). The Mizrahim are seen from this perspective as struggling for recognition as social and political equals to the Ashkenazi founders and to their descendants. For instance, Shas proposes a vision of Israeli society and its collective identity that is more congenial to Mizrahi interests and values than the Ashkenazi model of a democratic secular state at peace with its neighbors and closely integrated into Western culture and the liberalized world economy (Peled 1998). This chapter will not take up this controversy at length, although we will come...