Israel

This chapter investigates the factors affecting floor access in the Israeli national parliament—the Knesset. Although Israel is a parliamentary democracy with a proportional, closed-list electoral system, the Knesset’s rules of procedure give little control to parties over floor access. Analyzing over 46,000 speeches over three terms between 2009 and 2019, even in debates where party leadership does have control over who takes the floor, we find no strong evidence that such control is used to give more speech time to highly ranked representatives. This is at odds with predictions made by others in two ways: First, in that the parliamentary rules do not reflect the electoral incentives of party leadership; Second, in that parties do not appear to utilize whatever ability they possess to control their representatives’ speechmaking.