Latest / Logosofia no Dia a Dia / How Other Democracies Solved Political Fragmentation
Transcript
- [Prompt] custom: One of the justifiable criticisms that has been levelled against democracy in Israel is that there i | Hosts: corn, herman [Response] Corn: Daniel sent us this one, and the timing couldn't be sharper. He's pointing at something that drives a lot of people in Israel quietly nuts — the endless revolving door of political parties. His question is basically this: if we accept that Israel's system of letting anyone with a grudge start their own party has become destructive, what have other countries actually done to strike a balance between stability and democratic vibrancy? Herman: Right on cue, the Times of Israel liveblog this morning has the Yashar party — brand new, formed by an MK who didn't make their party's list. It's the same story we've seen a dozen times. Politician gets edged out, announces they're starting something fresh, and suddenly there's another faction jostling for airtime. Corn: The Yashar party. Which I'm sure will be the last one. Definitely no more after this. Herman: Right, this time it's different. This time the splinter will solve everything. Corn: Here we are, weeks before a Knesset election, and the structural question is staring us in the face again. Is there a better way to organize democratic representation — one that doesn't crush pluralism but also doesn't treat party formation like a hobby? Herman: Daniel's framing gets at something specific that I think is worth naming upfront. He's not just annoyed by the chaos. He's pointing out that these breakaway parties rarely form around coherent policy platforms. They form around personalities and factional grievances. And the result is that social issues — the stuff that actually affects people's daily lives — get permanently sidelined. Corn: Which is a structural feature, not a bug. When the system rewards splintering over coalition-building, you get a marketplace for ministerial portfolios, not a forum for governance. But before we get to solutions, let's actually sit with the mechanism for a minute — because the obvious fix that everyone reaches for, raising the electoral threshold, Israel already tried. And it didn't work. Herman: Here's the thing about that threshold. Israel's currently sits at three point two five percent. It was raised from two percent in twenty fourteen, and before that it was just one percent — basically a welcome mat for anyone with a photocopier and a grievance. The theory was straightforward: make it harder to get in, and the small parties consolidate or disappear. Corn: Yet the Knesset still routinely seats ten, eleven, twelve parties. So what broke? Herman: Part of it is that three point two five percent is still quite low by international standards. To put it in perspective, that's roughly four seats in the hundred twenty seat Knesset. You don't need a movement. You need a recognizable face and a narrow constituency that feels unrepresented. The math rewards niche appeals. Corn: The threshold went up, but not high enough to actually force consolidation. It's in this awkward middle zone — high enough to block the truly micro, but low enough that a disaffected MK with a personal following can still clear it. Herman: And that's the dynamic Daniel's getting at when he calls it ridiculous but non-constructive. You get parties that exist to serve as a vehicle for one person's political career, not to advance a governing philosophy. They don't build policy infrastructure. They don't develop benches of candidates. They're launch pads. Corn: Because coalition math is so tight, those launch pads end up wielding disproportionate power. A party with four seats can extract a ministry. The negotiation isn't about what the country needs — it's about who gets what portfolio. Herman: Which is why this question matters beyond Israel. Every democracy faces some version of this tension. The US two-party system sits at one extreme — it suppresses fragmentation but also suppresses representation of minority viewpoints. Israel sits at the other — maximum representation, minimum governability. The interesting question is what lives in between. Corn: That's really what Daniel's asking. Not just "is Israel's system broken" — plenty of people have that take. He's asking which countries have actually built something in the middle, and whether any of it works. Herman: Let's look at the countries that have actually tried to engineer something in that middle. Germany is the obvious starting point, because their five percent threshold has been the gold standard reference for decades. It was put in place in nineteen fifty-three specifically to prevent the kind of Weimar-era fragmentation that helped the Nazis rise. And for a long time, it worked. Corn: Worked in what sense? What did the Bundestag actually look like? Herman: For most of the post-war period, it was a three-party parliament — the CDU, the SPD, and the FDP as the perennial kingmaker. Occasionally the Greens joined after the eighties. Stable, predictable, coalitions formed around coherent policy agreements rather than personality auctions. And the five percent threshold was the main filter. Herman: The two thousand twenty-one election produced seven parties in the Bundestag. The Left party got in despite only winning four point nine percent of the vote — below the threshold. Germany has this thing called the basic mandate clause. If a party wins three direct constituency seats, it qualifies for full proportional representation even if it falls below five percent nationally. Corn: It's a pressure release valve. The threshold says "you need broad national support," but the basic mandate clause says "unless you have concentrated regional support that's deep enough to actually win districts. Herman: The Left party won three direct seats in Berlin and Leipzig, so they got thirty-nine seats total through proportional allocation. The threshold blocked them, the exception let them through. It's a deliberate design choice — Germany decided that geographically concentrated minorities shouldn't be shut out entirely, even if they're small nationally. Corn: Which is philosophically interesting. They're saying the threshold is about filtering out parties with shallow, diffuse support. But if you can actually win a local election — if real voters in a real place choose your candidate — that's different from polling at four point nine percent in every district and nowhere. Herman: And it connects to why Israel's threshold failed. Israel doesn't have districts. It's a single nationwide constituency — one hundred twenty seats allocated purely by national vote share. So there's no mechanism to distinguish between "this party has shallow support everywhere" and "this party has deep support in one community." Every vote is mathematically identical. Corn: The German model says: we'll block you at the national level, but if you can prove you represent a real place, we'll let you in. The Israeli model has no equivalent test. A party just needs three point two five percent of the national vote, and it doesn't matter whether those voters are concentrated in Tel Aviv or scattered across the country. Herman: That's the first reason thresholds alone don't solve fragmentation. They're a blunt instrument. Germany paired its threshold with district representation and a specific exception. Israel raised its number without changing the underlying structure. Same nationwide list system, just a slightly higher bar. Corn: Let's talk about Turkey, because they took the opposite approach — just cranked the number way up. What was their threshold? Herman: From two thousand two until twenty twenty-two, Turkey had the highest electoral threshold in the democratic world. Ten percent of the national vote to enter parliament. For context, a party that got nine point nine percent of the vote — millions of people — would get zero seats. Corn: That's not filtering. That's a wall. Herman: It was deliberately designed that way. After the fragmented coalitions of the nineteen nineties, Turkey's military-backed establishment wanted stable majority governments. The ten percent threshold delivered that — but at a serious cost. Kurdish parties, which consistently polled between five and seven percent nationally, were locked out of parliament for years. Corn: How did they adapt? Herman: They ran candidates as independents. Independent candidates didn't face the threshold, so Kurdish politicians would technically run as independents, win seats, then re-form their party bloc in parliament. It was a workaround that kept the system functioning but also made a mockery of the threshold's purpose. Corn: Which is a pattern we keep seeing. Raise the threshold, and parties find a way around it. In Germany, it's the basic mandate clause. In Turkey, it was the independent candidate loophole. The political energy doesn't disappear — it just routes around the obstacle. Herman: In twenty twenty-two, Turkey actually lowered the threshold from ten percent to seven percent. Still high by international standards, but the Erdogan government recognized that the ten percent bar was creating more problems than it solved. And here's the interesting part — the high threshold didn't prevent fragmentation, it just forced it into a different shape. Corn: What do you mean? Herman: It created a de facto two-bloc system. Parties formed pre-election alliances — the People's Alliance and the Nation Alliance — pooling their votes to clear the threshold collectively. So you still had multiple parties with distinct ideologies, but they were forced to negotiate joint platforms and candidate lists before the election rather than after. Corn: The fragmentation didn't go away. It just moved upstream. Instead of ten parties fighting for ministries after the vote, you had ten parties negotiating alliance terms before the vote. Herman: And that's not necessarily worse. Pre-election coalitions force parties to articulate what they actually agree on, to make compromises visible to voters before ballots are cast. In Israel, the coalition-building happens in smoke-filled rooms after the election, and voters have no idea what tradeoffs their party will make. Corn: Which brings us back to Daniel's point about social issues being permanently under-discussed. If coalition negotiations are about dividing ministries rather than agreeing on policy, nobody has to actually commit to anything before the election. You campaign on identity and faction, then sort out the details later. Herman: There's one more German innovation worth mentioning that addresses exactly this. In two thousand five, Germany discovered an absurd constitutional flaw in their electoral math. Because of how overhang seats worked, a party could actually lose seats by getting more votes in certain districts. It was called negative vote weight, and the constitutional court ruled it violated the principle of equal suffrage. Corn: Wait — more votes could cost you seats? How is that even possible? Herman: It's a quirk of mixed-member proportional systems. Germany gives each voter two votes — one for a local district candidate, one for a party list. If a party wins more district seats than its proportional share would entitle it to, those extra seats become "overhang seats." But under the old system, adding overhang seats for one party in one state could trigger a recalculation that reduced that same party's seats from the national list. The math was genuinely perverse. Corn: Voting for your preferred party in your local district could, through some algebraic nightmare, reduce their total representation. That's the kind of thing that makes people stop believing elections work. Herman: Germany fixed it. The twenty thirteen reform eliminated negative vote weight and capped the Bundestag at five hundred ninety-eight seats. Though in practice, it's grown to seven hundred thirty-six because of leveling seats — compensatory seats added to maintain proportionality. The point is, even a system as well-designed as Germany's needed a major constitutional fix sixty years in. Electoral systems are never finished. Corn: The through-line here is that thresholds are just one dial on a much more complex dashboard. Germany has the five percent threshold plus district seats plus the basic mandate clause plus two-vote ballots plus anti-negative-vote-weight math. Turkey has the seven percent threshold plus alliance structures plus an independent candidate workaround. Israel has the three point two five percent threshold and... that's basically it. One dial, and it's not even turned very far. Herman: That's the key insight. When you only have one mechanism, you keep turning that one dial and wondering why the whole machine doesn't work differently. Israel raised the threshold from one percent to two percent to three point two five percent, and each time the number of parties barely budged, because the underlying incentives — nationwide proportional representation with no district accountability, no alliance requirements, no constructive vote of no confidence — all stayed the same. Corn: The dial goes to eleven and the machine still makes the same noise. Herman: Let's follow the chain into what happens after the votes are counted. Because thresholds are the filter, but the real damage shows up in coalition negotiations. And this is where Israel's system creates a dynamic that I think is corrosive. Corn: The marketplace for ministries. Herman: When you have ten or twelve parties and nobody gets more than thirty percent of the vote, forming a government means stitching together a majority from four, five, six factions. Each one knows it's the last piece of the puzzle. Each one can threaten to walk. And what gets negotiated isn't a governing agenda — it's who controls which ministry. Corn: A party with four seats can demand the Housing Ministry, or the Interior Ministry, and suddenly they're setting policy for millions of people because the math made them indispensable. Herman: The twenty twenty-two to twenty twenty-three coalition crisis was the purest example. Small parties extracted concessions wildly disproportionate to their electoral weight, and the whole thing nearly collapsed multiple times because the coalition wasn't held together by policy agreement — it was held together by the fear of going back to elections. That's not governance. That's hostage negotiation. Corn: Contrast that with what Germany actually does. Herman: Germany's twenty twenty-one coalition agreement was a hundred and seventy-seven pages. Let me say that again — one hundred seventy-seven pages of detailed policy commitments, negotiated before the government was sworn in, with enforcement mechanisms built in. Coalition committees meet regularly to resolve disputes against the text of the agreement. It's not just a handshake. It's a contract. Corn: The coalition isn't "we'll figure it out later." It's "here's exactly what we agreed to do, in writing, and there's a process for holding each other to it. Herman: That's a structural outcome, not a cultural one. German parties know they'll be held to a written agreement, so they invest in policy capacity. Israeli parties know the negotiation will be about portfolios, so they invest in personalities. The incentives shape the behavior. Corn: Which connects directly to the splinter party lifecycle Daniel's describing. Walk me through it. Herman: An MK fails to make their party's candidate list — maybe they're number twelve on a list that won ten seats. They're out. So they announce a new party, usually built around their personal brand. They campaign on grievance and factional identity. If they're lucky, they scrape past three point two five percent and get a handful of seats. If not, they disappear — or merge into a larger party in exchange for a realistic list spot next time. Corn: The Yashar party this morning is the latest turn of that wheel. Herman: It's the platonic ideal of the cycle. A disaffected politician, a new banner, no policy infrastructure, and the entire pitch is "I should be in the Knesset." There's no governing philosophy being developed. No think tank producing white papers. No bench of future candidates being trained. It's a vehicle for one person's career. Corn: Even when these parties survive, they never develop the institutional memory or policy depth to actually govern. They're permanent startups. Herman: Compare that to what Turkey's high threshold forced. When you need ten percent to enter parliament, you can't just launch a vanity project. You have to negotiate your way into a pre-election alliance. That means sitting down with other parties before the campaign, hammering out a joint platform, agreeing on candidate lists, deciding what you'll compromise on and what you won't. The fragmentation doesn't disappear, but it gets processed into something voters can actually evaluate. Corn: The Turkish model forces the coalition negotiation to happen in public, before the election, with a document voters can read. The Israeli model pushes it into back rooms after the election, with no document and no accountability. Herman: That's why Daniel's observation about social issues being permanently under-discussed isn't just a complaint — it's a structural diagnosis. When parties form around personalities rather than policy, nobody has an incentive to develop a serious position on housing, or education, or healthcare. Those are complicated. They require expertise. They don't fit on a campaign poster. It's much easier to run on "I represent this community" and sort out the details later. Corn: Except "later" never comes, because the coalition collapses and the cycle starts again. Herman: And here's where I think the comparative lesson gets interesting. New Zealand switched to mixed-member proportional representation in nineteen ninety-six — a five percent threshold, a hundred twenty seats, and a system that's produced stable coalitions of five or six parties for nearly three decades. They didn't eliminate fragmentation. They built a structure that channels it. Corn: What's different about how they channel it? Herman: A few things. First, the five percent threshold is paired with single-member districts — so like Germany, parties have to prove they can win somewhere real, not just hit a national percentage. Second, New Zealand developed a norm of detailed coalition agreements with formal dispute resolution. Third, and this is subtle but important, the constructive vote of no confidence means you can't just collapse a government for tactical advantage — you need a replacement ready. Corn: Germany has that too. The constructive vote of no confidence. The Bundestag can only remove a chancellor by simultaneously electing a new one. Herman: And Israel doesn't have it. A coalition can fall apart because one small party decides to bolt, and suddenly the country is heading to elections with no alternative government in place. There's no mechanism that says "you can't break it unless you've already built the replacement." The constructive vote of no confidence is one of those pieces of democratic plumbing that nobody talks about but that fundamentally changes the incentives. Corn: If you're designing from scratch — or reforming — you're not just picking a threshold number. You're asking: do we have districts or a national list? Do we require pre-election alliances? Do we have a constructive vote of no confidence? Is there a basic mandate exception? Does the coalition agreement have legal force? Each of these is a dial, and the outcome depends on how they interact. Herman: Israel has basically one dial turned to three point two five, and everything else set to maximum permissiveness. That's not a system designed for stability. It's a system designed for maximum entry, with the hope that the threshold alone will do the filtering. And as we've seen, it doesn't. Corn: What can we actually pull from all this that's useful beyond just diagnosing Israel's problem? Because Daniel's question was practical — who's solved this, and what can we learn? Herman: I think the first takeaway is counterintuitive. The worst outcome isn't a system with too much fragmentation or too little. It's a system that encourages fragmentation without providing any stability mechanisms to absorb it. Israel's three point two five percent threshold is in this uncanny valley — high enough to block true micro-parties, low enough to let personality-driven splinters through. And those splinters never build policy capacity because they don't have to. They can survive on factional identity alone. Corn: You get the chaos of fragmentation without any of the institutional depth that would make the fragments actually capable of governing. It's the worst of both worlds. Herman: Compare that to New Zealand, where five or six parties routinely form coalitions, but each party has real policy infrastructure because the five percent threshold paired with single-member districts forces them to demonstrate competence somewhere. Or Germany, where even small parties that clear the threshold have usually existed for decades, built policy foundations, and can point to actual governance experience at the state level. Corn: The design question isn't "how many parties is too many." It's "does the system force parties to develop governing capacity, or does it let them survive on personality? Herman: Which brings me to the second takeaway. The reforms that actually work combine multiple tools. A meaningful threshold — somewhere in the three to five percent range — but paired with at least two other mechanisms. A constructive vote of no confidence, so governments can't collapse without a replacement ready. And some form of pre-election coordination incentive — Turkey's alliance system, Germany's list linkage, New Zealand's coalition norm. No single fix does the job alone. Corn: That's the mistake Israel keeps making. They keep adjusting one dial and wondering why the machine doesn't work differently. Herman: The third thing I'd say, and this is for anyone who cares about democratic reform in any country, is: pay attention to the plumbing. Electoral thresholds, seat allocation formulas, coalition rules, district magnitude — these are the structural features that determine whether political energy goes into governance or into endless negotiation. Most people argue about personalities and ideologies, but the plumbing is what shapes the incentives those personalities respond to. Corn: That's the thing. You can have the most principled politicians in the world, but if the system rewards splintering and punishes coalition-building, you'll get splintering. The incentives eat ideology for breakfast. Herman: If you're a voter trying to make sense of any democratic system — whether it's Israel, the US, Germany, wherever — the question to ask isn't "are these politicians good or bad." It's "what behavior does this system reward?" Because over time, the system gets what the system is built to get. Corn: Which is a deeply unromantic way to think about democracy. But also the most useful one. Herman: Here's the uncomfortable question that all of this leaves us with. The fragmentation we've been diagnosing — is it actually the problem, or is it a symptom of something deeper that no electoral reform can touch? Herman: Israel's society is fractured along religious, ethnic, and ideological lines. Secular and ultra-Orthodox. Arab and Jewish. Left and right, and then sub-divisions within each. Those divisions exist before anyone casts a ballot. If you raised the threshold to five percent, or seven percent, you'd get fewer parties — but would you actually be resolving those fractures, or just suppressing their expression? Corn: You'd be telling large communities that their concerns don't fit in the available boxes, so pick one of the big ones and shut up. That's not stability. That's a pressure cooker. Herman: We've seen what happens when pressure cookers blow. Turkey's ten percent threshold kept Kurdish parties out of parliament, but it didn't make Kurdish political identity disappear. It just forced it into workarounds and, at times, into extra-parliamentary channels that were far less constructive. Corn: The design question gets harder. It's not just "how do we engineer stability." It's "how do we represent real social fractures without letting them paralyze governance." And that's not a math problem. That's a political philosophy problem. Herman: Which is why this conversation isn't just about Israel. Look at the Netherlands — fifteen parties in parliament after the twenty twenty-one election. Even Sweden, historically a model of stable social democracy, now routinely seats eight parties. Fragmentation is spreading, and every democracy is going to face some version of this tension. Corn: Israel isn't an outlier. It's an early warning. Herman: Or a laboratory. The Israeli experiment shows what happens when you maximize democratic entry without building stability mechanisms. It's a cautionary tale, but it's also a place where the consequences of different design choices play out in real time. Other countries can watch and learn without having to run the experiment themselves. Corn: The question Daniel's left us with — what balances vibrant democracy with the ability to actually govern — isn't going anywhere. If anything, it's the defining institutional challenge of the next few decades. And nobody's fully solved it yet. Herman: At least now we know what to look for. Thresholds, districts, coalition rules, constructive votes of no confidence — the plumbing matters. And the countries that get it right will be the ones that stop treating electoral design as a one-time fix and start treating it as ongoing maintenance. Corn: Something to chew on while the Yashar party launches its inaugural campaign video, which I'm sure will be a thoughtful meditation on housing policy. Herman: I'm sure. And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact. Hilbert: In the seventeen eighties, Russian explorers on the Yamal Peninsula discovered lava tubes containing crystallized methane hydrate deposits — essentially frozen natural gas — that would ignite when exposed to a flame, leading local Nenets reindeer herders to call them "stones that burn. Corn:...Right. Thanks, Hilbert. Herman: This has been My Weird Prompts. If you enjoyed the episode, leave us a review wherever you listen — it helps. We're back soon.