Ofer Kenig

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Ashkelon Academic College

Objective Under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, Likud—Israel's most successful political party in the past 50 years—transformed from a highly institutionalized leader party into a personal party. This study explores the personalization of Likud and its various manifestations and analyses the causes of this process and its consequences. Metho...

The last decade has seen an expansion of party primaries as a means of selecting legislative candidates. Since primaries are rarely subsidized, well-resourced candidates have a considerable advantage, which has an impact on equality, diversity and representation. This article focuses on the well-regulated legislative primaries in Israel, examining...

In recent decades it has become a common practice for political parties to have active branches operating outside of their countries. The main reason for this practice is to mobilize potential voters living abroad. Israel, however, is a country in which citizens cannot vote abroad yet some parties nevertheless invest resources for sustaining their...

The last decade has seen an upswing in and expansion of party primaries as a means of selecting legislative candidates in many parliamentary democracies. Yet, while most democracies around the world regulate the financial aspects of general elections, the same cannot be said for these intraparty contests. The absence of financial regulation in part...

The book examines two of the most prominent developments in contemporary democratic politics, party change and political personalization, and the relationship between them. It presents a broad-brush, cross-national comparison of these phenomena that covers around fifty years in twenty-six countries through the use of more than twenty indicators. It...

Few countries receive as much attention as Israel and are at the same time as misunderstood. The Oxford Handbook of Israeli Politics and Society brings together leading Israeli and international figures to offer the most wide-ranging treatment available of an intriguing country. It serves as a comprehensive reference for the growing field of Israel...

Political parties around the world are democratizing the ways in which they select legislative candidates and party leaders. The move towards more inclusive methods, often labelled as “primaries”, is at least partly a response to declining party membership and growing public disaffection towards party politics. While this democratization of intra-p...

While primaries were once associated almost exclusively with the United States, similar methods for selecting party leaders and candidates have lately become common in many parliamentary democracies. This considerable expansion of intra-party democracy has resulted in the rising popularity and increased usage of the term ‘primary’ election. However...

Although parliaments are usually perceived as the political institutions responsible for the functioning of representation, it is not out of context to expect cabinets to also be representational of society. This applies especially to parliamentary democracies, where ministers are not only heads of executive portfolios but also the voting members o...

Party membership is in decline in Israel. This article analyzes the main characteristics of party members in three of the largest parties in Israel: Kadima, Likud, and Labor. Party members in Israel share similar features with party members in other countries: they are older, economically better off than the average voter, they are more highly educ...

The post of the party leader is one of the most prominent positions in modern parliamentary democracies. Some party leaders become prime ministers, others serve as the heads of the opposition, while still others are appointed as cabinet ministers. This article offers a classification of party leader selection methods. The opening section discusses...

The presidentialization of parliamentary democracies is one of the most prominent developments concerning political systems in the past two decades. Its main attributes are the personalization of electoral campaigns and the empowerment of prime ministers In the legislative and executive arenas. This article examines the power of Israeli prime minis...

The selection methods of party leaders in Israel have gone through a gradual shift during the last 30 years. Like parties in several other democracies (Canada, United Kingdom, Japan), the major Israeli parties have changed their internal distribution of power to give their members a role in candidate and leadership selection. In Israel, as elsewher...

The last two decades saw a significant shift in party leaders' selection methods. As part of a wider phenomenon of intra-party democratization, many parties opened their leadership selection procedure to wider selection bodies (selectorates). Such a step was expected to reduce the parties' elitist and oligarchic tendencies by attracting more leader...

This article examines the relationship between electoral systems and party system fragmentation. Focusing on the two electoral reforms that Israel adopted in the last decade, it first sets out how electoral system change can influence voter behaviour and party strategy. It then uses ‘the effective number of parties’ index to show the extent of part...