In the summer of 2011 a large segment of the Israeli society engaged in a civil protest for social justice. The demonstrators – who left their homes and moved into tent cities located in the hearts of Israel''s large cities – protested against the continuing rise in the cost of living and the deterioration of public services, such as health and education. They claimed that the government, and the Israeli parliament as a whole, is indifferent to the people''s needs and does not represent the vast majority of the Israeli public, but only a rather small, aristocratic elites. This protest included hundreds of thousands of people in Israel, the largest in its history, crossing social, geographical and religious cleavages.
The main feeling common to most protesters was that their representative institutions, whether government or parliament, do not perform their representative role adequately and do not act according to the way the citizens believe they should. This social phenomenon is only one example to demonstrate the dissatisfaction so often felt by citizens in Western democracies with the responsiveness of elected representatives. Similar protests, which took place in Spain and have spread to London and New York, provide examples of the disappointment felt by citizens from the representative functioning of parliaments and governments.
My paper will assess the reasons for the above-mentioned dissatisfaction and explore the relations between elected representatives and the electorate from a comparative perspective, while focusing on the Israeli context. It will use a top-down approach, exploring the way elected representatives perceive their representative role and construct their perceptions of representation, in order to pinpoint the main reasons for voter-representative discrepancies.
I will claim that a great deal of the discrepancies found between representatives and represented are a result of the complicated triangle created between public representatives, the electorate and political parties. Furthermore, I believe it is possible to point to a tension, or maybe even a contradiction, felt by MPs between their representative role (i.e., their commitment to their voters, otherwise known in the literature as individual representation) and their obligation to their party (and to party discipline, otherwise known as collective representation).
The goal of my proposed paper is to tackle this tension from the less popular perspective – that of elite attitudes towards representation – and allow us to assess how elected representatives perceive their representative role, in theory and in practice, and how institutional arrangements may help or hinder representative-represented congruence.
