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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 activities and branches outside of the country. Using the Israeli case, we aim to uncover additional incentives for parties to be present and active abroad. To do so, we map the activities of Israeli parties abroad and analyse their incentives, relying on documents and in-depth interviews with the parties’ directors of external relations. We find that parties’ activities can be divided into two basic groups. The first one includes diaspora-oriented activities, focusing mainly on maintaining ties with the Jewish communities abroad and gaining control over the institutions of the Zionist organizations. The second is focused on the Israeli state, by both improving the position of the party domestically and promoting Israel internationally according to the party’s ideology.

Personalization of politics describes a process in which the power of individual politicians rises, ostensibly at the expense of the parties. This is manifested, among other ways, by the manner in which politicians use parliamentary tools. In this study, we focus on one such tool, the private member bill, assessing whether its use necessarily expresses personal behavior, which weakens the party, as suggested in the literature—or not. To test this, we conducted an in-depth analysis of the way Israeli legislators use private member bills in the Knesset, which is regarded as an indicator of personalized politics. We found that partisan-oriented behavior can be found even when using such a highly personal tool. This suggests that personalized politics does not always weaken the party. We also examined under which conditions Knesset members demonstrate partisan-oriented behavior while using private member bills. Testing institutional party-level variables revealed that MKs from parties with exclusive candidate selection methods, opposition parties, and small parties are more likely to exhibit such behavior.

A prominent finding in coalition formation literature is that the underlying political rationale at the subnational level largely follows that of the one revealed by the classic literature on national coalitions. The Israeli political system is extremely centralized, with a local government that is highly dependent on its national counterpart. One could expect such a setting to result in local party behaviour that closely resembles the national one. However, as we show, this is far from being the case. We analyze 34 municipal coalitions in the 17 largest Israeli cities. After establishing that Israeli municipal politics fly in the face of classical coalition formation theories, we turn to explain this discrepancy with a qualitative analysis of interviews with 5 formatuers and 8 councillors. We conclude that mayors face low costs of adding surplus coalition partners, while standing to gain from wider legitimacy, weaker opposition, and constrained future competition. At the same time, municipal lists have strong resource- and policy-related incentives to join the coalition while compromise is met with low political costs. The result is an overwhelming predominance of oversized coalitions and partnerships which would be highly improbable at the national arena.