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Israel has a single chamber legislature called the Knesset - meaning literally gathering or assembly - which consists of 120 members (MKs) elected for a maximum term of four years. In practice, Knesset terms rarely last the full four years and the average term is a mere two years. The next election is due in January 2017.
The simplest way of describing the electoral system of Israel is to call it national list system.
This means that the whole country is in effect regarded as one constituency and voters, instead of choosing one candidate for their local constituency as in many countries, choose one list of candidates from a number of lists, each compiled and presented by a political party on a national level. Although national list systems do not have to operate this way, in Israel closed lists are used which means that the party determines the order of the candidates on the list and the voter has no influence over or choice of that order.
Originally the Israeli electoral system had no specified threshold that a political party had to reach before it could secure representation in the Knesset which in practice meant that, if a political party secured one 120th of the vote on a national basis (that is, a mere 0.83%), it would be represented in the legislature. Today the threshold is 2%. However, when the four political parties which make up the current coalition government agreed in March 2013 on the terms of that government, they formalised a deal that would raise the voting threshold in future elections from 2% to 4%; had this restriction been effect in the 2013 elections, Kadima and the three Arab parties would have failed to qualify for seats in the Knesset.
Many other democratic countries operate list systems but on a sub-national level - for instance, the 16 Lander in Germany or the 16 'regional' constituencies in Italy. But Israel is unique in having a national list system. All countries with list systems operate a threshold but this is usually 3-5% (it is 5% in Germany). Israel's threshold of 2% is very low by international standards.
This is the simple way of explaining Israel's electoral system. The formal way of describing it is to call it the highest averages method of party-list proportional representation using the d'Hondt formula.
The highest averages method requires the number of votes for each party to be divided successively by a series of divisors and seats are then allocated to parties that secure the highest resulting quotient or average, up to the total number of seats available. The d'Hondt formula is the most widely used for list systems and involves using the divisors 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. This system tends to give larger parties a slightly larger portion of seats than their portion of the electorate. Technically this would guarantee that a party with a majority of votes would receive at least half of the seats - except no party in Israeli elections ever secures a majority of votes.
Each Knesset session is known by its election number. So the Knesset elected by Israel's first election in 1949 is known as the First Knesset, while he current Knesset, elected in 2013 is the Nineteenth Knesset.
The Knesset sits at Givat Ram in Jerusalem.
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