The political sands of Israel are shifting. New parties often emerge and then vanish, large portion of the electorate changes its vote from one election to the next, politicians easily switch party allegiances too. What do party members do in such an unstable reality? And what did they do in the relatively stable past? This would be the topic of our paper.
The paper begins with a presentation of Duverger’s concentric circles as a starting point for locating party members in relation to their party and to their political environment. It argues that over time, the borders between parties, as political sub-systems, have become blurred. We then turn to analyze the Israeli scene, which serves as an extreme example of party decline that goes together with significant increases over time of rates of electoral volatility and party switching. The next section examines the behaviour of Israeli party members in the increasingly volatile domestic environment. The fourth section presents an integrative summary of our analysis of developments in Israel.
The Israeli case is interesting in that no party has yet attempted to reform its membership structure, that is, to add categories that differentiate between various kinds of members/supporters in order to cope with the changing increasingly volatile environment. Rather than that, it might be that the nature of party membership changed, even though the formalities of party membership stayed rather similar.
