Representation, minorities and electoral reform: The case of the Palestinian minority in Israel

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the recent change in the electoral threshold in Israel, from 2% to 3.25%, on the political representation of the Palestinian minority in Israel in the 2015 national election. I argue that the change in the threshold had a direct impact on Palestinian electoral representation, and that this change provided incentives to Palestinian leadership to broaden their appeal and become more inclusive in their agenda. Following recent scholarship on ethnic minorities (Chandra 2004; Posner 2004; Lublin 2014) and theories of substantive and ascriptive representation, I suggest that through the provision of electoral incentives, institutional design can influence not only the degree of representation, but its substance as well.