This paper investigates the complex relationship between voter attitudes and legislative cooperation in the Israeli Knesset from 1992 to 2022, examining how public opinion shapes parliamentary behavior in a dynamic multiparty system. By combining comprehensive data on legislative co-sponsorship networks with detailed voter attitude measures from the Israeli National Election Survey (INES), we analyze how public perceptions of political parties influence patterns of cross-party legislative collaboration. Our research design leverages three decades of longitudinal variation in both bill co-sponsorship patterns and voter attitudes to identify the causal effects of electoral preferences on parliamentary cooperation, while accounting for important institutional factors such as coalition dynamics and ideological positioning. We construct time-varying measures of legislative cooperation between party pairs using social network analysis of co-sponsorship data, capturing both the frequency and intensity of collaborative legislative efforts. These measures are then analyzed alongside sophisticated voter attitude metrics that track how the Israeli electorate's perceptions of different parties evolve over time. Through time-series regression methods and instrumental variable approaches, we address potential endogeneity concerns and isolate the specific impact of voter attitudes on legislative behavior. Our empirical strategy carefully controls for confounding factors including coalition-opposition dynamics, ideological distance between parties, and broader political trends, while exploiting changes in party leadership and electoral outcomes for identification. The findings from this research will significantly advance our understanding of how electoral incentives shape legislative behavior in multiparty systems and illuminate the mechanisms through which public opinion influences parliamentary cooperation. This study makes several important contributions to the literature on legislative behavior and democratic representation. First, it provides novel empirical evidence on the relationship between voter attitudes and legislative cooperation in a complex parliamentary system. Second, it develops new methodological approaches for analyzing the interaction between public opinion and parliamentary networks. Finally, it advances theoretical frameworks for understanding how electoral preferences translate into concrete legislative outcomes in multiparty democracies. This research has important implications for our understanding of democratic responsiveness and the functioning of parliamentary institutions.
