Project Directors: Dr. Chen Friedberg and Prof. Reuven Y. Hazan
In any democracy, overseeing the executive branch is one of the legislature's most important tasks. Part of an elected official’s responsibility as the people's representative is to oversee the government’s actions, to make them public, to force the government to account for them and, when necessary, even to criticize them. The goal of this project is to analyze the current situation concerning the Knesset’s ability to oversee the government, to highlight the obstacles that exist and to offer ways of overcoming them.
In order to fully understand the problems of parliamentary oversight in Israel, and prior to proposing any reform in this area, the historical and conceptual sources of the concept must be explored. This research project will first survey the historical background and foundation of the legislature’s oversight role, including a discussion of the classical definitions proposed by the earlier theorists. The modern oversight role will then be clearly defined, in an attempt to overcome the ambiguity that characterizes it today.
The third stage of the project will outline a theoretical framework for studying parliamentary oversight, including a discussion of the role of oversight in the arena of legislative-executive relations in a parliamentary regime and the structural elements that can affect its scope. The goal of this section is to highlight the inherent aspects of a parliamentary regime that can interfere with the effectiveness of legislative oversight (cohesive political parties, coalition versus opposition, the government's control of a majority in the legislature, etc.).
The focus will then broaden to describe the major institutional instruments and mechanisms used by the Knesset, and other democratic parliaments, to overseeing the executive branch. These instruments will be surveyed and discussed in a comparative manner, focusing particularly on reforms that have been implemented by various parliaments in order to strengthen their oversight capabilities.
In its empirical stage, this project will examine two of the instruments that the Knesset turns to most often – the permanent committees and parliamentary questions, focusing on the period of the sixteenth Knesset (the last complete Knesset, 2003-06). The particular committees that will be examined in this project are: the Education, Culture and Sports Committee; the Internal Affairs and Environment Committee; and the Labor, Welfare and Health Committee. In addition, the Knesset’s own oversight committee – the State Control Committee – will be reviewed, as will specific parliamentary questions regarding education, interior, and health in the sixteenth Knesset.
Through the construction of various indices, this project aims to examine the legislative branch's capability to oversee the executive (i.e., the potential for legislative oversight), and to evaluate the implementation of this capability. The findings emanating from this project will lead to conclusions regarding the Knesset's actual ability to oversee the government via the instruments and mechanisms available to it, and the ways in which these instruments function in reality (i.e., the achievement of legislative oversight).
In its final stage, the project will propose a comprehensive reform to the system of parliamentary oversight in Israel, based on both the empirical findings and the information collected from the comparative literature. The goal of this proposed reform is to strengthen parliamentary oversight in Israel by improving the Knesset's potential and ability for overseeing the government.