Popular Sovereignty, the Neoliberal Turn and the Crisis of Representation in Israel

Dr. Dani Filc, M.D., Ph.D., is a senior lecturer in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and Chairperson of Physicians for Human Rights Israel. His publications include The Power of Property: Israel in the Globalization Age, (coedited with Uri Ram, Van Leer Institute, 2004), Hegemony and Populism in Israel, Circles of Exclusion: Politics of Health in Israel (Cornell University Press, forthcoming in April 2009), The Political Right in Israel: Different Faces of Jewish Populism (Routledge, forthcoming in September 2009).

Israel, like many other liberal or semiliberal democracies, is undergoing a crisis of representation. This crisis manifests itself in diminishing voter turnout; in the weakening of traditional political parties and declining party membership; in the rapid emergence and even faster waning of "trendy" new parties; in the growing popular distrust of the political system and of politicians. In Israel, this crisis is particularly salient because until the 90s, Israeli society was characterized by very high voter turnout and by the centrality of political parties, not only within the political system, but in society as a whole.

There are various reasons for this relatively rapid and radical change. This paper focuses on the ways that the neoliberal transformation that Israel underwent since the mid-80s stripped the concept of popular sovereignty, and even more the practices, of their real meaning. I begin with a discussion of the practical expressions in modern democracies of the concept of popular sovereignty. In the second part, I address the ways in which the neoliberal transformation of Israeli society strengthened an elitist-technocratic model of society and weakened the institutional expressions of popular sovereignty to such an extent that it contributed considerably to the deepening of the crisis of representation.

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