[EM] Clarification of term

[Doreen Dotan]

B"H
 
Thank you for the clarification, James.  If neither of you object, I should like to refer to you as James G-A and to James Gilmour as James G, thus making it clear to whom I am responding.
 
I live under anintrusive, invasive and in many ways oppressive government.  Having lived this way for twenty-one years and having had a belly-full of it, I find that the system of government of Switzerland more than any other democracy in the West seems to me to be the model we should strive to emulate; this despite the "craze" for all things American in this country, which is due in large part to American cultural hegemony in Israel. 
 
Even in a country as small as Israel centralizing government in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv causes the MP's to become alienated from life outside of the major cities: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and, to a lesser extent, Haifa. This is most certainly true of those politicians who hail from the cities and from the "200 Families" who are running the country, but it is also true of the MP's who come from the development towns, kibbutzim, moshavim other small communities away from the center of the country.
 
I think, then, that government should remain at home, as in the kantons of Switzerland, and that the federal government's powers should be severely limited.  The individual citizen must have both a sense of political empowerment and accept the responsibility of being a self-governing, self-determining political entity. As we know, citizens in a direct democracy have full legislative rights. In a representative democracy, these rights are exerted only by MPs.
 
If you will split your screens and compare the two links below, you will see that Israel and Switzerland are not dissimilar.  There is much in the Swiss model of government that we can learn from and emulate.
 
http://www.theodora.com/wfb/israel_geography.html
 
http://www.theodora.com/wfb/switzerland_geography.html
 
It transpires that the relative size of Canton Zurich or Canton Bern is not very different than Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, there are catons that are approximately the size of Haifa. The smallest of Switzerland's cantons are approximately the size of Israel's largest kibbutzim.
 
In summary, the development of a canton-like system vis-a-vis the federal government in Israel would serve the country better, IMO, than if it were divided into "districts" and the present relationship of the government to the populace was retained.
 
Doreen

James Green-Armytage <jarmyta at antioch-college.edu> wrote:
Doreen Dotan writes:
>Please define "district magnitude" amd "district" as used in the passage
>above. Sorry for the elementary questions.
> 
>Doreen


Legislative elections are often broken down into various districts.
Districts can be either single seat or multiple seat. In the united states
for example, the federal congressional elections are divided into 435 or
so districts, which each elect one seat. So they are single seat elections
and the district magnitude for each district is 1. An example of a
multiple winner system would be if the US was broken into 43 larger
districts, which each elected about 10 seats. Israel, as I understand it,
elects the whole parliament in one district, so the district magnitude is
120. Which is very high. There is kind of an open debate about what the
best district magnitude is. Larger district magnitudes allow for greater
proportionality. Smaller magnitudes allow for more localized
representation. 

James


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