Abstract
From 1996 to 2003, the directly elected Israeli prime minister had to consider how to preserve his coalition government as the number of political parties greatly increased in the Knesset. Previous research explained that split-ticket voting gave seats to many political parties, but the relation between electoral system change and voting behavior was not clear. This paper examines this puzzle statistically under the hypothesis that Israeli citizens voted sincerely, not strategicaly, in both the direct election of the prime minister and the Knesset election. This hypothesis can be proved using the conditional logit model. I conclude that strategic voters appeared only in Knesset elections because they prefered selection of a coalition government to selection of the most favored parties. However, Israeli voters voted sincerely under the direct electoral system for prime minister because of their chance to select their prefered coalition government. Therefore, we see a multifaceted party system with a directly elected prime minister in Israel.
