Abstract: Since the establishment of the state the executive branch has been at the center of Israel's political development. Foreign and domestic policy-making has been almost exclusively executive-centric with the legislature taking on primarily oversight roles. As we argued in Chapter 2, the institutionalization of executive governance in western democracies has been closely associated with the very evolution of the modern state, its ever-increasing state-encompassing activities, its large size, and the extensive and intensive penetration of the political-bureaucratic machinery into most areas of collective behavior. Although in Israel the more recent trends towards multicultural-ism, individualism, economic liberalism, and progress towards a relatively autonomous civil society have eased the grip of the state, political power has remained highly concentrated in the executive with nonelected authorities exercising considerably more power than in the past. The appointed heads of nonelected policy-making institutions, including the top civil servants in defense, intelligence, and finance, the governor of the Bank of Israel, and the attorney general (who also serves as the attorney general to the government) have become an integral part of the Israeli core executive. The state comptroller has emerged as the Knesset's institutional reaction to executive governance.
Publication Year: 2002
Publication Date: 2002-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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