https://www.nysun.com/foreign/winner-in-israel-turns-out-to-be-new-voting-law/90646/
Who was the real winner in the recent Israeli elections? The answer: the 2014 electoral law. It requires a list to garner at least 3.25 % of the vote to get seats at the Knesseth.
In 2015, the first time it was in force, it helped both Prime Minister Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party and Yitzhak Herzog’s liberal Zionist Union to emerge as the country’s main political forces, with 30 and 24 seats respectively out of 120 — against eight smaller parties, Right and Left, who got from 5 to 13 seats each.
This time, it was even more effective, providing 36 seats to Likud and 35 seats to the Blue-White Coalition, the indirect heir to ZU, and leaving less than one half of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, to nine lesser lists. In other words, the 2014 law is turning proportional representation into something closer to a bipartisan system. Quite an achievement.
Pundits like to argue about the comparative theoretical merits of the majority system, a feature most famously of America, and proportional representation. More often than not, however, countries just pick up an electoral system for practical reasons.