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Legislative effectiveness and legislators’ productivity are important issues in parliamentary life. The literature about legislative effectiveness and legislators’ productivity deals mainly with the characteristics of its use, while that on legislation attempts to define and measure the productivity of legislators. The main objective of this research is to develop a new productivity scale, reflecting a new way of looking at productivity. The scale includes various parameters such as private bills, parliamentary questions, motions for the agenda and one-minute speeches, which have never been explored together. As a secondary objective, we determine the characteristics shared by the most productive legislators and those shared by the least productive. We test the scale using data from the Israeli parliament (the Knesset). The findings show that while legislators have a variety of tools available to them, most do not realize the full potential of the tools. Furthermore, party size and gender explained 43.4% of the variance in the productivity level in the 14th Knesset. In the 16th Knesset, we found a similar pattern except that gender was replaced by nationality; the larger the party, the less productive the legislators associated with it. Furthermore, non-Jewish legislators were more productive than Jewish legislators.

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This paper examines the causes of the increase in the number of women candidates in local Israeli government elections during October 2013. To do so, it develops a new model called the four anchors model based on (1) authentic leadership, (2) organizations with gender awareness, (3) practices that provide organized training for women only and (4) networking for women. Establishment of each one of the anchors with synergy among all four of them will encourage more women to be active in political life at the local level. The research combines mixed research methods based on seven different information sources such as questionnaires, interviews, content analysis of newsletters from the Local Councilwomen’s Union, observations and informal talks with women council members.

The current research examines the ability of legislators to be re-elected through fulfilling their three roles: legislation, oversight and representation. This study also re-examines Mayhew's claim (1974) that most legislators are motivated by a desire to be re-elected, and that this desire drives their legislative activity through its utility in advertising, credit claiming and position taking. We argue that the skills required for selection and re-election are different from those required for enacting legislation. Thus, we distinguish between two types of legislators – those who are electable and those who are successful in the legislature.