Both Israel and the Netherlands use no-district (at-large) list PR.
But political culture is very different - for one thing Israel is regarded as being unstable while Netherlands is very stable.
(Compared to Canada, Israel is not as outlandishly unstable as might be thought -
since WWII Canada has had 21 elections. Most minority governments in Canada last only a couple of years.
Netherlands has had 23 elections, the same as very stable Sweden.
Israel has had 25, four more than Canada.
Meanwhile, Italy, regarded as unstable, has had only 20 elections since WWII, fewer than Canada has had.
So what is difference between Israel and the Netherlands, other than Israel's recurring war or near-war situation and its non-enfranchised Palestinian population?
Differences
Number of members
Netherlands has 150 members (for pop of 17M)
Israel 120 members (for pop of 9M)
Electoral threshold
Netherlands has no threshold other than its effective threshold, about .67 percent of the vote
BIJI took a seat with .8 percent of the vote in 2021
Israel uses 3.25 percent
three parties each took more than 2 percent of the vote or so but got no seats
Number of parties in House:
Netherlands 17 (2021 election)
Israel 10 (2022 election)
Strongest party
Netherlands (2021) 22 percent of the vote 34/150 seats
Israel 23 percent of the vote 32 /120 seats
Preferential voting/open-list PR in Netherlands
appears that Netherlands uses preferential voting (apparently where voters can help select individual candidates)
while Israel uses plain party lists (closed-list list PR).
it seems the Netherlands do not use the term "preferential voting" the way we do.
Appears to be ability to give a vote for an individual candidate on a party list.
Wiki "elections in Netherlands" says
The 150 members of the House of Representatives are elected by open list proportional representation. The number of seats per list is determined using the D'Hondt method, effectively resulting in an electoral threshold of 1/150th (0.67%) of votes to secure a seat. Voters have the option to cast a preferential vote. The seats won by a list are first allocated to the candidates who, in preferential votes, have received at least 25 percent of the number of votes needed for one seat (effectively 0.17% of the total votes), regardless of their placement on the electoral list. If multiple candidates from a list pass this threshold, their ordering is determined based on the number of votes received. Any remaining seats are allocated to candidates according to their placement on the electoral list.
(Note there is no mention of districts)
The .25 of quota is just for "seats won by a list", to help make Dutch PR into an open-list process. A party can't actually win a seat with .25 of the quota; a candidate cannot be elected with just .25 of a quota - the party has to get quota first
But I actually don't fully know how the Dutch "preferential vote" works.
seems not to be that case that different preferences are weighted differently...
I found this online:
Dutch Elections 2021 – Preferential voting explained – ChannelsOnline This is extremely interesting, showing how a Dutch voter has literally a thousand options as opposed to Canadian voters who usually have just 5 to ten individual candidates to choose from.
The careful parsing of the vote in Nether lands helps to ensure that the vote will be used to elect - a young or old, female or male, environmental or economy-minded, north or south regional/local representation or not - candidate of the party that the voter supports. Dutch voters do not just give blank cheque to their party of choice, as Canadian voters have to do.
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