Snap legislative elections were held in Israel on 17 September 2019 to elect the 120 members of the twenty-second Knesset. Following the previous elections in April, incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form a governing coalition, the first such failure in Israeli history. Prof. Liron Lavi breaks down the Israeli political and election system and gives us a bonus update on what happened after the votes were tabulated!

Liron Lavi is a Research Fellow at the Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies. She received her PhD in Political Science in 2017 from Tel-Aviv University, where she studied the role of time in elections and democracy in Israel. During her doctoral research, Liron was also a Visiting Graduate Researcher at the Y&S Nazarian Center and UCLA's Department of Political Science from 2015 to 2017. Her doctoral work earned her the Best Dissertation Award from the Israeli Political Science Association in May 2018.

Liron's research interests include political communication; elections and democracy; Israeli politics; philosophy of time; and national identity. Her current work focuses on the 2015 and 2019 Israeli elections and the 2016 U.S. elections as she studies the effect of new media on democracy and its legitimacy. Liron is the recipient of the 2013 Warren E. Miller Scholarship and the Faculty of Social Science Dean Excellence Award in 2007, 2010, and 2013. Her research has been presented in international meetings including the Israeli, the Western and the American Political Science Associations and published in top academic journals, including Nations and Nationalism and Political Studies.