Publication
For 14 years, Mako’s Election Compass has accompanied Israeli voters on their way to the ballot box. Across 8 electoral cycles, it has helped undecided voters—and occasionally convinced ones as well—find the parties closest to them in their positions, the ones best suited to them.
The Election Compass is an interactive tool seeking to identify the parties best suited to a user by answering questions on policy and political issues, and matching the answers to party positions. This is a joint venture of Mako and the Tachlith Institute designed to help the public understand not only who is running against whom, but also what the parties are really talking about and what they intend to do if elected. In recent years, we have grown accustomed to discussing elections primarily through blocs, leaders, boycotts, and political alliances. All of these remain important, but they do not tell the whole story. The upcoming elections will also decide substantive questions concerning security, conscription, the legal system, the cost of living, religion and state, and the functioning of public systems.
The need for such a tool is particularly prominent in the current period. Since 2023 and the war that broke out on October 7, the Israeli public engages increasingly in questions previously perceived as overly professional or complex: What are the proper relations among branches of government, how should conscription policy look, what is Israel’s security concept, and what are the priorities of the next government? Concurrently, significant gaps exist even within the blocs themselves among parties that occasionally appear similar. Therefore, knowing which camp an individual feels they belong to does not always suffice; checking which party is closer to their positions in practice is important.
The compass relies on a broad data infrastructure built by the Tachlith Institute over time: 58 public opinion polls encompassing 2,446 questions and 43,949 respondents. The polls were conducted in cooperation with several leading polling institutes in Israel, including iPanel, Kantar, Panel4All, DirectPolls, Midgam, Sapio, and Askaria. Via this database, we were enabled to identify not only public positions on central issues, but also differences among voter groups, issues distinguishing between parties, and places where conventional political division fails to tell the full picture.
The compass presents the user with a series of questions on central issues on the agenda, comparing their answers to party positions. Some questions examine broad political affiliation, while others are designed to expose differences among parties residing within the same bloc.
The compass was built via a research and methodological process including analyzing poll data, identifying issues distinguishing among parties, formulating clear questions and answers, examining scoring and weighting mechanisms, and systematically mapping party positions. The mapping was based, as far as possible, on direct responses by the parties and on public, established sources. The goal is to generate an accessible yet non-simplistic tool: one translating a massive volume of data and complex political reality into clear questions while preserving accuracy, transparency, and balance.
The results are based on party positions as examined vis-à-vis the parties themselves by Tachlith – The Institute for Israeli Policy, and as analyzed by the Institute’s research staff.
The compass features all parties running for the 26th Knesset that won at least one percent of the vote across the three latest polls conducted on leading news sites. The parties appearing in the compass (as of July 30), in alphabetical order: Together (Beyachad), Balad, The Democrats, Hadash, United Torah Judaism (Yahדות HaTorah), Yessodot Israel, Yashar!, Yisrael Beytenu, Blue and White (Kahol Lavan), Likud, Otzma Yehudit, Religious Zionism (HaTzionut HaDatit), Ra’am, Shas, and Ta’al.
The 2026 version of the Election Compass offers two tracks: the first is intended for the general voter public, and the second is intended for young voters eligible to vote for the first time in their lives. The new voters track includes a smaller number of questions, yet the questions are identical across both tracks.
Tachlith – The Institute for Israeli Policy (Reg.) is an applied, independent, and non-partisan research institute operating to strengthen Israel as a Jewish, democratic, secure, and prosperous state, in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. The Institute develops policy recommendations based on research and data, assisting decision-makers from both coalition and opposition in advancing informed, effective, and as feasible implementable policy within consensus spaces. Within the framework of the project, the Tachlith Institute provided the research and methodological infrastructure, while Mako led the development, product, and accessibility of the compass to the general public.
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