The biggest obstacle to your idea is, I think, the executive. In parlamentary systems the government answers to the parliament, and needs MPs support to continue—indeed, the Israeli maneuvering that you cite is related to making the government collapse, not to political parties. So as a first thing, you need a presidential system. But even then, MPs would probably organize as for or against the president—I imagine that the president’s role in drafting and proposing legislation would be even higher than in present day US, as the coordination of MPs via the parties would be missing.
The second factor is the actual parties, i.e. the organisation of people that want to be politically active (in the current system these people select, support, control and in a few cases eventually become MPs, but that is only part of what the do). A lot of this activity will always be there and is important—what makes the party is members and of some political ideology, the MPs are not in principle needed. You want to separate these orgs from what happens in parliament, but it’s not clear if it’s possible—many candidates are always internal, people who have participated to party activity for years before running and continue to discuss their views with other members on a regular basis.
Personally, I think if we eliminated the parties we would probably be worse off, because they would be replaced by worse (less transparent) coalition building. But I would be curious to see you flesh out your ideas!
The biggest obstacle to your idea is, I think, the executive. In parlamentary systems the government answers to the parliament, and needs MPs support to continue—indeed, the Israeli maneuvering that you cite is related to making the government collapse, not to political parties. So as a first thing, you need a presidential system. But even then, MPs would probably organize as for or against the president—I imagine that the president’s role in drafting and proposing legislation would be even higher than in present day US, as the coordination of MPs via the parties would be missing.
The second factor is the actual parties, i.e. the organisation of people that want to be politically active (in the current system these people select, support, control and in a few cases eventually become MPs, but that is only part of what the do). A lot of this activity will always be there and is important—what makes the party is members and of some political ideology, the MPs are not in principle needed. You want to separate these orgs from what happens in parliament, but it’s not clear if it’s possible—many candidates are always internal, people who have participated to party activity for years before running and continue to discuss their views with other members on a regular basis.
Personally, I think if we eliminated the parties we would probably be worse off, because they would be replaced by worse (less transparent) coalition building. But I would be curious to see you flesh out your ideas!
Addendum: if you want to bring legislation more in line with voters’ preferences issue by issue, avoiding the distortion from coalition building, Swiss-style referenda seem to work to an acceptable degree http://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x6hpkYyzMG6Bf8T3W/swiss-political-system-more-than-you-ever-wanted-to-know-i