10 - THE PRIMACY OF THE PARTICULAR (Trường Sơn)

THE PRIMACY OF THE

PARTICULAR

Ken Gladdish

Ken Gladdish (d. 2003) taught comparative European politics at the University of Reading in England, where he was head of the department of politics for four years until his retirement in 1994. He wrote exten-sively on the Netherlands, also on Portugal, and more generally on representation, ethnicity, and the etiology of political science. This essay originally appeared in the January 1993 issue of the Journal of Democracy.

A little more than three generations ago, the eminent British political scientist Sir Henry Maine discussed what he referred to as “that extreme form of popular government which is called democracy.” He wrote not as an opponent of the form but as an inquirer into its success, which seemed to him “to have arisen rather from skillfully applying the curb to popular impulses than from giving them the rein.”1 This view, which today may appear unfashionably paternalistic, can be redeemed by stressing the word “impulses.” Few contemporary governments would regard it as either sen-sible or necessary to respond to each and every fluctuation of public opinion in between the settled contests that now determine and legiti-mate periods of rule by competing sets of politicians. But the question of how these contests should be staged, in terms of the method for translat-ing votes into legislative seats, still leaves much room for argument.

That it is a topical argument is as evident in long-established demo-cratic polities like France and Britain as in the emerging democracies of Eastern and Central Europe, or indeed in the moves toward multiparty politics that have recently occurred in many states which date their independence to the post-1945 collapse of European colonialism.

In the recent debate in the Journal of Democracy among Arend Lijphart, Guy Lardeyret, and Quentin L. Quade that followed Lijphart’s original article, two opposing positions were presented.2 Lijphart advo-cated strict proportionality in the allocation of popular representation. His two critics catalogued the perils of such close attention to the un-

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mediated arithmetic of party support and endorsed plurality elections. The arguments of the protagonists, however, implied an uncomfortable absolutism, for all rested on the presupposition that a particular elec-toral system can be advanced as universally superior to all alternatives. This notion had already been challenged in an earlier essay in the Jour-nal of Democracy by Larry Diamond. Writing on “Three Paradoxes of Democracy,” Diamond had drawn attention to the problem of “represen-tativeness versus governability” and contended that “each country must find its own way of resolving this universal tension.”3

My purpose is to expand upon that sage contention, which I shall seek to do in three ways: First, by questioning the starkness with which the alternatives were earlier presented; second, by resisting the amputa-tion of electoral systems from the whole body politic; and third, by considering some examples that may suggest greater subtlety in value judgments than attachment to general prescriptions easily allows.

A Range of Formulas

In the first place, the choice does not lie tout court between plurality and proportional representation (PR). There is a range of formulas that is so elaborate as to make each set of national arrangements virtually sui generis.4 When, for example, we consider systems that are not based upon mere plurality (and note that plurality systems differ in important ways), we confront provisions as distinct as the additional-member sys-tem in Germany, the alternative vote in Australia, and the single transferable vote in Ireland.5 Furthermore, even where proportionality is embraced as a goal, actual practices extend from Portugal’s regional system, with its large variations in the size of constituencies, to the nationwide PR system found in the Netherlands. There is therefore a real danger of setting up a debate that is grossly reductionist in its essential terms. But that is only part of the problem. Lijphart can certainly be commended for his broad-brush search for objective measurements of the various outcomes of different systems. This is a vastly different un-dertaking, however, from endeavoring to decide which of the two highly generalized alternatives is the ultimate answer.

This is very clearly brought out by the efforts of each of the three debaters to press his case. Two difficulties here seem insuperable. The first—and this is something that the interlocutors themselves largely concede—is the impossibility of separating out the influence of elec-toral systems from all the other forces that can affect a polity over time. The second is that electoral systems cannot simply be pulled out of a drawer in the way that one might choose a cooking recipe. Each na-tional case is highly circumstantial and reflects both history in all its manifestations and, more specifically, the consequences of particular patterns of political mobilization.

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In the Netherlands, on which Lijphart is a widely recognized expert, nationwide PR came about for a number of reasons. Prominent among these was the perceived failure of a plurality system to deliver coherent results, given the fragmented nature of Dutch political competition by the second decade of the present century. This is not of course to argue that the eventual choice was wholly determined by this circumstance, for debate continues in the Netherlands today about the efficacy and desirability of nationwide PR. But it does suggest that the notion of a circumstance-free choice is at odds with reality.

Furthermore, even if it could be convincingly demonstrated (which on the evidence of the debate so far seems unlikely) that PR systems consistently outperform plurality systems, or vice versa, it would still be naive to insist that the apparently more enlightened method should be universally adopted.

Of course, one can explore, as an exercise in comparative politics, the extent to which electoral systems seem to play a significant role in the performance of different polities. If the general findings were per-suasive, they would then become an instructive reference for politicians and others who must decide the exact “rules” of the electoral “game” in their various countries. But this merely reemphasizes the point that each polity is distinct, and must therefore work out its own formula.

In Britain today, there is renewed debate about the wisdom of retaining

• plurality system based upon single-member constituencies. Many in-gredients are discernible in the cases for and against, but the dominant concern is whether “simple” plurality still provides for a reasonably fre-quent alternation of parties in government. If this particular anxiety, the result of four successive Conservative victories, had not arisen, the de-bate would almost certainly not be so high on the agenda. The current concern therefore reflects a highly circumstantial feature peculiar to a particular run of recent electoral outcomes. What is most significant is that there is no consensus on what might replace the traditional plurality system, given that each of the alternative prospects would have important consequences for the complexion of both representation and government.6 It may be that, in the eyes of God, there is a “perfect” electoral system for Britain. But we do not know what it is, and even if we did, there may be costs that significant groups would be unprepared to pay to secure it.

The latter point, concerning costs, must be taken into account when considering why polities do or do not adopt particular arrangements. For there is a fundamental dichotomy that runs through all discussions about how popular votes should be related to the distribution of seats in

• legislature: in systems based on popular sovereignty, the people need to be both represented and governed. In each and every democracy, some appropriate relationship between these two needs must be estab-lished; it seems obvious that the solutions chosen will vary considerably from country to country.

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Nevertheless, one general statement can be confidently made about the prime difference between plurality systems and PR systems: The former tend to limit significant representation in the assembly to two parties, thus facilitating single-party majority government, while the latter, subject to whatever thresholds might be imposed, provide for the legislative representation of all measurable contenders. To put it most simply, plurality systems reduce the prospect of legislative fragmenta-tion; proportional systems increase it.

The Netherlands, France, and Germany

Having questioned the grounds on which the debate has so far pro-ceeded, I shall now attempt to demonstrate the importance of particular cases rather than the persuasive force of general propositions. Let us begin with the previously mentioned example of the Netherlands. Even as it was adopting universal suffrage, the Netherlands replaced its con-stituency system by a formula of nationwide PR. The main circumstance prompting this change was the sheer geometry of political mobiliza-tion, which meant that contests in single-member seats had become unmanageable.7 By 1914, five significant political groupings were com-peting on an increasingly national basis, and ad hoc alliances formed to produce majorities in individual constituencies were unable to solve the problem of coherent representation. It seemed inevitable therefore that some other method of staging the national electoral competition would have to be adopted.

The solution of nationwide PR was a resort to the arithmetic of over-all party strengths at the cost of a direct linkage between voters and representatives. That this has been no light cost is evidenced by the continuing Dutch debate, which surfaced dramatically in the latter half of the 1960s, about the need to address the problem of linkage. Under nationwide PR, Dutch MPs have no constituents and Dutch voters have no local representatives in the legislature. As several commentators have explained, this has serious consequences for the conduct of national politics.8

A further cost is that the meticulous registration of party strengths, with no minimum threshold, results in a multiparty legislature from which governments have to be forged, often with considerable delay and with no reference back to voters. It so happens that, for a number of reasons, this seems not to cause undue damage to governmental continuity.9 But the reasons are highly specific to Dutch political practice and—dare one use the term?—culture. In other polities it is likely that such prolonged cabinet formations, and the sometimes painful delivery of unexpected governments via the midwifery of party leaders acting in the wake of elections, could cause considerable dislocation and disaffection.

If we turn to the much discussed case of contemporary France, other

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matters come into view. Although the precise classification of succes-sive French electoral systems has become an academic cottage industry, it is clear enough that under the Fifth Republic single-bloc legislative majorities were sought by the device of second ballots in single-mem-ber constituencies.10 What is more open to conjecture is exactly what ensued from the adoption of PR with department-wide districts for the 1986 elections to the National Assembly. John Frears contends that this move “generated a storm from political elites, indifference from the public, and a commitment from the new government to get rid of it again.”11 In the same vein, Roy Pierce and Thomas Rochon hold that it “was widely interpreted as a move to avert electoral disaster by the Socialist party, by preventing the two main rightist parties from to-gether winning a large majority of the seats in the Assembly.”12

The Right did, in the event, secure a legislative majority. The Social-ists were not destroyed, though they lost a quarter of their seats. What has attracted most comment, however, is that Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Na-tional Front was able to secure as many seats as the Communists. Whereas, according to Frears, “If the two-round system had been maintained, the National Front would have won virtually no parliamentary seats though winning the same number of votes.”13

Here we confront a frequent objection to PR that applies even to mild specimens like Mitterand’s provision for departmental lists. Lardeyret regards the success of the National Front, and the emergence of extreme opponents to it, as “an unhealthy situation [that] can be attributed largely to PR.” But surely the real question is another one: Socialist motivations apart, what would have been the best electoral formula for dealing with not only the threat of extremism, but all the other circum-stances of French politics in the mid-1980s?

As already noted, all electoral systems have costs—a fact that was not exactly highlighted by the earlier contributors. The French situa-tion may appear somewhat peculiar to an outsider in that powerholders seem able to shuffle electoral systems at will (Greece would be a similar instance). While such maneuverings might conceivably be regarded as commendable attempts to respond to the fluctuations of political mobi-lization, there is ample evidence that less pure instincts are at work in both countries.

Clearly, profound issues arise when the consequences of any given electoral system are confronted. A provision that has attracted much enthusiasm on the part of electoral reformers in plurality systems is the German additional-member formula, which the Federal Republic adopted at the time of its formation in 1949. This recipe provides both for con-stituency representatives chosen in plurality elections and for represen-tation in terms of national party strengths. It includes a threshold applying to both constituency and national party support, so that a party has to achieve at least 5 percent of the total number of votes cast

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in order to secure seats in the Bundestag. This level of support, but often little more, has been recurrently achieved by the Free Democratic Party (FDP), which accordingly occupies a pivotal position between the much larger forces of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). As Gordon Smith explains, “The strategic posi-tion in the party system occupied by the Free Democratic Party . . . gives the party a weight quite out of proportion to its parliamentary represen-tation.”14 From this pivotal position, the FDP has been able to exert a powerful influence on the formation and operation of governments. In-deed, it has been able to change the whole complexion of government without benefit of elections, as when the FDP abandoned its coalition with the SPD in 1982 and ushered the CDU into office.

Disproportionate leverage wielded by small but strategically posi-tioned “fulcrum” parties like the FDP is not an inherent feature of PR systems. It is generally lacking in the Scandinavian countries, for in-stance. Where such parties do exist, moreover, their power derives more from the particular geometry of mobilization patterns (which produce political situations where majorities cannot be formed without the in-clusion of smaller parties) than from PR as such. But plurality systems, given their tendency to marginalize third parties, do make the rise of fulcrum parties less likely, which is one reason for the resistance to PR in Britain.

The New Systems of Central Europe

If we turn from established West European systems to the admittedly still larval systems of Central Europe, we find an interesting variety of cases. In the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic, postcommunist elections were held in June 1990 for both the bicameral Federal Assem-bly and the respective Czech and Slovak National Councils. A party-list system was adopted in all three cases, but there was concern about two issues.15 One was a fear of the sort of fragmentation that beset interwar legislatures; the other was an anxiety about overweening party machines, another feature of earlier practice. Several devices were therefore adopted to impede these possibilities. They included, though the detail is com-plex, what amounted to a 5-percent threshold for the federal parliament and the Czech assembly and a provision for preferential voting within party lists.

Hyperfragmentation was indeed avoided, though this could be largely ascribed to Civic Forum’s success in gaining widespread support as a transitional political movement closely identified with the Velvet Revo-lution. The Forum gained some two-thirds of the seats in each house of the Federal Assembly as well as in the Czech National Council.

Despite the prognostications of pollsters and commentators, the re-sults of the second Federal Assembly elections, held in June 1992, also

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reflected a consolidation of the leading Czech and Slovak formations (Civic Democracy and the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia, re-spectively).16 Yet this very same consolidation has served to promote the impending split of the 74-year-old federation into a Czech republic and a separate Slovakia. Hindsight thus reveals that the bogeyman was less party fragmentation than national fission, though it would hardly be plausible to argue that a system designed to produce less consolida-tion in each of the two parts of the federation would have offered a more constructive approach.

The case of Poland, though alarming, is a more straightforward ex-ample of the problems of electoral mechanics. There the October 1991 elections for the Sejm resulted in the emergence of 29 parliamentary parties, the largest of which obtained less that 13 percent of the total vote and less than 14 percent of the available seats.17 Turnout was a mere 42 percent. The elections were held on the basis of proportional representation, without a threshold, in 37 districts with between 7 and 17 seats each. A further 15 percent of the total seats (69 out of 460) were allocated nationally with a 5-percent threshold and a requirement of support in at least five districts.18 It took almost two months of intensive interparty negotiation before a government could be assembled, and there has subsequently been a succession of governmental changes.

The Czech and Polish experiences exemplify the uncertainties of the early phases of transition from an effectively one-party to a competitive system. But each transition has its own problems and peculiarities, and electoral mechanisms remain merely one facet of the prism of political competition. In Hungary, the pace of the political transition away from the one-party system fell somewhere between the long march led by Solidarity in Poland and the abrupt Velvet Revolution in Prague. More than three years elapsed between the beginning of intense debate, ne-gotiation, and organizing work in mid-1987 and the first multiparty parliamentary elections in April 1990, as Hungarians dismantled com-munism and put together a new constitution.

Roundtable talks in the fall of 1989 hammered out the electoral sys-tem for the first free elections in postcommunist Hungary. A Hungarian political analyst has characterized the outcome as follows:

The historical parties (Smallholders, Social Democrats, Christian Demo-crats) favored proportional representation with county-based party lists, which was used in 1945 and 1947. However, the general mood in the country, especially among the MPs in the parliament, made it impossible to abolish the existing local constituency representation. Since there were no huge popular movements behind the new political parties, their legitimacy was limited. The local notables and the citizens did not want to let the whole nomination process be controlled by party bureaucracies. The long debate and the general mood made it impossible to introduce any election system based on a single principle. Therefore the electoral system became a combination of different principles and techniques. The 386 seats of the

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unicameral Hungarian parliament were divided into three categories: 176 were to be elected in single-member constituencies, 152 from regional party lists, and 58 from national party lists.19

In single-member constituencies, a second ballot was required where no candidate received an absolute majority in the first round. On the second ballot, a plurality would suffice for election. The regional party-list seats and the national seats were subject to a 4-percent threshold. The whole formula was intended to help prevent party proliferation. That it had its costs is indisputable: Turnout was unimpressive, and hardly any constituency seats were filled on the first ballot. Given the complexity of the electoral provisions, it would be hard to determine how proportional the results actually were in terms of the ratio of seats to initial party votes. Nevertheless, they did deliver a parliament with only six parties, which enabled a majority coalition to be formed by an alliance of the largest single party and two ancillaries.

Merits and Defects

My examples so far have tended to suggest that various forms of PR produce outcomes that are less than optimal from the standpoint of stable, coherent, and effective government. None of this, however, should be taken as pointing to the absurdly simple-minded conclusion that PR is always the wrong choice. For not only can PR work well in certain national contexts (such as Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands), but plurality systems (as in Britain) can display grave defects of their own.

Britain, like the United States, is a land of single-member legislative districts and first-past-the-post elections. To win, a candidate need not secure an overall majority of votes in the constituency. That will, of course, be the case if only two candidates compete; in practice, however, three or more contenders seek election in most British constituencies. Candidates may therefore be elected with just over a third of the votes cast where there are three contenders, or just over a quarter where there are four, and so on.

Two serious problems arise under the British system. The first, and the one most commonly cited by critics, is the lack of provision for propor-tionality between total national party votes and party parliamentary seats. It is invariably the smallest of the three significant national parties, the Liberal Democrats (formerly the Liberals), which is the most heavily penalized. In the April 1992 parliamentary elections, which were fairly typical, the Liberal Democrats gained 17.8 percent of the total national vote, but having obtained a plurality in only 20 constituencies, they secured a mere 3 percent of the seats in the House of Commons. Since the system is not designed to deliver proportionality, exact equivalents of national votes and seats are rare for the two larger parties as well.20 On the other hand, the system does usually manage to produce single-party majority governments. Of all the elections held in Britain since 1945,

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only one (the February 1974 balloting that returned Harold Wilson to Number 10 Downing Street at the head of a Labour-Liberal coalition) has failed to return one party with an overall legislative majority.

The less frequently voiced criticism of the British system stresses the apathy it seems to breed among the vast majority of voters, who may rea-sonably feel that it matters little whether or not they vote. In April 1992, only 52 of 651 parliamentary seats changed hands across parties. In per-haps a further 50 seats there may have been a possibility of an upset. In more than five hundred seats, therefore, no change was remotely likely; this is the case in every election. In a fully proportional system, all votes would go toward the distribution of legislative seats. Even though there might not be dramatic overall changes from election to election, such a set-up would do much more than the current one does to justify the act of voting.

From a standpoint that is concerned purely with translating votes into representation, a proportional system may appear, at least in prin-ciple, to deliver the democratic goods. If parties are the sole vehicle of popular representation, and if government is based, as it is in all genu-inely parliamentary systems, upon relative party strengths in the legislature, there may seem little to justify any system that narrows the range of electoral choices. In practice, however, there are formidable arguments, both general and specific, against proportionality.

The most general argument emphasizes the threat that proportional-ity can pose to governmental coherence. The process of forming a majority government after proportionality has delivered a highly frag-mented legislature is subject to several types of difficulties. The first occurs when long periods of interparty haggling follow parliamentary elections. In the Netherlands, as we saw, prolonged delays in the forma-tion of cabinets have become a normal and not very troublesome feature of national politics. A more worrisome example of delay in cabinet formation would be the recent experience in Belgium, where five months elapsed between the parliamentary election of November 1991 and the creation of a new government. Such severe paralysis cannot be attrib-uted simply to PR, of course, nor does it mean that a plurality system would necessarily be better for Belgium. But it is a troubling instance of a political hiatus arising from fragmentation.

A second kind of difficulty arises when odd coalitions form out of sheer expediency, as with the combination between the Portuguese So-cialist Party and its most right-wing opponent, the Social Democratic Center Party, in 1977–78. What is interesting in the Portuguese case is that the very same electoral system (party lists in varied-size districts) that produced this egregious example also delivered single-party ma-jority governments after elections in both 1987 and 1991.21

A third type of problem emerges when it proves impossible to form a majority government at all, and a minority administration results. The Scandinavian countries—notably Denmark, which has had only three

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majority governments since 1945—offer many instances of this dubi-ous phenomenon. Poland today is another case in point.

A further problem of coalition formation in fragmented legislatures is that of accountability to voters when coalitions form only after the elections are over. There is much comment about this on record in the Dutch case.22 The argument here has two barrels. The first is that voters in such circumstances cannot know the full consequences of their choice of party. This can to some extent be countered by the contention that in all systems voters cannot calculate the precise outcome of casting their vote. The second charge—that such “unsignaled” coalitions lack a demo-cratic mandate—is more difficult to refute because it strikes near the heart of the notion of popular sovereignty. To combine two or more parties, each of which represents an exclusive choice by individual vot-ers, where there has been no prior pact known to the electorate, does seem to raise serious questions about governmental legitimacy.

It so happens that the Dutch case also exemplifies the problem, al-ready cited in respect to Germany, of the enormous leverage available to parties that command the center. The major confessional parties in the Netherlands, amalgamated since 1975 under the banner of the Chris-tian Democratic Appeal, have for most of this century largely determined the complexion of each and every coalition cabinet. Until the 1960s, this reflected their regularly demonstrated ability to amass about half of both the votes cast and the seats contested, making them the country’s principal political grouping. Yet even their relative decline to around one-third of the national vote has not robbed them of this decisive leverage, and so they continue to preside from the center.

The Test of Practicality

Another question for debate is that of the linkage—or the lack thereof— between voter and representative. The basic structure of parliamentary representation in Britain was established long before the development of either national mass-based parties or universal suffrage. Although it has been modified in recent times, the system’s essential characteristic re-mains that of locality representation. This ostensibly means that each citizen, however he or she may have voted (or not voted), has a represen-tative in the legislature to whom grievances can be directly addressed. This follows from the assumption that each MP serves on behalf of all the interests and concerns within his or her constituency. Given the current primacy of national party strategies, that assumption may now be dubi-ous, but it endures within the minds of citizens and legislators alike. Indeed, in a recent survey of the attitudes of British MPs toward electoral reform, the majority of respondents placed this aspect of the representa-tional system at the top of their list of that system’s virtues.23

The concrete benefits of locality representation may be variously

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evaluated, but it is undeniable that where proportionality leaves local-ity representation out of account, then relations between the citizen and the legislature are affected. This is one reason why so-called mixed systems, like the German additional-member system, have attracted the interest of reformers in a pluralist system like Britain’s.

The final item in the critic’s arsenal of charges against proportional-ity is its potential for giving scope to fringe parties (as already noted above with regard to France). The literature on this topic is vast indeed, ranging through the emergence of fascism in the interwar period to the threats posed by the extreme left and right (and now by fundamental-ism) in the post-1945 era. The literature can only grow, for the debate is perennially open-ended. If an electoral system operates so as to exclude expressions of antidemocratic sentiment, does that not also mean shut-ting out the lesser voices of democratic sentiment? Can the problem not be tackled by other means, such as the German Basic Law’s proscription of antidemocratic parties? Whatever judgment an impartial referee might reach on this vexed question, it remains a comfort to those who live under long-established plurality systems that the likelihood of an anti-democratic movement gaining significant legislative influence in their countries is small indeed.

Any sensible tribunal weighing the relative merits and demerits of proportionality (in its many possible forms) and plurality (also capable of variations) would refuse to rule on purely or even largely theoretical grounds. The best test is one of practicality and aptness relative to national circumstance. The most relevant of these—the one that must be given the most weight in the evaluation of alternative electoral mecha-nisms—is the existing pattern of political mobilization. No reformer, however convinced of the elegance of a particular scheme or provision, could sanely try to graft it onto a polity whose dynamics would make the reform unworkable, damaging, absurd, disruptive, or catastrophic. It is surely one of the tasks of political scientists to analyze the effects of different electoral provisions, but it cannot be in their province to rec-ommend recipes in vacuo.

The problems of orchestrating free, fair, and open competition for political power can be especially great in relatively new, resource-strapped states. In such circumstances, one would have to be bold beyond measure to offer general prescriptions for representation. Yet one may still nurse a hope that the debate which this journal has so usefully promoted will be of heuristic value to decision makers in societies where representative government is a new item on the agenda.

NOTES

1. Sir Henry Maine, Popular Government (London: John Murray, 1885), vii, xi.

2. See Arend Lijphart, “Constitutional Choices for New Democracies,” Journal

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of Democracy 2 (Winter 1991): 72–84; and Guy Lardeyret, “The Problem with PR,” Quentin L. Quade, “PR and Democratic Statecraft,” and Arend Lijphart, “Double-Checking the Evidence,” Journal of Democracy 2 (Summer 1991): 30–48.

3. Larry Diamond, “Three Paradoxes of Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 1 (Summer 1990): 54.

4. An official of the British Electoral Reform Society claimed recently that he knew of three hundred different formulas.

5. All three systems are constituency-based. The additional-member system distributes additional seats in proportion to the national configuration of party support. The alternative vote is a preference system that enables voters to rank candidates in their order of preference and then redistributes the second (or subse-quent) preferences of those who voted for the weakest contenders so that a majority is achieved. The single transferable vote operates similarly to the alternative vote, but in multimember constituencies.

6. Current serious proposals include all three systems cited above. There is little discernible support for party-list approaches on either a regional or national basis.

7. See H. Daalder, “Extreme Proportional Representation: The Dutch Experi-ence” in S.E. Finer, ed., Adversary Politics and Electoral Reform (London: Anthony Wigram, 1975), and K.R. Gladdish, “The Netherlands” in Vernon Bogdanor, ed.,

Representatives of the People? Parliamentarians and Constituents in Western De-mocracies (Aldershot, England: Gower, 1985).

8. See K.R. Gladdish, Governing from the Centre: Politics and Policy-Making in the Netherlands (London: C. Hurst, 1991), ch. 6.

9. See K.R. Gladdish, “Governing the Dutch,” Acta Politica 25 (October 1990): 389–402.

10. See Alistair Cole and Peter Campbell, French Electoral Systems and Elec-tions Since 1789 (Aldershot, England: Gower, 1989).

11. Howard Penniman, ed., France at the Polls, 1981 and 1986 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988), 211.

12. Howard Penniman, ed., France at the Polls, 181.

13. Howard Penniman, ed., France at the Polls, 214.

14. Gordon Smith, William Paterson, and Peter Merkl, eds., Developments in West German Politics (London: Macmillan, 1989), 71.

15. See Judy Batt, “After Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Poll,” World Today 46 (Au-gust–September 1990): 141–43.

16. Economist, 13 June 1992.

17. David Warszawski, “The Elections: Don’t Let’s Be Shocked,” East Euro-pean Reporter, January–February 1992, 19–21.

18. Krzysztof Jasiewicz, “From Solidarity to Fragmentation,” Journal of De-mocracy 3 (April 1992): 55–69. Jasiewicz has grave doubts whether juggling with the electoral system would have avoided hyperfragmentation, though from his consideration of alternatives it does seem that it might have been significantly reduced.

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19. A. Körösényi, “The Hungarian Parliamentary Elections 1990” in A. Bozóki, A. Körösényi, and G. Schopflin, eds., Post-Communist Transition: Emerging Plu-ralism in Hungary (London: Pinter, 1992).

20. In the case of the April 1992 election, John Curtice has called attention to a surprising quirk in the mathematics: “For the first time ever the system wholly failed to deliver a bonus in seats to the winner. Instead, so far as the Conservatives and Labour are concerned, it acted in a purely proportional way.” Guardian, 13 April 1992. Clearly what happened—ostensibly for the first time—could have happened on any previous occasion. This prompts the reflection that proportional-ity is not excluded in a plurality system. It is merely made highly uncertain.

21. A former member of the Portuguese parliament recently delivered the following verdict on the electoral system: “The four main political parties . . .

dispute elections according to rules that reduce the individual deputies more to the role of party officials than of representatives of the electorate.” She then warned: “Indeed, the functioning of the proportional system in Portugal should be a true object lesson for those naif Britons who believe its introduction might improve British institutions.” Patricia Lança, “The Land of Mild Customs,” Salisbury Re-view, June 1992, 29.

22. See K.R. Gladdish, “Two-Party versus Multi-Party: The Netherlands and Britain,” Acta Politica 7 (July 1972): 342–61, and K.R. Gladdish, “Two-Party versus Multi-Party: The Netherlands and Britain,” Parliamentary Affairs 26 (June– August 1973): 454–70.

23. K.R. Gladdish, A.T.W. Liddell, and P.J. Giddings, “MPs’ Perceptions of the British Electoral System” (University of Reading Politics Group Research Paper No. 1, 1984).