The Theoretical Limits of Maximum Distortion: Some Analytic Expressions for Electoral Systems

The role of the electoral system in the political process is one which has long concerned political scientists. Traditionally, the emphasis has been on the ‘mechanical’ effects that such systems have or are assumed to have, on such features as the number and strength of parties in a given political system. More often the debate became of a polemical nature, fought on the respective merits of one or other of the major electoral systems. The culmination of all this effort was that, until recently, research in this area of the discipline consisted almost entirely of a body of material, basically unsystematic in scope and essentially descriptive by nature. More contemporary research has concentrated on discovering the precise nature of the empirical relationship between electoral systems and party systems, with some degree of success. Our concern in this paper however, is not to contribute to the knowledge of the ‘mechanical’ effects of electoral systems but, in a related fashion, to examine some possible theoretical properties that may have an equal importance for democratic theory.