Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy

Research paper about specific electoral design issues. Available on the internet through the website of CIC. Horrowitz: ,,To evaluate an electoral system or to choose a new one, it is necessary to ask first what does one want the electoral system to do. No electoral system simply reflects voter preferences or the existing pattern of cleavages in a society or the prevailing political party configuration. Every electoral system shapes and reshapes these features of the environment, and each does so in different ways. In this short paper, I want to set out several possible purposes of electoral systems that can be found in the literature in the subject and then make some observations about those purposes and the electoral systems that further them, before turning to a few comments on electoral systems in relation to Malaysian politics.''