ABSTRACT
There used to be a conventional wisdom among political scientists that electoral systems do not change in established liberal democracies:
A major purpose of elections is to supply a stable institutional framework for expression of various viewpoints. Even if imperfect, a long-established electoral system may satisfy this purpose far better than could a new and unfamiliar system, even if it were inherently more advantageous. ... [M]ost of the long-established electoral systems do the job. Keeping the ills we know of may be better than leaping into the unknown (Taagepera and Shugart, 1989: 218, 236).
