ABSTRACT
Two fundamental choices that confront architects of new democratic con-
stitutions are those between plurality elections and proportional repre-
sentation (PR) and between parliamentary and presidential forms of
government. The merits of presidentialism and parliamentarism were
extensively debated by Juan J. Linz, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Donald L.
Horowitz in the fall 1990 issue of the Journal of Democracy.2 I strongly
concur with Horowitz’s contention that the electoral system is an equally
vital element in democratic constitutional design, and therefore that it is of crucial importance to evaluate these two sets of choices in relation with
each other. Such an analysis, as I will try to show, indicates that the com-
bination of parliamentarism with proportional representation should be an
especially attractive one to newly democratic and democratizing countries.
