ABSTRACT
The choice of leaders and policies by voting—in fair, competitive constituency elections and representative assemblies—is the single most common procedural characteristic of democratic polities. However the decision to vote is accounted for, the choice exercised through the vote is assumed to be a rational act, provided the voter obtains adequate information to make possible a rational choice. A variation on PR, sometimes considered a form of semi-proportional representation, is "cumulative voting", whereby voters are allowed to cast all their votes in a multi-member district election for one candidate or divide them among two or more candidates. In the 1940s, Maurice Duverger suggested that experience with electoral systems seemed to indicate the operation of a social scientific law: plurality/majority elections tend to produce two-party systems and stable governments; PR tends to produce multi-party systems and less stable coalition government.
