ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews party systems, electoral systems and presidential powers in Europe, to see whether the emerging democracies are exhibiting similar or different patterns of institutional development compared with those of the West. It focuses on the four most important features of electoral systems: district magnitude, allocation formula, supplementary seats and thresholds. Run-off elections are an electoral system under which there are two rounds of elections, held within a week or fortnight of each other. Supplementary seats may be divided into two categories, compensatory or additional. If seats are compensatory, it means that for purposes of determining seat allocation among parties, all seats those in the basic districts as well as in the upper tier are taken into account. In Europe simple plurality is used in the UK, and outside Europe in the United States of America and Canada. Proportional representation (PR) is an allocation formula which tries to distribute seats in proportion to the votes.
