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In societies severely divided by ethnicity, race, religion, language, or any other form of ascriptive affiliation, ethnic divisions make democracy difficult, because they tend to produce ethnic parties and ethnic voting. An ethnic party with a majority of votes and seats can dominate minority groups, seemingly in perpetuity. Some version of this problem informs the politics of a great many severely divided societies. 1 In severely divided societies with ethnically based parties, ordinary majority rule usually results in ethnic domination. Two commonly proposed methods of amelioration are called consociational and centripetal. Consociationalists generally try to solve the problem by establishing a regime of agreed guarantees, including proportional group participation in government and minority vetoes of ethnically sensitive policies. Their solution is to replace the adversary democracy of government and opposition with a grand coalition of majorities and minorities. By contrast, centripetalists do not propose to substitute a consensual regime for majority rule, but attempt instead to create incentives, principally electoral incentives, for moderates to compromise on conflicting group claims, to form interethnic coalitions, and to establish a regime of interethnic majority rule. Both consociationalists and centripetalists presuppose that ethnic groups in severely divided societies will be represented by ethnically based parties. The goal of both is interethnic power sharing. Their differences lie in contrasting conceptions of the best governing arrangements for such societies. Consociationalists aim at mandatory postelec

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Electoral systems do not simply reflect voter preferences, social cleavages, or the political party configuration of a given society. All electoral systems shape and reshape these features. The choice of one electoral system or another involves a decision about what goals decision-makers wish to foster. The present article enumerates six possible goals of electoral systems and then explains how various systems foster or derogate from these goals. In all cases of electoral-system choice, there are tradeoffs. A system may fulfill one objective but make it difficult to attain another. Clarity of objective and attention to the details of system choice are, therefore, necessary.