there, there is growing attenuation of party discipline, and to that limited
degree, two-party parliaments are at least slightly more like the USA—showing a
marginal increase in the range of policy options coupled with a marginal decline in
accountability.
Multiparty parliaments are often seen as much more representative bodies,
especially so as the electoral rules are increasingly close approximations to purely
proportional, and the resulting relatively high number of eVective parties provides
a closer approximation to representation of the various interests in society. That is,
these systems are better at re-presenting the voices and preferences of the public
inside the legislature. But this contrast between the two- and multiparty system
should not be pushed too far, for two reasons.
First, while there may be many parties, their distribution of seats is often quite
asymmetric (Laver and Budge 1992 ). Take Israel, for example (see, e.g., Aldrich,
Blais, Indridiason, and Levine 2005 ; Blais, Aldrich, Indridiasan, and Levine
forthcoming). As one of the more nearly proportional party systems (a single,
nationwide district with low threshold for representation of 1. 5 percent of the vote,
soon to increase to 2 percent), it generally oVers many choices to its voters, with a
good fraction of them holding seats after the election. Thus, they are particularly
strong in representing a relatively large fraction of the electoral views within the
Knesset. Still, until Prime Minister Sharon broke with Likud while actually in
office, Labor and Likud were invariably the two largest parties. One or both still
is invariably in the government, meeting that their voice is heard where policy is
really made (for theoretical views, see Laver and Shepsle 1996 ; Laver and Schofield
1990 ). And, of course, the strongest voice of all, the prime minister, always
comes only from a major party, which in Israel’s case was one of these two until
very recently. Thus, ‘‘voice’’ and inXuence/power are quite diVerently distributed.
Israel is far from unique in this regard. Governments are very far from random
samples of members of the legislature, and prime ministers are not drawn as a
simple random sample from the names of all legislators. This asymmetry in voice is
in some sense parallel to the asymmetry in majoritarian electoral systems that
results from the disproportionate translation of votes into seats in the
two-party cases.
If there is asymmetry of one kind or another in both types of electoral systems,
there is also a sort of accountability problem in multiparty systems, perhaps a
stronger accountability problem than found in two-party systems. Take the case of
Israel, again. In their election of 2003 , everyone knew who would ‘‘win’’ the election
(and where everyone understands that ‘‘winning the election’’ is quite diVerent
from merely winning a seat and thus a voice even in a multiparty parliament). It
was clear from the outset that Likud would win and that their leader, Ariel Sharon,
would become the prime minister. What was a mystery was what sort of govern-
ment he would be able to form. Public discussion of alternative governments was
commonplace in that campaign. Voters could—and some did—have preferences
political parties in and out of legislatures 559