Electoral System Design
The central feature of democratic legitimacy,of course, resides in the electoral system. When we vote, we do two things at once:We contribute to forming a government or opposition, and we seek representation of our positions and preferences. This means that elections are not just a race that some win at the expense of others, but a way of participating in the creation of the representative body, as is suggested by Plotke’s (1997) argument that the opposite of epresentation is not participation but exclusion.