Uuden vaalijärjestelmän valinta Itä-Euroopan maissa

Authors

• Kimmo Kuusela

Abstract

All the East-European countries have by now held free or at least partially free parliamentary elections. The communist regimes favoured majority-type elections, whereas the new leaders have in- System in Eastern troduced various forms of proportional representation. Hungary and Bulgaria adopted a mixture of majority and proportional allocation rules in their first elections. In East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and in 1991 also in Bulgaria and Poland, all the seats were distributed proportionally. The parliamentary elections of 1989 in the Soviet Union and in 1991 in Albania were to a lesser extent a shift toward competitive elections. Therefore, the electoral system in those countries did not change as radically as elsewhere. Yugoslavia’s experiments with free elections have not included the national level. This article deals with parliamentary elections in Eastern Europe in 1989—1991. It reviews the electoral systems used, and evaluates their effects on the election outcome. Special attention is paid to the relationship between the electoral system and the degree of proportionality.