There are two basic ways of determining electoral results: first-past-the-post and proportional representation. First-past-the-post is the British and American way. From Britain it spread to all the former dependencies of the British empire. It is a solid system in that it makes the elected representative of a constituency inescapably responsible for his voting record. Every time there is an election the representative or the parliamentarian has to go back to his electors and convince them that he, mainly as an individual (although party performance also affects public perception), deserves to be re-elected. In the first-by-the-post system you would have to be in a land of utter ignoramuses to get away with malfeasance in office.

As not all voters are created equal, the first-past-the-post system is vulnerable to special pleading, especially by campaign financiers. It has also against it that through gerrymandering, or the redrawing of congressional or parliamentary districts or constituencies, it can be made to distort over-all electoral results, so that, in theory, it becomes likely that representation will not reflect public opinion. In America, it is the electoral-college system, which carries the first-past-the-post principle to unconscionable extremes. It has allowed presidential candidates on four occasions to reach the presidency with a minority of votes (see The American business cycle and electoral results). In Britain, the Conservative or Laborite bent of regional electorates causes the disregard of many millions of votes.

The usual way that first-past-the-post idiosincracies are corrected is through proportional representation, through which places in parliaments are allotted according to party election results. This sort of system, though seemingly fair, makes representatives more accountable to the parties that choose them than to the electorates, who vote for the party rather than for the candidate. Under proportional representation, in principle, even in a land of acute political observers, you could get away with murder and be re-elected if a party was willing to back you. The trend in the world's democracies, except where first-past-the-post is entrenched, is for a combination in which first-past-the-post is the basic system but minority votes in every constituency are totted up and assigned proportionally to parties which fulfill a minimum-requirement of popular support. In Venezuela, perhaps the world's worst performing true democracy, proportional representation in practice divided the country into party chiefdoms. There indeed it was the case that, whatever else you did as long as you did the party's bidding, you were assured of re-election. It was the essence of clientelism.

There is another potentially big flaw in proportional representation and that is where the electorate is fissured in many different ways, such as happens in Israel. One would imagine that a state that was formed for a people that claims affiliation to one religion and descent from one ancient tribe would tend towards social and political homogeneity, but that is not the way things have turned out in Israel, partly because of the Diaspora, partly because Jews can be Jews without actually being observant Jews.

To start with, "ethnicity" was always important in Israeli elections. Here again you could ask: what "ethnicity" since Jews claim they are a people and they share a religion that informs all aspects of life? There existed three early "ethnic" trends: the Azkenasim, or the Jews of central and eastern Europe, speakers of Yiddish (a German dialect); the Sephardim, the Jews of the Mediterranean, speakers of Spanish and other languages; and the Sabra, or Jews native to Palestine, who learned to speak Hebrew. With the adoption of Hebrew and the passing of various generations, the Sabras are no longer a recognizable ethnic entity. The separation between Azkenasim and Sephardim still exists. Jews are also divided religiously. Some are agnostics or atheists, some are reformists or modernists, some are Orthodox or fundamentalist. Within the Orthodox, there are various groups animated by charismatic religious figures or followers of certain special traditions. There even existed an ultra-Orthodox sect that was against the existence of the state of Israel. These Orthodox Jewish sects are agreed only on their hatred of Jews who do not observe the Sabbath strictly, which happens to be the case of the majority of Israelis.

But the complexity does not stop there. During the 1970s and the 1980s, some Russian Jews began agitating to be allowed to emigrate from the USSR on the grounds that they were a persecuted minority. The degree of persecution of Jews in Russia is a debateable issue. They were certainly persecuted in The Pale before World War I. In the last few years of Stalin, there were signs of official support for anti-Semitism. But despite the millions of Jews that emigrated from the Pale mostly to America and even with the great Jewish migration from the USSR, due to natural reproduction there are probably still more Jews in Russia than those that originally emigrated. The Jews that emigrated under the USSR also alleged that, after all, there was a Jewish state they could go to so they could not be considered state-less refugees. Many, perhaps a majority, ended up in America as technically refugees. But quite a large number did settle in Israel and they represent a considerable political force with its own party or parties. These fissures in Israeli society were not at first very compulsive and there were three main political trends: the Labor Party (Mapai), which was the strongest force at the creation of Israel; Likud, which was the "conservative" opposition to Labor; and Orthodox Jews, who have always been around, always as a tiny and fragmented political minority.

Politics in Israel, as elsewhere, is about power, but in Israel it often seems to be about sharing power and about nothing else. At first there was no challenging Labor. But Labor had a laid-back attitude towards Palestinians, as exemplified by Moshe Dayan, and the Likud anti-Palestinian view gradually gained ground. Ironically, Menachem Begin, the first Likud prime minister and a former terrorist, was also the man who signed the peace with Egypt. This, and the death of his wife, depressed him so much that he left politics and soon died. Begin's electoral success opened the sluice gates and anti-Palestinian militancy became so much a part of the Israeli political scene that Labor was partially sucked in.

With the relative prevalence of anti-Palestinian attitudes, resulting in a consensus of sorts on the one issue that should have been a crucial theme of debate, Israeli politics became almost exclusively about maneuvering for political advantages. The Israeli electoral system was made meticulously proportional, because, despite Israel's secularist, collectivist roots, Judaic Orthodoxy has always been considered to have a special place in society, partly out of respect for tradition, partly because of the stridency of Orthodox Jews themselves. As Orthodox Jews were numerically insignificant, it was necessary to lower requirements for representation in the Knesset. (Conversely, which is another minus on Israeli democracy, Israeli Arabs have a quota of representatives which does not correspond to the fifth of the population of Israel that they constitute.)

This mania for proportionality, combined with the general tendency in Israeli society away from accommodation with Palestinians, has resulted in that the Palestinian problem is, by some accounts, no longer an electoral issue, which is as if you were certifying as extremely healthy a person with obvious symptoms of some deforming disease. Israeli politics contain an element of extreme radicalism that may not be a true reflection of Israeli public opinion. In Israel proportional representation, which is usually invoked as a corrective for electoral unfairness, has been skewed towards virulent and unrepresentative extremism.

If democracy has not contributed significantly to economic growth in developing countries (see Democracy, oligarchy, plutocracy: what exactly is America peddling to the world?), if it can be used to impose a political agenda that voters did not approve in America (see Of mandates and the lack thereof), and if it is a means for obstructing a peaceful solution to the Palestinian issue, then there are grounds for claiming that democracy is going at present through what appears to be a crisis. This is not to say that democracy is a failure or that there is a substitute for democracy. Democracy is still the best means not only for governance but especially to mend the ways of democracy itself. But as long as democracy impedes rather than encourages world peace, there will be grounds for arguing that democracy is not quite what it is stacked up to be. Such being the case, the Chinese way to development, in which democracy is mostly democratic-sounding noises, will seem like a respectable option. And Russia's penchant for authoritarianism will also have a sound historical justification. If there is indeed a crisis of democracy, therefore, it is not because of democracy per se, but because of things that democracies, and America in particular, are not getting right.