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This study analyzes the performance of the electoral systems in South Eastern European countries during the last two decades. It will argue that no other European region has experimented more with electoral systems than the SEE region. This has happened for many reasons: the lack of democratic experience, the nature of the new authoritarian regimes, the political interests of major parties and ethnical composition. Periodic changes that are made to the electoral systems are reflected by changes in the political systems. Countries where electoral systems have had more stability are those that have also had the most stable democracy levels. The study discusses the progress of the electoral process in each of the South Eastern European Country. It analyzes the features, common indicators, external and internal influences, as well as the formulas for translating votes into seats. The current study shows the tendency of regional countries to shift from the majoritarian electoral systems, introduced at first, to proportional electoral systems, as well as the new trends of specific formulas used to represent the ethnic communities and groups of citizens living abroad. While in the early 90's the electoral system had the tendency towards new political inflows, current tendencies are opposite. The traditional parties have a tendency to control the political representation system, while the new political inflows demanding political representation face obvious difficulties. DOI:10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n7p569

The study of electoral systems is a key area of research within political science. In part, the attention paid to electoral systems reflects their importance to democratic political systems. Electoral systems define "what constitutes" a vote, establish "a rule for how votes are totaled," and create a mechanism for "translating vote share into seat allocations" for representative institutions (Bawn 1993, 966). These roles mean that electoral systems impact not only how interests are represented, but also how accountability is structured.

This paper provides a game-theoretic model of representative democracy with endogenous party formation. Coalition formation may occur before and after elections, and the expected payoffs from the after-election majority game affect incentives to form parties before the elections. In this way Duverger's hypothesis can be formally explained by the strategic behaviour of political elites. If politicians care primarily about private benefits, the equilibrium policy outcome under a proportional electoral system coincides with the median party's position. On the othoer hand, with quasilinear utility, the distance from the median voter outcome may be lower with plurality rule.