The Advantages of Pure Forms of Parliamentary Democracy over Mixed Forms

It is often said that parliament shouldrepresent the opinions found in thepopulation and that government should beheld accountable for its political program.It is shown that these two goals rely ontwo different basic models of democracywhich are not fully compatible with eachother: the model of a pure representativedemocracy and the model of a pure two partycompetition. Unaccountable governments,voter alienation, strategic voting, andgovernmental instability are shown to beconsequences of this institutional mix.These problems may be avoided with reformsin the direction of one or the other basicmodel.