Guidelines to Assist National Minority Participation in the Electoral Process Page: 19 compensate for any disproportionality produced by the district seat results. The single member districts ensure that voters have geographical representation. Another mixed system is called the parallel system. Like the MMP system, it combines the single member system with the PR system. But under this system, the PR seats are not used to compensate for any disproportionality. The PR seats are allocated in accordance with the number of votes in favour of the political party. These votes are determined either by counting the votes in favour of the political parties that have fielded candidates in the single district elections or by a second vote. Examples of countries using parallel systems are Albania, Armenia, Croatia, Georgia, Russia and Lithuania. Option 2: Proportional representation systems, where a political party’s share in the national vote is reflected in its share of the legislative seats, may assist in the representation of minorities. The list PR system is the most prevalent form of PR and the most common electoral system choice amongst OSCE countries. Under this system, each party submits a list of candidates to the electorate and voters therefore vote for a party as opposed to an individual candidate. This system is applied in numerous states, e.g., Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Croatia, Spain, Portugal and Romania. The more proportional an electoral system, the more it allows minorities, even dispersed ones, to be represented in an elected body, at least if the threshold is met. The proportional system in Finland allows the Swedish minority, which is in the majority only on the Aland Islands, to be represented by its own list in three other constituencies. It also has a seat in a further constituency through alliances with other parties. This system has a number of clear advantages: • it delivers highly proportional election results. The number of votes won are proportional to the number of seats gained. • it is relatively invulnerable to gerrymandering, mal-apportionment and other forms of manipulation of results by the manipulation of electoral boundaries. • it is relatively simple for both voters and electoral officials. • because of its high levels of proportionality, list PR systems are often favoured as being the most likely to ensure the representation of even small minorities. It should be noted that list PR may have the effect of entrenching ethnic politics, rather than work to encourage inter-ethnic alliances. The experience of list PR in post-Dayton Bosnia is a good example of how proportionality alone will not encourage accommodation. In Bosnia, groups are represented in parliament in proportion to their numbers in the community as a whole. But because parties can rely exclusively on the votes of members of their own community for their electoral success, there is little incentive for them to accommodate on ethnic issues. In fact, the incentives work in the other direction. Because it is easy to mobilise support by playing the “ethnic card”, the major parties in Bosnia have every incentive to emphasise ethnic issues and sectarian appeals. Bosnia’s 1996 elections were effectively an ethnic census, with electors voting along ethnic lines and each of the major nationalist parties gaining support almost exclusively from their own ethnic group. In the case of Bosnia, this electoral system not only promoted ethnic mobilisation, but served to encourage the most extreme elements within those ethnic groups.