because they cannot be seen as long-term and uninterrupted democracies. Indeed, for most of the period covered, Spain was a dictatorship under Franco. The year 1945 is selected because it is seen as a conventional starting point for studies in the social sciences because it marked the end of World War II and a shift from the sort of world that existed before that war. Lijphart further believes this an appropriate year because prior to that time, many European countries were not democracies or had been democratic for only a short time. The year 1990 served as the end of the study for practical reasons.
The basic methodology differs from earlier studies in that it is not used to study elections but to study electoral systems:
My variables are the basic characteristics of electoral systems, measures of disproportionality, and measures of multipartism and of the production of ma
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