1 - Majoritarian and proportional systems 1.1 - Premises 1.2 - Majority systems 1.3 - The majority premium 1.4 - PR Systems 1.5 - The double ballot 2 - Who gets elected ? 2.1 - Person voting and list voting 2.2 - The German and the hare systems 2.3 - Minority representation and gerrymandering 2.4 - A coda on Japan 3 - The importance of electoral systems 3.1 - How important 3.2 - The effects of electoral systems: a discussion 3.3 - The influence of electoral systems restated 3.4 - The laws 4 - Choosing an electoral system 4.1 - Assessing majoritarianism 4.2 - assessing proportionalism 4.3 - Assessing the double ballot 4.4 - Which is best ? Part two: presidentialism and parliamentarism 5 - Presidentialism 5.1 - Defining 'presidential system' 5.2 - The American prototype 5.3 - The latin american experience 5.4 - Is parliamentarism a remedy ? 6 - Parliamentary systems 6.1 - Types of parliamentarism 6.2 - Power sharing 6.3 - Premiership systems 6.4 - Working parliamentarism 6.5 - Assembly government 6.6 - Stability and effectveness 6.7 - The directly elected premier 7 - Semi-presidentialism 7.1 - The french prototype 7.2 - Similar and dissimilar cases 7.3 - Defining semi-presidential systems 7.4 - Which is best ? Part Three : issues and proposals 8 - The difficulty of politics 8.1 - Primitivism and negativism 8.2 - Corrpution and the rejection of politics 8.3 - Video-politics and video-democracy 9 - Alternating presidentialism: a proposal 9.1 - From one engine to two 9.2 - Strong-intermittent presidency 9.3 - The best of two worlds ? 10 - The paradox of governing by legislating 10.1 - Initiative and veto 10.2 - Decree power 10.3 - Crossing parliament effectively 10.4 - Toward solving the executive-legislative nexus 11 - Problems with presidential systems 11.1 - Reelecting presidents 11.2 - Twoparty versus multiparty presidentialism 11.3 - Staggered versus synchronized elections 12 - Problems with parliamentary systems 12.1 - Bicameralism or not 12.2 - Party discipline 13 - Constitutional engineering