The oddities of Japan's party system make it hard to predict what this means.
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Kazakhstan's party system has been set up from scratch in a hurry.
It replaced a supposedly neutral caretaker government that, under Bangladesh's fraught two-party system, normally takes over for three months at the end of a government's five-year term to oversee fair elections.
He is unlikely to stand in next year's election because of the ruling party's unofficial rotation system: Mr Jonathan is from the Christian south and it will be the Muslim north's turn to nominate a candidate to serve out the once-expected second term of Mr Yar'Adua's presidency.
That, in Israel's multiple-party PR system, would have been a massive triumph.
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The press were crammed into rooms where the party's filing system sits: box files, with the names of obscure conferences stencilled onto them in felt-tip.
She added the decision to switch from the party's previous system of having two principal speakers followed "the realisation that people don't respond to abstract ideas".
The centrist People's Party backed keeping the present system.
In the 1998 primary for the governor's race, Dan Lungren, the Republican, easily won his party's nomination under the new system.
That is because Argentina's proportional-voting system encourages party discipline as elections draw near.
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LDP's own seniority system, which regulates the struggle for power between the party's competing factions, is particularly rigid.
The balance of power in women's basketball, once a two-party system with Connecticut and Tennessee, had begun to shift recently.
Many worry that partisanship in the U.S. leads to policy paralysis, but political disagreement here pales in comparison to the European Union, which has 27 member states whose political landscapes feature far more parties than the two-party system in the U.S. The U.S. also possesses a single jurisdictional political entity that allows it to enforce a common fiscal and monetary policy across all of its parts.
He must also avoid giving the impression that he has given up too easily his own party's dream of an ultra-proportional system of single transferable votes.
It describes Mali's democracy as a system in which the ruling party buys political support and votes, with high-level posts or with lucrative government contracts - many not tendered.
The more respectable reasons include his party's opposition to the time-dishonoured system of Proporz, whereby the two hitherto main parties carved up just about all public-sector jobs, from ambassadors to health inspectors, between them.
His party has dented the two-party system long dominated by the Pakistan Muslim League-N and the outgoing Pakistan People's Party and could steal votes from both.
It is making it ever harder to solve problems that require cross-party collaboration such as reforming America's health-care system or its pensions.
Because, under Germany's system of proportional representation, the Greens got 47 parliamentary seats, but under France's majority-voting system its Greens, the main environmental party, got a mere half-dozen.
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Nominally, Japan's slow moving political realignment has produced a kind of two party system, with the long-entrenched Liberal Democratic Party pitted against the New Frontier Party, which is made up mainly of dissidents from the LDP and the religious-based Komei party.
Third, by overthrowing the LDP, Japan's voters have turfed out not just a party, but a whole system.
Italy's political system encourages the forming of alliances, and the Democratic Party has teamed with the more left-wing Left Ecology Freedom party.
The election is based on a proportional representation system that requires voters to select a party's list of candidates rather than one specific individual.
After all, that's what happened to the last great moral issue to rattle the American party system: alcohol prohibition.
Under the stifling, consensus-based post-war system, based on a Social Democrat-People's Party duopoly, mentioning the issue smacked of bad manners.
Apartheid was the nation's system of legalized racial segregation that was enforced by the National Party government between 1948 and 1994.
Ms Dyer claims she appealed against the decision and questioned the scoring system - and that she wrote to the party's general secretary, Colin Smyth - but received no response.
Oxfordshire's Labour leader Liz Brighouse said her party would consider changing the current repair system by setting up "a not for profit organisation to do the work", as this might be more cost-effective.
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