This model, which is tending to replace the preceding one in the advanced democracies, is less perfected and less wide-spread to date. But its most significant features are beginning to emerge in most western countries which have shared the same experience of prosperity, peace, openness to the world and liberalisation of morals over recent decades. Those transformations of living conditions have fostered the emergence of a culture described by Ron Inglehart as postmaterialist, a culture whose features he has described and whose consequences on electors’ attitudes and political behaviour he has assessed.

a. The logic of representation has clearly abandoned the principles of loyalty under the system of faithful patronage and affiliation to a particular socio-cultural category. It has come closer to the logic of the market. From the supply constituted by the available parties and candidates, the elector makes a choice which best – or least badly – matches his or her present demands. Those demands are ranked by each person in the light of the priorities which he or she gives to the issues at stake (security, employment, environment protection, moral liberation, taxation, globalisation, etc). As a result, the system no longer represents social groups but the aggregation of individual priorities assigned to the various public policies.

b. The logic of the selection is therefore eminently political: the electors choose the people who seem to them to be the most capable of understanding their dominant demands and of supplying them with answers or, if you like, the “political enterprises” best satisfying the “call for tenders” that elections now represent for the electorate.

c. The logic of the investiture is very much present: what is involved is a contract conclude between the “consumer” of public policies and the “entrepreneur” whom the consumer instructs to resolve his or her problems. But the contract is a precarious one. It clearly constitutes a fixed term contract for the achievement of a priority objective. So much so that the vote is as much concerned with sanctions as it is with investiture. The consumer may try out a new product, but he or she may reject it with a clear conscience if he or she does not find it entirely satisfactory. Electoral behaviour was so stable in the past that people did not shrink from likening it to geology. It is so volatile nowadays that it may be more appropriate to liken it to the dramatic changes more familiar to the field of meteorology.

d. The most functional voting method in a model of this kind is certainly first-past-the-postor majority, which clearly invests and sanctions and favours alternating between political partiesin power. But such a system may suffer from the drawback that it does not leave enough roomfor emerging movements susceptible of capturing new demands. As a result, in this new culturethere is a blossoming of proposals for, or attempts at, implementing hybrid systems,predominantly first-past-the-post (or majoritarian) for the purpose of having alternating parties inpower, but embodying a corrective feature of proportional representation in order to allow forinnovation.