The emerging democracies tend legitimately to skip stages of political, economic and social development in order to take short cuts to catch up with the developed states which took decades and sometimes centuries to mature. It would be pointless and unjust to preach patience to them. That said, it is wise to help them to make at the start of their democratisation process the fundamental choices that are going to shape how they develop, in full knowledge of the facts. From the point of view of electoral systems which is our subject here, this preliminary phase, should, at the “constitutive moment” cover three aspects: initial identification of the nature and degree of segmentation, the choice of a model of citizenship and finally, the choice of giving electoral democracy greater or lesser influence over governance.