Gideon Rahat, Reuven Y. Hazan and Richard S. Katz, "Democracy and Political Parties: On the Uneasy Relationships between Participation, Competition and Representation," Party Politics, 14 (November, 2008), 663-683.

First paragraph:
Political democracy is a messy concept, implicating many values that are not always mutually compatible. Whether this messiness is ameliorated, exacerbated or merely reproduced when one moves from a single level, or a single institution, to consider the interactions either among multiple levels of government or among the various organizations that collectively institutionalize democracy at a single level, has long been a concern of both normative theorists and empirical researchers. In general terms, was John central government, not only is not political freedom, but often creates a spirit precisely the reverse', or, alternatively, should we agree with Giovanni Sartori (1965: 124) that 'democracy on a large scale is not the sum of many little democracies'?

Figures and Tables:

Table 1. Hypotheses concerning the relationship within parties between participation, representation and competitiveness in three kinds of selectorates

Table 2. Competition in three kinds of selectorates: an analysis of candidate lists

Table 3. Competition in two kinds of selectorates: an analysis of intra-party selection results

Table 4. Representation of women in Knesset candidate lists according to three kinds of selectorates

Figure 1. Women's representation in Israel and in PR democracies, 1950-2003

Appendix: The Measurements

Second to Last Paragraph:
We find that the three democratic values of inclusive participation, competition and representativeness are unlikely to be simultaneously maximized in a single institution. Rather, the relationships among these values may be non-linear, or even negative. In particular, those parties with the most inclusive candidate selection procedures - those that are most internally democratic - produce lists of candidates that are least representative and experience only medium levels of competition.