Political transitions contain volatile moments when long established political landscapes change markedly. Old political sensibilities are challenged. New political forces are constituted. Popular social groups claim new rights. Even where transitions are peacefully negotiated, new institutional arrangements are fragile, and the opportunities for securing democracy are uncertain. The destabilizing effects of transitional moments thus pose challenging questions about what kind of democracy can be consolidated. They impel us to go beyond the question of the emergence of democracies to the kind of democracies that are emerging and to develop analytical frames for evaluating the extension of democratic rights after transitions. Highlighting this challenge, Guillermo O'Donnell has noted that recent transitions have produced polities that must be called polyarchies but that display apparently systematic variations in the social reach of democratic rights. O'Donnell color-codes emerging democracies in to blue where the state enjoys a high social presence and public authority through effective bureaucracy and the rule of law, green where the state's territorial penetration is high but its fiunctional penetration is not, and where the state's presence is virtually nil on both indices. In brown areas, O'Donnell argues, the state's components of democratic legality, and hence, of publicness and citizenship, fade away at the frontiers of various regions and class, gender and ethnic relations; the polity is characterized by low-intensity citizenship.1 This image of posttransition polities signals the differential spread of democratic rights; much might be learned from an analysis of democratization that maps changes in the configuration of blue, green, and brown areas. If definition and institutionalization of areas during a transition can be explained, democratization processes can be better understood, and the prospects of consolidation can be better gauged. In modemrn democracies the electoral system provides the definitive institutional mechanism of political competition and participation. Electoral systems are pivotal in structuring the actions and interests of politicians in both intraand interparty relations. In addition, as Scott Mainwaring has noted, the political origins of electoral systems show how politicians design electoral institutions to promote their own political advantages.2 The relationship between electoral design and the expansion