"Communists were a minority in New York City.They got some representation," says Arend Liphartof the University of California at San Diego.

Cincinnati repealed PR in 1957 shortly afterthe election of Theodore Barry--a Black man--toits city council, says Joseph F. Zimmerman, anexpert on PR at the State University of New Yorkat Albany. And he says the timing of the twoevents is probably not a coincidence.

"It may not have been the only reason, but it'scertainly one of them," says Zimmerman. "Butagain, that's what the system was designed to do,ensure minority representation."

In fact, PR seems o work so well that electoralreformers seeking to give racial minorities a sayin government are also attracted to it.

"I wish we could get it adopted in the South,"says Edward Still, a lawyer in Birmingham, Alabamawho has mounted several challenges to electoralsystems under the federal Voting Rights Act. "Ithink it would solve a lot of our problems."

But, Still says, "I can't seem to get anyoneinterested in it. No one seems to understand it."

Several Southern towns have implemented formsof at-large voting systems, still says, givingBlacks a long missing voice in municipalgovernment. A full-fledged PR system, he says,would make the situation even better.

But Still says the nuances of PR often confusepeople into thinking that it threatens democracy.

"People think about quotas or the European listsystem and they say, 'Wait a minute. When I wentto school, we read that that's what allowed Hitlerto come to power.'"

"The political parties don't like it exactlybecause it didn't give the party bosses muchcontrol," Still says. "They hated it."

IN the United Kingdom, where thedominant Conservative and Labour parties oftenshut out groups with broader-based support, PR isalso a controversial topic.

In the 1983 general election, for example, analliance between the Liberal Party and the SocialDemocratic Party (SDP) received 25 percent of thevote nationwide but only 23 seats in Parliament.The minority Labour party won more than 250 seatswith 27 percent of the vote.

Many British citizens now say that the UKshould follow its continental counterparts andadopt PR.

"Straightforwardly, it comes back wheneverthere's a strong third party," says former SDPleader Shirley Williams, the acting director ofHarvard's Institute of Politics. "If you have aneffective third party, the `first-past-the-post'system is so unfair."

In fact, Zimmerman says political parties havegood reason to dislike PR because they depend onloyalty to a platform that a transferable systemis designed to eliminate.