The Progressive Liberal Party's stunning upset victory in the Bahamas a week ago demonstrates how the pendulum can swing in politics. Five years ago, the centre-right Free National Movement retained power with 35 seats in the island nation's 40-seat House of Assembly. The centre-left Progressive Liberal Party was cut down to just four seats while an independent held the other seat.

This time, it was the FNM's turn to be cut down to size, losing all but seven seats while the resurgent PLP added 25 and four independents were elected. No doubt there will be plenty of reasons offered for both the PLP's dramatic recovery and the FNM's stunning collapse, but one lesson Bermuda should ponder as the Boundaries Commission continues its work is whether it wants these sorts of swings of the pendulum here under a single seat constituency system.

To jump from four seats to 29 is more than commendable and Bahamas PLP leader (and now Prime Minister) Perry Christie deserves credit for rebuilding his party from the ruins of the Sir Lynden Pindling era. But the PLP's four seats in the previous House never reflected the true strength of the party any more than the FNM's seven seats do in this one; the price of single seat constituencies in small parliaments can be dominant government, weak opposition and wild swings of the pendulum from one election to the next -- as the FNM and the PLP have now learned.

Indeed, in the Bahamas' 40 seat House, the PLP's 52 percent of the vote turned into 72.5 percent of the seats. The FNM's 41 percent of the vote turned into 17.5 percent of the seats in the House with the remainder of the vote going to a third party and Independents.

Roughly the same thing occurred in the FNM "landslide" in the previous election.

Of course landslides and disproportionate representation can happen in Bermuda under the current system and in larger Parliaments as well. The 1985 General Election saw 31 United Bermuda Party seats, with the Progressive Labour Party reduced to just seven members. And the governing Canadian Progressive Conservatives saw their 300-plus MPs reduced to just two in the early 1990s as they were sandwiched between the Liberal Party and the far-right Reform Party.

But they seem to happen less frequently.

After the Bahamian election, the Nassau Guardian noted in an editorial that with 29 members, the Government could run roughshod for the next five years unless the Opposition was sufficiently strong and constructive. It added: "... too often a government comes to power after campaigning that it will be the servant of the people only for the people to find out that the government is their master. Hopefully that will not happen here."

The Guardian may well be disappointed. Big majorities breed arrogance, almost inevitably, as those who recall that 31-seat UBP majority under Sir John Swan from 1985 to 1989 will attest. Landslides are part of any electoral system. The risk in a small parliament with single seat constituencies is that they become the norm and that cannot be good for anyone.