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The four Southern European democracies ‐ Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece ‐ have a number of important cultural, social, economic, and historical characteristics in common, and their political systems are also often seen as similar, representing a ‘Mediterranean model of democracy’. However, when these four democratic regimes are compared with the world's other democracies in terms of the contrasting majoritarian and consensus models, they turn out not to form a distinctive and cohesive cluster. The concluding section suggests several explanations for this unexpected finding.