The article attempts to determine the effectiveness of elections as a mechanism for expressing political preferences, understood as the support for postulates (platforms) of political parties. An analysis of a simple model based on the assumption of rational issue-voting leads to a conclusion that preference expression is inevitably distorted by the necessity to vote on “packages” of issues/propositions of unequal support among those voting them. It also provides the correlates of effective preference articulation. The remainder of the article discusses other limitations – mainly of psychological nature – to the elections’ articulation function.