At the general elections, the Belgian voter can either vote for an entire party (a vote on top of the candidate-list) or vote for a candidate on that list. The general, elections of november 8th, 1981 featured a notable fall of the percentage of preferential votes by 4,46 %, although this proportion was steadily rising since 1958, by an average of 3,67 % each election year. Although the use of preferential votes is varying from one constituency to another, and from one party to another, the order of constituencies and parties, ranked by their proportion of preferential votes, did not change profoundly. The remarkable drop of the overall proportion of preferential votes is probably due to the shift from preferential votes to list-votes by the bulk of voters who fled from the christian-democratic parties to the liberals, the flemish-nationalists and the ecologists.