There was clearly a bandwagon effect in the Northern Ireland election: once the DUP and Sinn Féin had established themselves in 2003 as the leading party in each community, this gave them a pulling power vis-à-vis each of their rivals. Organisational skills were then deployed effectively to maximise this effect, as well as to marginalise challenges from dissidents.
Everything now depends on next week's test of strength between Ian Paisley and the two governments.
Clearly, the DUP leader wants to enter and lead a new Northern Ireland executive - but he wants first of all to win one last round in his two-front battle against Sinn Féin and the British government - at this stage directed even more, perhaps, against the latter than the former.
As far as Sinn Féin is concerned, given the clarity of the commitment to policing given by both leader and party, Paisley could have had little more of consequence to say on that subject if Michelle Gildernew had not walked into the kind of trap which her leaders have proved so adept at dodging by a combination of fudge and bluster.
She answered negatively a question about whether she would inform the PSNI if she had information about a dissident republican plot for an act of violence.
How Adams and McGuinness must have cursed when they heard of her blunder, which gave a fresh lever to the DUP.
In relation to the British government, Paisley clearly wants to be seen to have won whatever financial concessions it may be prepared to make in order to secure closure on the power-sharing issue.
He does not want any of the credit for whatever may be forthcoming to accrue to an executive established in due course with Sinn Féin participation.
Although at the time of writing the signs are positive, there is always a danger that Paisley might misjudge his room for manoeuvre at this final stage through giving ground to his party critics by once too often trying to face down the British government in order to buy off the dissidents in his party.
Success also depends on Gordon Brown being willing to concede enough financial aid to satisfy Paisley.
The chancellor may not be enthused about being asked to go out of his way to provide his colleague Tony Blair with a costly Northern Ireland "lap of honour", at the possible cost of problems with his native Scotland, where in the current election campaign the SNP is running ahead of the Labour Party.
But such concerns should be outweighed by the benefit to him, as a likely successor to Blair, of getting free of the burden of direct rule in Northern Ireland and of the seemingly endless negotiating process with its disputatious parties.
In the meantime, we can learn something about forces which may be working under the surface in Northern Ireland by analysing how voters last week used their lower transfers, which came into play after the candidates to whom they gave their first preferences had been either elected or eliminated.
First of all, it has to be said that the extent to which voters for most Northern parties used their preferences to the full was most impressive. Voters there certainly understand PR and know how to make it work to satisfy their political aspirations.
Sinn Féin voters were particularly assiduous PR voters, voting right down the ticket - even to the point of giving their final preferences to one or other of the DUP candidates. The surpluses of elected Sinn Féin candidates, as well as the votes of those eliminated, passed on massively to the SDLP, although in Strangford the transfer of one-fifth of the Sinn Féin preferences to the Alliance and Green candidates allowed the DUP to take the last seat from the SDLP by barely 30 votes.
In Mid-Ulster, many of the votes Sinn Féin had won from the SDLP were returned to them through the transfer of 90 per cent of Martin McGuinness's surplus, which elected the SDLP's Patsy McGlone.
By contrast, in Lagan Valley, the only constituency where a transfer of SDLP votes took place, their votes helped to elect both the Sinn Féin and the Alliance candidates - but, interestingly, it was Trevor Nunn of Alliance who received a majority of these SDLP transfers.
The Green Party's voters were less inclined than others to transfer down the line. In three constituencies between one-fifth and one-third of their votes were non-transferable.
However, from the voting pattern of Green supporters who did vote down the ticket it is clear that two-thirds of these voters come from the minority nationalist community - and barely 5 per cent of their preferences were exercised in favour of DUP candidates. However, in the two cases where Alliance candidates remained in the running at a time when a Green candidate was being eliminated, that party was the favoured recipient of Green transfers.
Two-thirds of Alliance voters passed their next preferences to unionist rather than to nationalist candidates, confirming what has been believed to be the ethnic balance of Alliance support.
However, in the two cases in which Green Party candidates were still in the running, one-third of Alliance preferences went to them.
Is there any evidence of cross-community transfers? Yes, in three special cases - all involving UUP voters.
In South Antrim, one-fifth of David Burnside's surplus transferred to the SDLP rather than to DUP candidates, and in Strangford one-third of the surplus of UUP candidate David McNarry also passed to the SDLP candidate - almost, but not quite, enough to enable him to defeat the third DUP candidate in that constituency.
That would have happened if, as mentioned earlier, one-fifth of Sinn Féin transfers had not been passed to Alliance and the Green Party rather than to the SDLP.
Finally, in Foyle almost the whole of the DUP surplus went to the much weaker UUP candidate, but when he was eliminated, at a stage when no other unionist candidate remained in the race, despite the large DUP element in these transfers half of the votes then held by the UUP transferred to nationalist candidates - 99 per cent to the SDLP as against 1 per cent to Sinn Féin .
These represent the first faint signs of a departure from the deeply-entrenched ethnic voting tradition of Northern Ireland.