[en] A new statistical description of hadronic charged-particle multiplicity distributions is presented, which takes into account the associated neutral multiplicity and charge conservation. A simple Gamma distribution is used to generate fictitious intermediate neutral objects that have equal probability of becoming single neutral hadrons or charged hadron pairs. The resulting charged multiplicity distributions are very similar to those generated by the negative binomial distribution, which has been very successful in describing the data. Diffractive, non-diffractive and single-jet multiplicities are well fitted by this procedure. Good fits to e⁺e/sup /minus// charged multiplicity distributions are also obtained by assuming that each such distribution is the result of the statistical addition of two identical and independent single-jet hadronic-type distributions. The success in fitting e⁺e/sup /minus// data by using hadronic single-jet distributions provides a new insight on universality. 13 refs., 4 figs