Thresholds and Their Effect on Small Parties

Proportional representation is supposed to match seat share to vote share. A threshold breaks that promise on purpose. Before any seats are handed out, the system checks each party's national vote percentage against a fixed cut-off, often 3, 5, or 7 percent. Any party under that line is deleted from the count entirely, as if it had won zero votes. Only the surviving parties then divide up the seats, using their original votes but now as shares of a smaller, qualifying total.

This matters because deleting a small party does not waste its votes. It transfers them. Once the losers are removed, every remaining party's effective vote share rises, since the pie is now divided among fewer competitors. The biggest party usually gains the most seats from this, often ending up with a seat share larger than its vote share. That is exactly why thresholds exist: they are a deliberate trade-off, sacrificing exact proportionality to prevent a legislature from fracturing into dozens of tiny factions that make coalition government unworkable.

This connects directly to the comparison between electoral formulas elsewhere in the unit. A country using the same ballots but a different threshold, or no threshold at all, produces a different legislature from identical votes. Russia's 5 percent threshold and Germany's 5 percent threshold both erase small parties, while the Netherlands, with a threshold near 0.67 percent, lets dozens of small parties into parliament. The threshold, not the voters, decides how fragmented or consolidated the party system looks.