Electoral Thresholds

[DC Al Fine]

After the recent German elections results, the 5% threshold has come under fire in the forum. Approximately 14% of German voters will not have their preferred party in parliament and the election results indicate some vote splitting between the FDP and AfD, usually the domain First Past The Post.

Stability seems to be the main reason for electoral thresholds. Germany understandably adopted their current threshold with the Weimar Republic fresh in their minds. They wanted stable government after the instability of Weimar, but I am skeptical if their system would've worked in Weimar. It would've been extremely difficult to form a workable government in a legislature with large Nazi and Communist contingents. The issue with stability seems to mostly be due to the parties involved rather than the system.

Also if stability is the main aim, there are far more stable systems out there like FPTP or the 2-Round system. The electoral threshold approach seems to get the worst of both world, mixing disproportionate results with potential instability.

I lean towards reducing or even eliminating thresholds. If a party can obtain enough votes to get 1/#of seats %, they should be entitled to their 1 seat in the legislature.

How about you? Should electoral thresholds be reduced or abolished or do you think they should be maintained or even increased?

[barfbag]

We're too used to the current system to change numbers, but the states should be able to allocate their electoral votes how they want to.

[YL]

There are two (at least) countries which do use national list PR with no threshold: Israel and the Netherlands. Both do indeed have rather fragmented party systems with small parties getting a seat or two on vote shares that would be below the threshold in Germany, and I get the impression that this can make government formation harder.

My personal preference is STV in modest (Northern Ireland has it about right) sized constituencies. This deals with the vote-splitting problem, assuming party A's voters actually preference party B and vice versa so that one of them will get in if their combined share is enough, but you shouldn't get parties getting in on tiny shares of the vote.  (I don't mean the perversion of STV used for the Australian Senate: voters should determine their own preferences rather than have them allocated by their first choice party.) It isn't perfect, though.

Some countries (e.g. Spain, or the UK for European elections) use lists in fairly small constituencies, so you get a fairly high natural threshold, rather than the slightly artificial-seeming one of the German system.  But you still get the vote-splitting problem: indeed I suspect my region is going to elect four right-wing MEPs out of six next year on vote shares which don't justify that.

[greenforest32]

I don't have much experience with proportional representation and I always assumed electoral thresholds in the low single digits were this neutrally benign thing. I hadn't even considered the cumulative percentage of votes that could be blocked from getting any seats. Having an election where 14% of the vote is ignored in a sense doesn't sound like a good thing. I'd rather see more equal representation as I don't think there's any real harm in political views being expressed and represented in a legislature.

And stability shouldn't be so highly valued that you essentially block opposing views. I mean just look at what FPTP does on the state level here in the United States. Democrats have 96% of the seats in the Hawaii State Senate for example (24/25 seats). Does anybody think Republicans only get 4% of the vote there? Similar thing happens in reverse for Democrats in chambers like the Wyoming State House.

So basically I agree with you on the thresholds OP. Thresholds should be very low though a small one would still exist if they were eliminated completely as a party would have to get a high enough fractional % to get a seat (I don't see how they'd get 25% of 1 seat for example).

[TNF]

I'd say 1% would be a good threshold to have.

[You kip if you want to...]

I imagine they took it on to avoid their pre-war problems and keep to to keep out the NDP.

[Hatman 🍁]

I imagine they took it on to avoid their pre-war problems and keep to to keep out the NDP.

NPD

Anyways, I of course support no threshold at all (thresholds are arbitrary). BUT my ideal system would be based on a bicameral system where the upper house is elected by PR (with divisions of 10 Senators elected by PR in each division) and a lower house elected by AV like in Australia.

The only time I would use a threshold is where there are uneven PR divisions (one region electing 10 PR Members and another . I would make a threshold on the larger division so that it isn't easier to get elected in the 10 seat division than the 8.

[DC Al Fine]

I imagine they took it on to avoid their pre-war problems and keep to to keep out the NDP.

NPD

Anyways, I of course support no threshold at all (thresholds are arbitrary). BUT my ideal system would be based on a bicameral system where the upper house is elected by PR (with divisions of 10 Senators elected by PR in each division) and a lower house elected by AV like in Australia.

The only time I would use a threshold is where there are uneven PR divisions (one region electing 10 PR Members and another . I would make a threshold on the larger division so that it isn't easier to get elected in the 10 seat division than the 8.

I'm kind of surprised that you support AV? How come?

[Sol]

As low as is reasonably possible- .1%?

[angus]

How about you? Should electoral thresholds be reduced or abolished or do you think they should be maintained or even increased?

I'm not for it.  Anyway, we don't have it in the US because we have a "first past the post" system, to use the language of wonks, so the concept of the threshold doesn't apply.  Some states have ballot-access thresholds, however, and the debates always some threshold allowance.  I'm generally against them altogether for the USA. 

In societies where there's a parliamentary system, like Germany, their own internal rules might make sense, but I'd have them lower.  You have to figure out how to slice the pie.  I'm not sure how many seats the Bundestag has, but if it has 500 seats, then make the threshold 1/500 of all votes, or two-tenths of one percent.  That way a party gets represented proportionally.  Even that would present logistical challenges, though, because getting enough for one seat in one region is different than getting enough for one seat, but having it distributed throughout the land.   

[Hatman 🍁]

I imagine they took it on to avoid their pre-war problems and keep to to keep out the NDP.

NPD

Anyways, I of course support no threshold at all (thresholds are arbitrary). BUT my ideal system would be based on a bicameral system where the upper house is elected by PR (with divisions of 10 Senators elected by PR in each division) and a lower house elected by AV like in Australia.

The only time I would use a threshold is where there are uneven PR divisions (one region electing 10 PR Members and another . I would make a threshold on the larger division so that it isn't easier to get elected in the 10 seat division than the 8.

I'm kind of surprised that you support AV? How come?

Only for one house.

[freefair]

I'd be fine with a 3.5% Threshold. Sounds about right to me.

[Hatman 🍁]

Thresholds are inherently arbitrary. ANY number you come up with is just going to be pulled out of your arse.

[DC Al Fine]

I imagine they took it on to avoid their pre-war problems and keep to to keep out the NDP.

NPD

Anyways, I of course support no threshold at all (thresholds are arbitrary). BUT my ideal system would be based on a bicameral system where the upper house is elected by PR (with divisions of 10 Senators elected by PR in each division) and a lower house elected by AV like in Australia.

The only time I would use a threshold is where there are uneven PR divisions (one region electing 10 PR Members and another . I would make a threshold on the larger division so that it isn't easier to get elected in the 10 seat division than the 8.

I'm kind of surprised that you support AV? How come?

Only for one house.

I know that. It just seems surprising. Most of your rhetoric about electoral reform is about having proportional representation, yet AV seems to promote 2-party rule even more than FPTP. What am I missing in your logic?

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

The main problem (or benefit depending on your POV) with the high 5% threshold is that it keeps regional parties from forming.  The only party that is even close to being a regional party is the CSU, but as far as I can tell, that would be like saying the DFL of Minnesota is separate from the Democratic Party here.  Even then the CSU is only able to win party list seats some of the time. In 2009, all it got were the 45 constituency seats of Bavaria.

[Lief 🗽]

5% is good. Low thresholds result in un-democratic outcomes, as the glut of small, often extreme parties in the parliament force grand coalitions at best (which just leads to neoliberal moderate heroism and no change in governing ideology from election to election) or government paralysis at worst (like in Belgium, which leads to unelected bureaucrats essentially running the country).

[Franknburger]

A few general remarks first:
1. The two-chamber approach proposed by Hatman is difficult to apply to a Federation, where the second chamber serves representing member states interests. Note especially in this respect that the division of responsibilities between the German Bundestag (parliament) and Bundesrat (state representation) is quite different from the US-American one. The Bundesrat does not have any direct legislative nor budgetary power, but instead can veto on all federal legislation that affects state rights.
The way the German fiscal and administrative system is made up, a good part of federal legislation affects the states, either income-wise (as revenue from most taxes is shared between federation and states), or cost-wise (as the states are responsible for most implementation tasks). This gives the Bundesrat quite some leverage, which is partly also used in a partisan way (e.g. for blocking certain tax reforms). Most of the Bundesrat discussion and vote, however, is about technical issues such as implementation structures and procedures for federal legislation, and financial compensation by the federal government for tasks to be taken over by the states.
In line with this scope and function, Bundesrat members are not directly elected, but become so as member of their states' governments. Each state delegation has to vote as a block. Whether this system is practical or not is another discussion (I personally think it has served Germany quite well, and spared us a lot of "state rights" discussion, as well as the whole earmarking stuff).

2. PV electoral systems have a natural electoral threshold, which depends on the number of seats. This number, in turn, tends to reflect the size of the country in question. In the case of the Netherlands (150 seats in the second chamber), the natural electoral threshold is around 0.66%. In Germany (598 Bundestag seats), it gets below 0.17%. Considering mini parties staying even below that threshold, and vote allocation according to Ste. League (favouring smaller parties), the effective natural threshold in Germany might get as low as 0.15%. Without PV, in addition to the FDP and the AfD, another 7-8 parties would have gained parliamentary seats in the recent German federal election, only two of which (Pirates and NPD), however, passed the Dutch natural threshold.

3. A way to work around this effect is PV for separate "mega-constituencies". The Weimar Republic had 35 such constituencies, with between six to seventeen seats per constituency distributed by PV. The result was a natural electoral threshold between 6% and 16%, which was partially balanced by allowing to cast over "unused" votes to neighbouring districts, with a final compensation being done
on the national level. Nevertheless, the 1924 elections had the Bayerische Bauernbund, a regionalist Bavarian party, gaining three seats from 0.7% of the vote, while the USPD lost representation, as their 0.8% were too dispersed to anywhere cross the national threshold. Equally, the regionalist Deutsch-Hannoversche Partei gained 5 seats on their 1.1%, the Deutschsoziale Partei, with slightly more votes only 4 seats. Similar imbalances have been discussed for the recent Norwegian election (Norway's electoral system is similar to the Weimar one), and  will as well become obvious in the upcoming Luxemburg elections.

In short - the 5% threshold level is debatable. Following a ruling  by the German Constitutional Court, the electoral  threshold for the European Parliament has in Germany been lowered to 3%. It might also make sense to harmonise the electoral threshold with the public financing threshold - German parties are entitled to some 3 Euros public funding per vote received, provided they have received more than 1% of the vote.

The main problem (or benefit depending on your POV) with the high 5% threshold is that it keeps regional parties from forming.  The only party that is even close to being a regional party is the CSU, but as far as I can tell, that would be like saying the DFL of Minnesota is separate from the Democratic Party here.  Even then the CSU is only able to win party list seats some of the time. In 2009, all it got were the 45 constituency seats of Bavaria.

In Germany, parties need to either pass the 5% threshold, or gain at least three constituencies for their votes to be considered in PV. In 1994, this allowed the PDS (now Die Linke, at that time still very much an East German party) to enter the Bundestag at 4.4% of the total vote. Ethnic minority parties are generally exempt from the 5% threshold. This is in particular relevant for the Danish minority party SSW in Schleswig-Holstein state elections.

[minionofmidas]

A threshold at the equivalent of 30 parliamentary seats (which is what we have in Germany) is objectively ridiculous. Then again, so is awarding a seat for ~1/1200 of the vote, which is what you get if you distribute proportionally among 600 seats.
The answer, of course, is regional multimember constituencies, which is what most of the world does anyways (though usually they're too small for my liking) and can be better combined with a system of candidate preference votes, which are sadly lacking in Germany.

[minionofmidas]

Fully proportional federal result, Germany 2013

CDU 205
SPD 154
Left 51
Greens 51
CSU 45
FDP 29
AfD 28
Pirates 13
NPD 8
FW 6
Animal Protection Party 2
ÖDP 2
REP 1
PARTEI 1
pro deutschland 1
Bavaria Party 1 (0.131% nationally)

[Bacon King]

The main problem (or benefit depending on your POV) with the high 5% threshold is that it keeps regional parties from forming.  The only party that is even close to being a regional party is the CSU, but as far as I can tell, that would be like saying the DFL of Minnesota is separate from the Democratic Party here.  Even then the CSU is only able to win party list seats some of the time. In 2009, all it got were the 45 constituency seats of Bavaria.

It only got the 45 constituency seats because that's all it was entitled to proportionately receive, though. Per German law, any party that wins at least 3 constituency seats doesn't face the threshold, so there's nothing prohibiting the formation of regional parties as long as they're strong enough to win a few direct mandates.

[traininthedistance]

5% is too high- it's a pretty big distortion that something like 14 percent of voters aren't represented at all in the Bundestag.  But some sort of threshold, probably higher than the "natural" threshold, seems prudent in the interest of promoting results that exclude the worst extremist fringes and allow for easier coalition formation.  In a vacuum, I'd say that 2 percent (isn't that what Norway has?) sounds about right.

Though, and I can't exactly fault Germany for doing this, I'm sure it'll stay at 5 as long as that's what it takes to keep the neo-Nazis out of the Bundestag.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

If one applies a variant of the cube root rule to the threshold, then for a 598 seat parliament with no overhang seats and 43,702,474 valid votes, the threshold would be 615,704 votes, enough to allow the FDP, AfD and Pirates in, but keep the NPD out.

[minionofmidas]

There are two (at least) countries which do use national list PR with no threshold: Israel and the Netherlands.

Just noticed this - it's factually incorrect. Their thresholds are low - funny low in the case of the Netherlands at 1/150th of the vote - but they do have thresholds. Israel's is 2%.

Roughly speaking, these thresholds eliminate those who'd win only a single seat. (The countries and their parliaments being a lot smaller than Germany.)

Norway has regional constituencies and some national equalization mandates, and a 4% threshold to partake in these. The result is that parties that narrowly fail the national threshold still get a seat or three, which always struck me as fair enough.

[minionofmidas]

2. PV electoral systems have a natural electoral threshold, which depends on the number of seats. This number, in turn, tends to reflect the size of the country in question. In the case of the Netherlands (150 seats in the second chamber), the natural electoral threshold is around 0.66%. In Germany (598 Bundestag seats), it gets below 0.17%. Considering mini parties staying even below that threshold, and vote allocation according to Ste. League (favouring smaller parties), the effective natural threshold in Germany might get as low as 0.15%. Without PV, in addition to the FDP and the AfD, another 7-8 parties would have gained parliamentary seats in the recent German federal election, only two of which (Pirates and NPD), however, passed the Dutch natural threshold.

One should never read threads too carefully. More misconceptions here.

The natural threshold is not at 1/n, but at 1/2n (wn being the number of seats available.) That way 0.55 gets rounded up and 0.45 rounded down just like 17.55 gets rounded up and 17.45 gets rounded down. The Dutch actually have of electoral threshold at 2/3 of a percent, as mentioned - but, low and inoffensive as it is, it's not a natural threshold. The GDR election of 1990 is the only election under national pr without unnatural thresholds that I can think of.

warning - following paragraph starts as minor but relevant correction, then segues into weird aside -

Ste Lague doesn't actually favor smaller parties- it does so compared to D'Hondt but that's because only D'Hondt just is not all that proportional, not because of anything about Ste Lague. Hare-Niemeyer without a threshold OTOH does tend to favor very small parties and, worse, do so inconsistently and unpredictably. Where that is a non-issue - for the first distribution of seats in Germany in 2005 and 2009 for example, thanks to the threshold - Hare and Ste Lague almost always produce the exact same results, and for a simple reason: You can express either system as dividing party vote / total vote * no. of seats, rounded, with the only difference being how you go about healing the frequent rounding errors. Because of the way votes stack up - which tends to follow power laws, at least unless you have highly restrictive ballot access legislation - a high natural threshold (ie a small seat number) frequently means a lot of parties with seat dues of 0.3, 0.2, 0.1 etcpp, thus a large cumulative rounded down seat due, thus rounding error that, under Hare-Niemeyer, is fixed by simply rounding up the largest <.5 remainders, most of whom will come from parties under 0.5 of a seat. The recent Tunisian election (Hare-Niemeyer in constituencies, no threshold, huge reams of unknown parties) produced a bonanza of such effects.

[Lief 🗽]

Elections are ultimately simply a means to an end. If it were possible to create representative, benevolent, stable, and effective governments without going through the expensive, time-consuming and divisive pageantry of elections, then surely we would (or we should at least). Unfortunately that's not possible, so we look to elections to create those governments, and we craft our electoral systems to best achieve those ends (representativeness, stability, coherence, efficiency, accountability... I'm sure you can think of other values that are important as well). So while I think the focus on representativeness is important, it's not the most important value in the governments we want our electoral systems to result in. While it might be nice to allow a party that 2% of the population supports to have a couple of seats in the parliament, that generally detracts from the governments satisfying all of those other values. That's why I support relatively high and restrictive thresholds.