Electoral Thresholds

[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.

[YL]

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.)

Oops, should have looked them up before posting.  The results do tend to look rather like I imagine no threshold ones would; presumably you would get a handful of parties winning a single seat each if there were no threshold at all.