[pp.int.general] Pirates and election thresholds!

[Sven Clement]

On Aug 22, 2010, at 12:00 PM, Rickard Olsson wrote:

> Christian Hufgard skrev:
>> 
>> court confirmed the threshold also, due to the possible problems in
>> forming a stable gouvernment, if there would be more than just a few
>> parties in the gouvernment.
> I believe you meant "parliament" in that last sentence.

Yes and no ;) The major argument brought against allowing everybody to enter (given he got enough votes for a seat) is that, governments will be less stable if they have to form a coalition with smaller (often more extremist) parties (as seen in Israel).

> 
> Some kind of threshold is probably a good thing to avoid getting a dozen one-man parties into parliament, but a too large threshold robs a potentially large section of the voters from representation. It's a balance. I'd guess that somewhere between 1 and 4% is a reasonable threshhold, depending on the size of the parliament.

1% would mean in Germany that you would get (approx.) 6 seats. So I could probably accept such a threshold, if I look at Luxembourg, we find that we have no threshold but as we only have 60 seats in the parliament a party will have to get more than 1% so it would be fine too!

> 
> OTOH, we sometimes hear that voting for a party that won't get into parliament is a waste of a vote. I usually respond that,voting for a party and issues that are already represented in parliament is really wasting your vote as that does not change anything. ;-)

;) Good point, but I'm still convinced that there are to many voters voting tactically :/

Sven

> 
> 
> / Richie
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