Home > 3.2 Proportional systems > Report on the Thresholds and other Features of Electoral Systems which bar Parties from acces to Parliament (II)
 
 
 
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Paragraph 62
 

Clearly the criterion is unsatisfactory, even though there has been little attempt to find an alternative. In practice, there are three different sets of circumstances:


- the major parties are assured in all cases of reasonable representation or even, in a proportional system, a greater or lesser degree of over-representation;
- small parties will never secure representation because they are always the victims of an explicit or implicit threshold;
- parties in an intermediate situation are a more complex case because they can hope to win a few seats but not in proportion to their election results. Is a party represented when it wins 5% of the votes and 1% of the seats? Here we need to refine our criteria, for example by specifying that parties are not represented if – say – their percentage of seats is less than one-third of their percentage of votes. At one time, Greek electoral law took account of this concern by providing that small parties that exceeded the national 3% threshold were entitled to a percentage of seats equal to at least 70% of their percentage of votes (though with somewhat perverse effects, since the necessary seats were removed from the party immediately above and so on, with the largest party the only one that was sure to be spared).