The electoral threshold in the Belgian regional elections: the best way to fight fragmentation?

In many proportional representation (PR) systems, a legal electoral threshold has been implemented. Such a threshold reserves the allocation of seats to those parties which reach a minimum number of votes or a percentage of the votes. Since 2004, a legal threshold of five per cent has been introduced for the Belgian regional elections, following the introduction two years earlier of the same mechanism for the federal elections. The main reason behind this electoral reform – in a country which has been quite stable on this regard – was to prevent the further fragmentation of the political spect... Mehr ...