Election threshold

The electoral threshold is the minimum share of the vote which a political party requires to secure any representation.

This limit can operate in various ways. For example:

In party-list proportional representation systems, an election threshold is a rule that requires that a party must receive a specified minimum percentage of votes (e.g. 5%), either nationally or within a particular district, to obtain any seats in the parliament.

If there are a number of multi-member constituencies, each constituency will have a quota, i.e. a minimum percentage of the votes in that constituency to be awarded one seat.

One can define two boundaries: a threshold of representation is the minimum vote share that might yield a party a seat (under the most favorable circumstances for the party), while the threshold of exclusion is the maximum vote share that could be insufficient to yield a party a seat (under the least favorable circumstances for the party). Lijphart suggested calculating the informal threshold as the mean of these.