courtesy of www.congress.gov.ph
A formal vote threshold is the share of the total votes that a party has to obtain in order to qualify for a seat. In some countries, the formal threshold is higher to lessen the number of parties in the parliament and making it easier to form a government. In Germany, it has 5-percent, Poland has 7-percent and Turkey has 10 percent.
According to a blogger, Global Economy Matters, “the ten percent threshold was introduced by the 1980-83 military government to prevent a recurrence of the excessive parliamentary fragmentation and resulting governmental instability that characterized Turkish politics for much of the 1970s - has had a mixed record over the years.” (http://globaleconomydoesmatter.blogspot.com/2007/07/turkeys-early-parliamentary-election-of.html).
courtesy of www.congress.gov.ph
The formal vote threshold for the Philippine party-list system can be deduced from Section 11 of the Party-List System Act (Republic Act 7941). The said provision specifies that a party-list group that obtained at least 2% of the total votes cast for the party is entitled to a seat.
The party-list system in the Philippines is instituted to give the marginalized and under-represented sectors of its society representation in the House of Representatives and it comprises 20% of the entire number of representatives as specified by the Constitution. Although, it has not been reached since party-list elections have been conducted since 1998.
With the two-percent threshold only a small number of parties are able to obtain a party-list seat. In the last election, there are 17 out 93 participating party-list groups are represented.
If the formal vote threshold is removed and the Largest Remainder Method will be used, about 40 parties will gain seats for the 2007-2010 House of Representatives. If the formal threshold is fixed at one-half of the informal threshold which is 1/(total number of party-list seats) about 36 parties can make it. See our computations below.
Formal Threshold at Four-Percent
Formal Threshold at Two-Percent
Formal Threshold at 0.9091-Percent
No Formal Threshold
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