EUROPEAN POLITICS FUNDAMENTALS — Chapter 8, Exercise 1
Threshold and Fragmentation
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QUESTION:
Using the real Dutch effective threshold of roughly 0.67% against
Germany's real formal 5% threshold, explain why the Netherlands
ended up with 17 parties holding seats in 2021 while Germany's own
Bundestag stays considerably more consolidated.

SOLUTION:

The difference comes directly from how high a party's vote share has
to climb before it can actually win a seat in each system.

In the Netherlands, there is no legal minimum threshold at all — the
only real barrier is winning enough votes for just one of the 150
seats in a single nationwide constituency, which works out to
roughly 0.67% of the national vote. Any party that can clear that
very low bar wins representation, so genuinely small or niche parties
— appealing to a narrow slice of voters — can still enter parliament.
This is exactly what produced the 17 parties with seats after the
March 2021 election.

In Germany, by contrast, a party must clear a formal 5% threshold
(with a small number of alternative routes) before it wins any seats
under the proportional half of the mixed-member system at all. This
deliberately filters out smaller parties before they ever reach
parliament — a party winning, say, 3% of the vote nationally gets no
seats whatsoever, no matter how genuine its support base is.

The real result is that Germany's threshold acts as a filter applied
BEFORE seats are distributed, consolidating representation among
parties that have already cleared a meaningful support bar, while the
Netherlands' near-absent threshold lets representation spread out
across many more, smaller parties, each holding only a handful of
seats.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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The strongest answers explain the threshold as a genuine gatekeeping
mechanism applied before seats are ever awarded, rather than just
restating the two numbers (0.67% vs. 5%) without connecting them to
WHY one produces far more parties in parliament than the other.