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63-516: A notable achievement of the GB/BHE was the German Federal Expellee Law . Waldemar Kraft founded the grouping in 1950 as BHE ( Block der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten , Bloc of Expellees and of those Deprived of Rights, the latter term serving as a euphemism for ex-Nazis) at Kiel , capital of Schleswig-Holstein , the state with the largest proportion (34%) of expellees. Kraft,

126-416: A legislature . This limit can operate in various ways; for example, in party-list proportional representation systems where an electoral threshold requires that a party must receive a specified minimum percentage of votes (e.g. 5%), either nationally or in a particular electoral district, to obtain seats in the legislature. In single transferable voting , the election threshold is called the quota, and it

189-653: A coalition of two or more parties submitting a joint electoral list and in Lithuania, additionally 7 percent for coalition). However, in New Zealand, if a party wins a directly elected seat, the threshold does not apply. The threshold is 3.25 percent in Israel's Knesset (it was 1% before 1992, 1.5% from 1992 to 2003 and 2% form 2003 to 2014) and 7 percent in the Turkish parliament . In Poland, ethnic minority parties do not have to reach

252-459: A district magnitude of approximately six or more in the districts used. Support for a party is not homogenous across an electorate, so a party with ten percent of the general vote is expected to easily achieve the threshold in at least one district even if not in others. Most STV systems used today set the number of votes for the election of most members at the Droop quota , which in a six-member district

315-711: A former member of the Nazi Party and President of the Chamber of Agriculture in the annexed Reichsgau Wartheland at Posen , from where he had fled to Ratzeburg in Schleswig-Holstein, had become spokesman of the Landmannschaft Weichsel – Warthe association within the German Federation of Expellees ( Bund der Vertriebenen , BdV) in 1949. Theodor Oberländer joined Kraft; he had had involvement in

378-544: A legal threshold. The Senate of Australia is elected using single transferable vote (STV) and does not use an electoral threshold or have a predictable "natural" or "hidden" threshold. At a normal election, each state returns six senators and the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory each return two. (For the states, the number is doubled in a double dissolution election.) As such,

441-604: A majority of votes, but nevertheless won an outright majority of seats due to a record number of votes for parties which failed to reach the threshold, including the Free Democratic Party (the CSU's coalition partner in the previous state parliament). In Germany in 2013 15.7 percent voted for a party that did not meet the 5 percent threshold. In contrast, elections that use the ranked voting system can take account of each voter's complete indicated ranking preference. For example,

504-603: A much lower wasted vote compared to the other years. In the Russian parliamentary elections in 1995 , with a threshold excluding parties under 5 percent, more than 45 percent of votes went to parties that failed to reach the threshold. In 1998, the Russian Constitutional Court found the threshold legal, taking into account limits in its use. After the first implementation of the threshold in Poland in 1993 34.4 percent of

567-518: A party winning an outright majority of seats without winning an outright majority of votes, the sort of outcome that a proportional voting system is supposed to prevent. For instance, the Turkish AKP won a majority of seats with less than 50 percent of votes in three consecutive elections (2002, 2007 and 2011). In the 2013 Bavarian state election , the Christian Social Union failed to obtain

630-419: A seat each and the proportion of wasted votes reduced slightly to 21 percent, but it again increased to 29 percent in 2010 due to an increase in number of participating parties. These statistics take no account of the wasted votes for a party which is entitled to more than three seats but cannot claim those seats due to the three-seat cap. Electoral thresholds can produce a spoiler effect , similar to that in

693-465: A stiff electoral threshold say that having a few seats in a legislature can significantly boost the profile of a party and that providing representation and possibly veto power for a party that receives only 1 percent of the vote is not appropriate. However, others argue that in the absence of a ranked ballot or proportional voting system at the district level, supporters of minor parties, barred from top-up seats, are effectively disenfranchised and denied

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756-463: A threshold of 5 percent of party-list votes for full proportional representation in the Bundestag in federal elections. However, this is not a strict barrier to entry: any party or independent who wins a constituency is entitled to that seat regardless if it has passed the threshold. Parties representing registered ethnic minorities have no threshold and receive proportional representation should they gain

819-582: A threshold of up to 5 percent is applied for individual electoral districts, no threshold is applied across the whole legislative body. The German Federal Constitutional Court rejected an electoral threshold for the European Parliament in 2011 and in 2014 based on the principle of one person, one vote . In the case of Turkey, in 2004 the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe declared

882-444: Is 14 percent of the votes cast in the district. Carey and Hix note that increasing the DM past six lowers the natural threshold in the district only in small increments and deceasingly each time. In Poland's Sejm , Lithuania's Seimas , Germany's Bundestag , Kazakhstan's Mäjilis and New Zealand's House of Representatives , the threshold is 5 percent (in Poland, additionally 8 percent for

945-447: Is possible to achieve it by receiving first-choice votes alone or by a combination of first-choice votes and votes transferred from other candidates based on lower preferences. In mixed-member-proportional (MMP) systems, the election threshold determines which parties are eligible for top-up seats in the legislative chamber. Some MMP systems still allow a party to retain the seats they won in electoral districts even when they did not meet

1008-439: Is the smallest possible number of votes. That means that in a district with four seats slightly more than 20 percent of the votes will guarantee a seat. Under more favorable circumstances, the party can still win a seat with fewer votes. The most important factor in determining the natural threshold is the number of seats to be filled by the district. Other factors are the seat allocation formula ( Saint-Laguë , D'Hondt or Hare ),

1071-583: The 2002 elections as many as 45 percent of votes were cast for parties which failed to reach the threshold and were thus unrepresented in the parliament. All parties which won seats in 1999 failed to cross the threshold, thus giving Justice and Development Party 66 percent of the seats. In the Ukrainian elections of March 2006 , for which there was a threshold of 3 percent (of the overall vote, i.e. including invalid votes), 22 percent of voters were effectively disenfranchised , having voted for minor candidates. In

1134-456: The 2021 Czech legislative election 19.76 percent of voters were not represented. In the 2022 Slovenian parliamentary election 24 percent of the vote went to parties which did not reach the 4 percent threshold including several former parliamentary parties ( LMŠ , PoS , SAB , SNS and DeSUS ). In the Philippines where party-list seats are only contested in 20 percent of the 287 seats in

1197-451: The Basic Law (federal constitution), but rather to ethnic Germans who only later managed to escape persecuting states and were entitled to German citizenship under the 1913 law. The law also contained a heredity clause entitling children of expellees to inherit German ethnicity and citizenship: "If one parent was a German citizen or ethnic German residing on December 31, 1937, or earlier, in

1260-526: The Grundmandatsklausel ('basic mandate clause'), which grants full proportional seating to parties winning at least three constituencies as if they had passed the electoral threshold, even if they did not. This rule is intended to benefit parties with regional appeal. This clause has come into effect in two elections: in 1994 , when the Party of Democratic Socialism , which had significantly higher support in

1323-730: The ethnic cleansing of the Polish population during the war. In 1961, the party merged with the remnants of the German Party ( Deutsche Partei , DP ) to form the All-German Party ( Gesamtdeutsche Partei , GDP ), which however in turn failed to enter the Bundestag, winning only 2.8% of the votes in the 1961 election . Federal Expellee Law The Federal Law on Refugees and Exiles ( German : Gesetz über die Angelegenheiten der Vertriebenen und Flüchtlinge , lit.   'Law on

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1386-443: The first-past-the-post voting system , in which minor parties unable to reach the threshold take votes away from other parties with similar ideologies. Fledgling parties in these systems often find themselves in a vicious circle : if a party is perceived as having no chance of meeting the threshold, it often cannot gain popular support; and if the party cannot gain popular support, it will continue to have little or no chance of meeting

1449-424: The parliamentary election held under the same system, fewer voters supported minor parties and the total percentage of disenfranchised voters fell to about 12 percent. In Bulgaria, 24 percent of voters cast their ballots for parties that would not gain representation in the elections of 1991 and 2013 . In the 2020 Slovak parliamentary election , 28.47 percent of all valid votes did not gain representation. In

1512-492: The power index in the assembly, which may have dramatic implications for coalition-building. The number of wasted votes changes from one election to another, here shown for New Zealand. The wasted vote changes depending on voter behavior and size of effective electoral threshold, for example in 2005 New Zealand general election every party above 1 percent received seats due to the electoral threshold in New Zealand of at least one seat in first-past-the-post voting, which caused

1575-709: The 1923 Beer Hall Putsch , had joined the Nazi Party and the SA in 1933, had become chairman of the Bund Deutscher Osten organisation, and was a professor at the German Charles University in Prague until 1945. Before World War II, the Nazi Party had achieved some strong results in the eastern territories of Germany . Moreover, as flight and expulsions from there had been instigated by advancing Red Army forces in

1638-813: The BdV pressure group, and the role of the party dwindled away. In addition, the GB/BHE ministers were reproached by their party fellows for supporting Adenauer's policies to integrate the Federal Republic into the West. After an open conflict over the future status of the Saarland as an independent entity of the Western European Union , Chairman Kraft resigned from his post in 1954, when at a party convention his aide Eva Gräfin Finck von Finckenstein had not been re-elected as member of

1701-681: The Convention if imposed in a different country. It was justified in the case of Turkey in order to stabilize the volatile political situation over recent decades. The number of seats in each electoral district creates a "hidden" natural threshold (also called an effective, or informal threshold). The number of votes that means that a party is guaranteed a seat can be calculated by the formula ( total number of votes number of seats + 1 + ε {\displaystyle {\frac {\mbox{total number of votes}}{{\mbox{number of seats}}+1}}+\varepsilon } ) where ε

1764-528: The European Parliament . In the Cyprus EU constituency , the legal threshold is 1.8 percent, explicitly replacing the threshold for national election which is 3.6 percent. Cyprus only has 6 MEPs , raising the natural threshold. An extreme example of this was in the 2004 EU Parliament elections , where For Europe won 36,112 votes (10.80%) and EDEK won 36,075 votes (10.79%); despite both parties crossing

1827-465: The Federal Republic of Germany had/has to administer to the needs of these foreigners, because their respective governments in charge of guaranteeing their equal treatment as citizens, severely neglected or contravened that obligation. Election threshold The electoral threshold , or election threshold , is the minimum share of votes that a candidate or political party requires before they become entitled to representation or additional seats in

1890-568: The Parliament with just 34.28 percent of the vote, with only one opposition party ( CHP , which by itself failed to pass threshold in 1999) and 9 independents. Other dramatic events can be produced by the loophole often added in mixed-member proportional representation (used throughout Germany since 1949, New Zealand since 1993): there the threshold rule for party lists includes an exception for parties that won 3 (Germany) or 1 (New Zealand) single-member districts . The party list vote helps calculate

1953-519: The affairs of the expellees and refugees'; abbr. Bundesvertriebenengesetz , BVFG ) is a federal law passed by the Federal Republic of Germany on 19 May 1953 to regulate the legal situation of ethnic German refugees and expellees who fled or were expelled after World War II from the former eastern territories of the German Reich and other areas of Central and Eastern Europe . The law

All-German Bloc/League of Expellees and Deprived of Rights - Misplaced Pages Continue

2016-679: The areas of exile..." Inheriting the status of "expelled" resulted in an increase in the number of persons covered by the Act. According to the statistical yearbook, in 1971 in West Germany there were 8.96 million "expellees" under the law who could apply for a document certifying this classification ( German : Bundesvertriebenenausweis ; i.e. Federal Expellee Card). The law also recognises as refugees and expellees entitled to German citizenship refugees from Germany, who emigrated or were expelled after 30 January 1933 to flee factual or impending persecution on

2079-517: The desirable number of MPs for each party. Major parties can help minor ally parties overcome the hurdle, by letting them win one or a few districts: The failure of one party to reach the threshold not only deprives their candidates of office and their voters of representation; it also changes the power index in the assembly, which may have dramatic implications for coalition-building. There has been cases of tries to attempts to circumvent thresholds: Electoral thresholds can sometimes seriously affect

2142-441: The events of World War II suffered expulsion, in particular by removing or escape. Those expellees who were not already German nationals became entitled to German citizenship . The law did not apply to German nationals, including expellees and refugees from other countries, who at the time the Federal Republic of Germany was founded in 1949, were entitled to German citizenship under the 1913 nationality law and under Article 116 (2) of

2205-553: The executive committee. One year later, Kraft and Oberländer left the party to join the CDU. Kraft also left the federal government in 1956. At the 1957 federal election , the GB/BHE gained 4.6% of the votes and failed to re-enter the Bundestag due to the 5% election threshold . Until the end, it had somewhat more success in state elections, still represented in the state diets ( Landtage ) of Baden-Württemberg , Bavaria , Hesse , Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein, and participating in

2268-479: The former East Germany , won 4.4 percent of party-list votes and four constituencies, and in 2021, when its successor, Die Linke , won 4.9 percent and three constituencies. This clause was repealed by a 2023 law intended to reduce the size of the Bundestag . However, after complaints from Die Linke and the Christian Social Union , the Federal Constitutional Court ruled a threshold with no exceptions

2331-408: The governments of Czechoslovakia , Hungary , Poland, Romania , and Yugoslavia . The law applies to refugees and exiles (also known as expellees), which it defines as a German citizen or an ethnic German who resided in the former eastern territories of the German Reich, "located temporarily under foreign administration", or in areas outside the German Reich as at 31 December 1937, who as a result of

2394-499: The grounds of their political opposition, their racial classification, their religion or philosophy of life ( Weltanschauung ). The persons entitled to German citizenship also include (former) foreign citizens of states of the Eastern Bloc , who themselves – or whose ancestors – were persecuted or discriminated between 1945 and 1990 for their German or alleged German ethnicity by their respective governments. The argument goes that

2457-452: The informal threshold as the mean of these. The electoral threshold is a barrier to entry for political parties to the political competition. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe recommends for parliamentary elections a threshold not higher than three percent. For single transferable vote , to produce representation for parties with approximately ten percent of the vote or more, John M. Carey and Simon Hix recommend

2520-484: The late days of the war and were continued by the authorities of the newly established socialist republics in eastern and central Europe, most expellees had strong anti-communist attitudes. The Allies at first had prevented any associations of expellees, but gave in upon the establishment of the West German state with the proclamation of its Basic Law in 1949. In the Schleswig-Holstein state election of 9 July 1950,

2583-450: The lower house, the effect of the 2 percent threshold is increased by the large number of parties participating in the election, which means that the threshold is harder to reach. This led to a quarter of valid votes being wasted, on average and led to the 20 percent of the seats never being allocated due to the 3-seat cap In 2007 , the 2 percent threshold was altered to allow parties with less than 1 percent of first preferences to receive

All-German Bloc/League of Expellees and Deprived of Rights - Misplaced Pages Continue

2646-608: The mathematical minimum number of votes nationally to do so. The 2021 election demonstrated the exception for ethnic minority parties: the South Schleswig Voters' Association entered the Bundestag with just 0.1 percent of the vote nationally as a registered party for Danish and Frisian minorities in Schleswig-Holstein . The 5% threshold also applies to all state elections, while there is no threshold for European Parliament elections. German electoral law also includes

2709-409: The number of contestant political parties and the size of the assembly. Generally, smaller districts leads to a higher proportion of votes needed to win a seat and vice versa. The lower bound (the threshold of representation or the percentage of the vote that allows a party to earn a seat under the most favorable circumstances) is more difficult to calculate. In addition to the factors mentioned earlier,

2772-493: The number of votes cast for smaller parties are important. If more votes are cast for parties that do not win any seat, that will mean a lower percentage of votes needed to win a seat. In some elections, the natural threshold may be higher than the legal threshold. In Spain, the legal threshold is 3 percent of valid votes—which included blank ballots—with most constituencies having less than 10 deputies, including Soria with only two. Another example of this effect are elections to

2835-615: The party gained 23.4% of the votes as second party behind the Social Democrats (SPD), outnumbering the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer . Kraft nevertheless joined the CDU-led coalition government in Schleswig-Holstein as deputy minister-president . In order to integrate further nationalist voters, the party changed its name to GB/BHE in 1952. In the 1953 federal election , it reached 5.9% of

2898-501: The popular vote did not gain representation. There had been a similar situation in Turkey , which had a 10 percent threshold, easily higher than in any other country. The justification for such a high threshold was to prevent multi-party coalitions and put a stop to the endless fragmentation of political parties seen in the 1960s and 1970s. However, coalitions ruled between 1991 and 2002, but mainstream parties continued to be fragmented and in

2961-464: The quota for election (as determined through the Droop quota) is 14.3 percent or 33.3 percent respectively. (For the states, the quota for election is halved in a double dissolution election.) However, as STV is a ranked voting system , candidates who receive less than the quota for election in primary votes can still end up being elected if they amass sufficient preferences to reach the Droop quota. Therefore,

3024-544: The relationship between the percentages of the popular vote achieved by each party and the distribution of seats. The proportionality between seat share and popular vote can be measured by the Gallagher index while the number of wasted votes is a measure of the total number of voters not represented by any party sitting in the legislature. The failure of one party to reach the threshold not only deprives their candidates of office and their voters of representation; it also changes

3087-430: The right to be represented by someone of their choosing. Two boundaries can be defined – 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 seat under the least favorable circumstances. Arend Lijphart suggested calculating

3150-581: The seat allocation for that constituency. As of the 2022 election, nobody has been elected based on the 12 percent rule. In the United States, as the majority of elections are conducted under the first-past-the-post system , legal electoral thresholds do not apply in the actual voting. However, several states have threshold requirements for parties to obtain automatic ballot access to the next general election without having to submit voter-signed petitions. The threshold requirements have no practical bearing on

3213-528: The sixth (or, at a double dissolution election, the 12th) Senate seat in each state is often won by a party that received considerably less than the Droop quota in primary votes. For example, at the 2022 election , the sixth Senate seat in Victoria was won by the United Australia Party even though it won only 4 percent of the primary vote in that state. Germany's mixed-member proportional system has

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3276-456: The states' governments. Several of its prominent members eventually became members of the CDU or CSU after 1955. Former Nazi officials ( Walter Eckhardt ), propaganda writers ( Walter Becher ), SA and SS officers ( Wilhelm Schepmann ) and war criminals ( Heinz Reinefarth , Hans Krueger ) were activists of the party. Former BDM -leader Trude Bürkner-Mohr stood as a GB/BHE candidate in the 1953 state and federal elections. Oberländer endorsed

3339-404: The threshold in 1999 , passed it again: DYP received only 9.55 percent of the popular vote, MHP received 8.34 percent, GP 7.25 percent, DEHAP 6.23 percent, ANAP 5.13 percent, SP 2.48 percent and DSP 1.22 percent. The aggregate number of wasted votes was an unprecented 46.33 percent (14,545,438). As a result, Erdoğan 's AKP gained power, winning more than two-thirds of the seats in

3402-468: The threshold by a high margin and a difference of only 37 votes, only "For Europe" returned an MEP to the European Parliament. Other examples include: An extreme example occurred in Turkey following the 2002 Turkish general election , where almost none of the 550 incumbent MPs were returned. This was a seismic shift that rocked Turkish politics to its foundations. None of the political parties that had passed

3465-512: The threshold level to get into the parliament and so there is often a small German minority representation in the Sejm. In Romania, for the ethnic minority parties there is a different threshold than for the national parties that run for the Chamber of Deputies . There are also countries such as Finland, Namibia, North Macedonia, Portugal and South Africa that have proportional representation systems without

3528-453: The threshold nationally; in some of these systems, top-up seats are allocated to parties that do not achieve the electoral threshold if they have won at least one district seat or have met some other minimum qualification. The effect of this electoral threshold is to deny representation to small parties or to force them into coalitions. Such restraint is intended to make the election system more stable by keeping out fringe parties. Proponents of

3591-527: The threshold of 10 percent to be manifestly excessive and asked Turkey to lower it. On 30 January 2007 the European Court of Human Rights ruled by five votes to two and on 8 July 2008, its Grand Chamber by 13 votes to four that the former 10 percent threshold imposed in Turkey does not violate the right to free elections (Article 3 of Protocol 1 of the ECHR ). It held, however, that this same threshold could violate

3654-503: The threshold. In Slovenia, the threshold was set at 3 parliamentary seats during parliamentary elections in 1992 and 1996. This meant that the parties needed to win about 3.2 percent of the votes in order to pass the threshold. In 2000, the threshold was raised to 4 percent of the votes. In Sweden, there is a nationwide threshold of 4 percent for the Riksdag , but if a party reaches 12 percent in any electoral constituency, it will take part in

3717-448: The threshold. As well as acting against extremist parties, it may also adversely affect moderate parties if the political climate becomes polarized between two major parties at opposite ends of the political spectrum. In such a scenario, moderate voters may abandon their preferred party in favour of a more popular party in the hope of keeping the even less desirable alternative out of power. On occasion, electoral thresholds have resulted in

3780-521: The two main political parties (the Republican and Democratic parties) as they easily meet the requirements, but have come into play for minor parties such as the Green and Libertarian parties. The threshold rules also apply for independent candidates to obtain ballot access. Regions: 3% European parliament: 4% The electoral threshold for elections to the European Parliament varies for each member state,

3843-528: The votes and entered the Bundestag parliament with 27 seats. The party became coalition partner in Adenauer's second cabinet, with Oberländer and Kraft as Minister for Displaced Persons and Minister for Special Affairs respectively. However, with their ongoing integration in the West German society of the Wirtschaftswunder era, more and more expellees saw no need for a parliamentary representation beside

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3906-611: Was amended on 3 September 1971. The major force behind the law was the All-German Bloc/League of Expellees and Deprived of Rights party, which had among its supporters – besides German citizens, who had fled or were expelled from formerly German territory annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union – many formerly non-citizens, who experienced by the end of World War II and the post-war years of ethnic cleansing , denaturalisation, robbing and humiliation (1945–1950) carried out by

3969-571: Was unconstitutional. The court provisionally reintroduced the basic mandate clause for the 2025 federal election . In Norway, the nationwide electoral threshold of 4 percent applies only to leveling seats . A party with sufficient local support may still win the regular district seats, even if the party fails to meet the threshold. For example, the 2021 election saw the Green Party and Christian Democratic Party each win three district seats, and Patient Focus winning one district seat despite missing

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