The issue of threshold is tricky because, I would say, the issue is how you put it and whether you have a regional threshold or a national one. If you ask for a 5% national threshold, it is harsher than a 5% regional threshold.
In many countries they have a double threshold. A couple of those might be up to 10% in some cases, but if your party has more than 5% nationally, you will have an MP in Parliament.
I'm not very happy with the idea of the threshold. Let's say the threshold is 5%. If you get 5.1% of the vote, if you throw out all the votes below the 5%, you end up with roughly 6% or 7% of the members of parliament. Following that, if you get 4.9%, then you get zero.
That's why I think what I call a “round threshold” would be better. A round threshold is simply that we take the percentage of the vote and we remove 2%—it can go lower—and then if you have 3%, you get 1% of all the votes. It's smoother, because it's from zero to 1%, and not zero to 7%, so you have a smoother curve. For the small parties it avoids what has happened many times, and the Green Party knows that everywhere. You have 10 MPs and then you end up with two. You have crashed, because you have lost 1% of the vote. This is what I would like; it would be better.
The issue I have—and I have not simulated it much—is that my concern is for government stability. We have a prescription and we can calculate roughly how many months a government coalition can survive. If we know the size of the membership, we can simulate that, but I have not. What I am saying to you is my gut feeling for the moment, and I have to be rigorous.