| OCR Text |
Show 33 like EELV. Aside from the one PR election, France's majoritarian, two-ballot system has been effective in keeping the FN out of the national legislature, but not EELV. Even though the FN received over 12 percent and 15 percent of the total votes in 1993 and 1997, respectively, it won zero and one seat in the legislature. In contrast, EELV has had a minimum of three seats in the legislature since the 1997 legislative election. The variation surrounding the electoral success of niche parties in France indicates that electoral systems, whether during periods of change or constancy, can constrain or offer opportunities to parties within the system, but not if and how individual parties will act within a given context. Electoral Thresholds There are two types of electoral thresholds: legal and effective. A legal threshold is a required minimum percentage of the vote a party must receive in order to qualify for legislative seats. These are seen most frequently in PR systems, and restrict (depending on the size of the threshold) the number of parties who can enter parliament by acquiring seats. The legal threshold is, therefore, a helpful tool for determining the openness of the PR systems. The effective, or natural, threshold, on the other hand, is the actual percentage of the vote it would take for a party to secure a seat. In countries with a legal threshold, this doubles as the effective threshold. Since the legal threshold, however, can be misleading in countries where no such threshold exists, where it is most often entered as a zero or missing value, the effective national threshold is used in all cases where no legal threshold exists (Carter 2004, 85; Jackman and Volpert 1996, 510; Norris 2005).12 12 To calculate the effective national threshold, the formula 75% / (((S/E) +1) * √E) was used where S is the assembly size and E is the number of districts/constituencies (Gallagher and Mitchell 2005, 610). |
