Jakarta – Perludem believes that simplifying political parties is not enough through the implementation of a parliamentary threshold. Perludem believes that this policy has the potential to increase the number of unrepresented voters.
This was conveyed by Perludem Executive Director Heroik M Pratama during a public hearing with Commission II of the House of Representatives regarding the Election Bill at the Parliament Complex, Senayan, Jakarta, on Tuesday (February 3, 2026). He said that the higher the PT, the greater the potential for electoral disproportionality.
“Regarding the parliamentary threshold, this is closely related to two aspects at once: the disproportionate nature of election results and the simplification of political parties,” he said.
“The higher the parliamentary threshold, the higher the aspect of electoral disproportion because many votes are wasted,” he added.
Based on the latest election data, with a parliamentary threshold of 4 percent, he said, there were around 17.3 million wasted votes. He said these votes came from around 10 political parties participating in the election.
“But on the other hand, the parliamentary threshold is considered an important instrument for simplifying the party system,” he said.
However, he assessed that empirical data shows that this policy has not had a significant impact on the number of political parties in the House of Representatives. He gave an example that in the 2009 election with a threshold of 2.5 percent, there were nine political parties that managed to enter the House of Representatives. However, in the 2014 election, when the threshold was raised to 3.5 percent, the number of political parties in parliament actually increased to 10 parties.
“This means that in this case, the parliamentary threshold also has no significant impact on efforts to simplify political parties,” he said.
According to him, the party system should not only be viewed from the number of parties that enter parliament. However, he considered that what is more important is to look at the level of concentration of seats obtained by political parties.
“This means that there is confirmation that there are large, medium, and small parties,” he said.
He also gave the example of the party system in the UK, which is generally known as a two-party system. In fact, in the 2024 elections, there were around 15 political parties that had seats in the British parliament. However, the majority of seats remain concentrated in the two main parties, namely the Labour Party and the Conservative Party.
“Therefore, for example, in calculating the party system, we prefer to use a formula called the Effective Number of Parties in Parliament. We calculate the ENPP to see how concentrated the seats are in political parties,” he said.
“Now, if we look at 99 without a parliamentary threshold, our party system is actually five parties. Even though at that time there were 21 parties in the House of Representatives,” he added.
This article was published on Detiknews with the title “Perludem Criticizes Parliamentary Threshold in the House of Representatives: 17.3 Million Votes Wasted in 2024,” https://news.detik.com/berita/d-8339447/perludem-kritik-parliamentary-threshold-di-dpr-17-3-juta-suara-terbuang-di-2024.