If you have party lists, the existence or absence of a threshold will not matter, because you will need far more than the threshold to beat the list votes.

For that matter, in a side-ordered list the party decides as well, because name recognition decides personal votes and name recognition depends on the resources the party allocates to each candidate. In Denmark party-lists are legal, but generally frowned upon. A few parties use them (principally the red-greens), but in practice you do not see any great difference between open and closed lists. In this respect, the parties are quite depressingly good at managing voter behaviour.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.