In 2001, the state parliament of the German federal state of Hesse abolished a 5 percent legal electoral threshold for … threshold. The dataset covers all 426 Hessian municipalities over the period 1989-2011. Our results suggest that the seat and …

experiment is the abolishment of an explicit electoral threshold (the so called "five percent hurdle") for local elections in … where the electoral competitiveness of smaller parties improved more because of the abolishment of the explicit threshold …