@ Schniepel,

This depends on the amounts of votes that has been cast (blanco and/or invalid votes don't count) in the election.

So say there are 9 million valid votes, you divide this by 150 (the amount of seats in the 2nd Chamber), then you need 60.000 votes to get 1 seat.

ah ok thx.
I somehow expected it to be like in germany where you only get into parliament when u gather more then 5% in the election.

Some of those small parties become big. I like that our system gives everybody the chance to become big over time. A % would kill of smaller parties and political innovation.

but i have to admit that we dont have 11 parties in our federal parliament.. 5 right now.. probablly 6 next year

well.. before the rule was before WWII. In the Weimar Republic there were many many small parties in the parliaments. In the 1925 elections 12 parties made it into parliament (in some other source i read that there had been up to 17 parties in the parliament)
Its a wide spread theory that the ammount of parties made stable goverments very difficult due to the need to form coalitions involving many parties. Its said that it was one reason for the Weimarer Republic failing and opening the gates for the nazis.

didnt the Kaiser flee to Holland when the Germans rejected him?

The American 2-party system is about to implode, on the Democrat side I'm aware from the outside that idealists are sick and damn tired of trying to accomodate the splinter blocs such as unions that actually care about the results of policy and the established blocs are getting fed up being taken for granted by newbies.

On the Republican side there is actually a plutocrat core that wants a globalist corporatist state which embraces the welfare state and cheap foriegn labor.  They literally want to combine demographic trends certifying Republican majorities with a commitment to prefer Republican incumbents no matter what.  They complain of the "waste" involved in primary elections and openly hope for their elimination, in favor of choosing the candidates through control of funding in secrecy.  The inevitable result of an undying Old Guard seems not to bother them. 
They have no concern for reform or idealism except that it is harnessed and contained within their conspiracy and such zombies as Trent Lott are quoted as saying "We gotta contain this Tea Party".  Against these again are people who actually give a damn what policies are enacted.

In both cases the authoritarians have abandoned traditional (and tested) campaign methods such as canvassing neighborhoods door to door and personal interaction, in favor of mass media.  They are so far gone as to ridicule the emotional desire of Americans to trust their leadership, insisting that voters appreciate a good lie timely told.  Their manner is clerical; the party apparat is the vicarate of the New Revelation and all that is required of the masses is obedience and discipline, not debate.

The fruit of this is 10% approval of institutions and a 45% voter turnout.

> The Yell wrote:

> didnt the Kaiser flee to Holland when the Germans rejected him?

Yup, he stayed here until he died. His embalmed bodied still lies in a mausoleum (he designed it himself) in Doorn. In his Will it's stated that should Germany ever become a Monarchy again he wants his body to be transfered back to German soil.

that was cheeky of him, what if the German monarch was a Bourbon or a Romanov or a Coburg? Would they want to celebrate a Hohenzollern Kaiser?

@Schniepel:
if the voters in the Weimar rep had less choice, the largest part of them would have voted what? I fail to see how that would have given less chances to the nazis. The nazis captured a state that already was made authoritarian by somebody else.

Rather I think the system slowed the process down.

i can not make a long post now since i am at work.
first of all i am not saying that having a 5% clause is supperior to having none. I am very much undecided on this.
Its just a common theory that the fragmentation of parties made it difficult to form a stable coalition.
Between 1920 and 1933 there had been 8 elections for the Reichstag. Thats one election all 1.6 years while there should have been 4 year terms.
Most of the coalitions being formed involved 4+ parties and often there had to be new elections because just one of those parties disagreed on some minor topic and left the coalition.
This led to the problem Justinian mentioned above, Weimar Republics Goverment most of the time was too weak to deliver.
Now weak goverments often flaten the road for extremists and demagogues.

"Its just a common theory that the fragmentation of parties made it difficult to form a stable coalition"
Its one of those theories I disagree with. A stable coalition proly would have been undemocratic much faster. In a strange way, extreme left and right kept each other in check. Even if the social democrats had that power, I don't think they would have been all that democratic. A significant portion of them believed in a temporarily dictatorship to "counter" the right. The center-right and right at the time was against democracy almost completely (for the same reasons).

The factors that made it difficult i.m.o. where:
-no long democratic tradition (esp Prussia)
-no trust or understanding in democracy
-econ difficulties
-national humiliation
-lack of education on the voters side
-the pressure of the soviets
-disappointed vets
-distrust between the large political factions
-...could go on

It doesn't happen often that my English lets me down, but I'm not sure what you're trying to say, yell.