>If they do act frivolously, even if they play to their voters, some will see through it and if they bring down the government, they may well lose those voters and become an even more minor player.

Or they may play their cards well and do so only to expose the senior partner as cheating, and play not only to their own voters, but to partners' too and so grow at their expense. And they may do that for right reasons, or for just calculation - eventually, there will be a new government.

Italy has usually had about one month a year without a government on the average for most of the time after WWII, and the nice thing was that that wasn't an impediment to the functioning of the public life. One could almost argue that government isn't really required :).

>Not necessarily 'majority' biased. 'Largest vote getter' biased. The largest vote getting party gets a few more seats than they earned at the expense of the lowest vote getting parties who then get either fewer than earned, or no seats at all.

From what I know, that's supposed to be a correction of the straight proportional system, as it gives the larger parties more seats, so to bring some stability - i.e. with the extra seats, they have less need to bargain with smaller parties. OTOH, this forces unlikely bedfellows to form coalitions, so they would count as a single entity on the ballots and thus gain more of these extra seats, but then the bargaining happens inside the coalition, and soon after the victory they become dissatisfied with what they got, compared to what they think of their own importance, popularity, historic mission and whatnot.

>Any time a voter votes for a politician who loses, his vote goes for nothing. It shouldn't. In our latest election, the Green Party received 6.8% of the vote - almost 1,000,000 votes. In spite of that, they have no seat in parliament.

That really is ridiculous. What's the threshold (*) - 7%, 10%? Or is it the trick of gerrymandering or some such?

I've heard it argued that even 3% would be too high (then, for instance, an imaginary American Hebrew Party would never get a chair) specially when one has in mind that minorities are people and have their own minds and don't necessarily think that their minority parties are representing their interests, so they may cast a part of their vote to regular parties; even a 10% minority may so end up without a single representative if the bar is too high.