High effective thresholds can serve to discriminate against small parties - indeed, in some cases this is their express purpose. But in many cases an in-built discrimination against smaller parties is seen as undesirable, particularly in those cases where several small parties with similar support bases 'split' their combined votes and consequently fall beneath the threshold, when one aligned grouping would have gained enough combined votes to have won some seats in the legislature. To get around this problem, many countries that use list PR systems also allow small parties to group together for electoral purposes, thus forming a 'cartel' or apparentement to contest the election. This means that the parties themselves remain as separate entities, and are listed separately on the ballot paper, but that votes gained by each party are counted as if they belonged to the entire cartel, thus increasing the chances that their combined vote total will be above the threshold and hence that they may be able to gain additional representation. This device is a feature of a number of List PR systems in continental Europe, Chile before 1973, Brazil after 1979, and in Uruguay, Argentina, see Argentina, and Israel, see Electoral Reform in Israel.