Daniel M. Smith

The 2017 Election Results: An Earthquake, a Typhoon, and Another Landslide

The 2017 general election played out in very similar ways to 2014. Turnout remained low, and the coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Kōmeitō retained its two-thirds majority. The big story of the election was a schism within the opposition and the formation of two new parties, the Party of Hope and the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDP), divided primarily on the issue of constitutional revision. We examine how these new parties fared in terms of votes and seats, and across districts of varying population density. Our analysis suggests that even perfect opposition coordination would not have defeated the governing coalition, which dominated across all regions. The best showing on the opposition side was by the CDP, but whether it can pose a credible threat to the LDP going forward is still uncertain.

The 2012 Election Results: The LDP Wins Big by Default

On 16 December 2012, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which had been swept from power in August 2009 after more than half a century of dominance, roared back with a landslide of its own. Entering the election with only 118 of 480 seats in the House of Representatives (HR), the lower house of the National Diet, the LDP emerged with a stomping majority of 294. Moreover, the LDP and its long-time coalition partner, Komeito, jointly surpassed the two-thirds threshold needed to override vetoes from the upper house, the House of Councillors (HC), where the coalition lacks a majority—at least until the 2013 HC election. The incumbent Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which had taken power with an even more impressive 308 seats in 2009, retained only 57 seats this time, just barely managing second place after three difficult years in government.

Candidate selection methods and policy cohesion in parties: The impact of open recruitment in Japan

The method of candidate selection used by parties can influence a number of outcomes related to party organization and representation. In the past decade, Japan’s political parties have increasingly experimented with an ‘open recruitment’ system for selecting new candidates for national elections, but the degree of centralization in the process varies by party. We use candidate and voter survey data to assess whether the new system of recruitment has resulted in intraparty differences in the policy positions of candidates, and their distance from party supporters and the median voter. We find evidence that the new candidate selection method has resulted in the nomination of more centrist and urban-inclined candidates, an indication of greater responsiveness to voters, and that they exhibit higher levels of policy cohesion than their counterparts selected through traditional methods. However, these differences depend on the degree of party centralization in the process.

The Contraction Effect: How Proportional Representation Affects Mobilization and Turnout

A substantial body of research examines whether increasing the proportionality of an electoral system increases turnout, mostly based on cross-national comparisons. In this study, we offer two main contributions to the previous literature. First, we show that moving from a single-member district system to proportional representation in multimember districts should, according to recent theories of elite mobilization, produce a contraction in the distribution of mobilizational effort across districts and, hence, a contraction in the distribution of turnout rates. Second, we exploit a within-country panel data set based on stable subnational geographic units before and after Norway’s historic 1919 electoral reform in order to test various implications stemming from the contraction hypothesis. We find significant support for the predictions of the elite mobilization models.

Norwegian parliamentary elections, 1906–2013: representation and turnout across four electoral systems

Abstract Since gaining full independence in 1905, Norway has experienced more than a century of democratic elections, and has reformed its electoral system three times, most notably with the switch from a two-round runoff system to proportional representation in 1919. This research note introduces a new dataset featuring all candidates running for parliamentary (Storting) elections from 1906 to 2013, and documents the patterns over time and across electoral systems in the development of the party system; candidates’ gender, age, occupation, and geographic ties; and voter turnout. Scholars interested in using the dataset can gain access to it through the Norwegian Centre for Research Data.

Japanese Politics Between the 2012 and 2014 Elections

Japanese electoral politics and leadership in the past decade have been anything but stable. Both the 2009 and 2012 House of Representatives (HR) elections resulted in landslide defeats for the party in power. Between the 2005 and 2009 elections, Japan was led by four separate Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) prime ministers in as many years, including Shinzou Abe in his first short-lived administration (2006–2007). Between the 2009 and 2012 elections, there were three years with three more prime ministers, this time hailing from the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ).

Political Dynasties in Democracies: Causes, Consequences and Remaining Puzzles

Kinship often continues to play an important role in determining the ruling class even under modern democratic elections in a wide range of countries. In recent years, academic interest in the causes and consequences of such dynasties has been rapidly expanding. In this introduction to the Feature, we review existing work on political dynasties’ formation and potential implications for socio‐economic outcomes (such as economic growth, distributive policy, and gender representation), and outline a number of questions and challenges that remain important avenues for future research.

Introduction: Abe on a Roll at the Polls

This chapter provides an overview of the 2017 general election in Japan, and introduces the contents of the volume.

Parties, Legislators, and the Origins of Proportional Representation:

A prominent line of theories holds that proportional representation (PR) was introduced in many European democracies by a fragmented bloc of conservative parties seeking to preserve their legislative seat shares after franchise extension and industrialization increased the vote base of socialist parties. In contrast to this “seat-maximization” account, we focus on how PR affected party leaders’ control over nominations, thereby enabling them to discipline their followers and build more cohesive parties. We explore this “party-building” account in the case of Norway, using roll call data from six reform proposals in 1919. We show that leaders were more likely to vote in favor of PR than rank-and-file members, even controlling for the parties’ expected seat payoffs and the district-level socialist electoral threat facing individual legislators. Moreover, using within-legislator variation, we show that the internal cohesion of parties increased significantly after the introduction of PR.

Gender and Dynastic Political Recruitment

Throughout history and across countries, women appear more likely than men to enter politics on the heels of a close family relative or spouse. To explain this dynastic bias in women’s representation, we introduce a theory that integrates political selection decisions with informational inequalities across social groups. Candidates with dynastic ties benefit from the established reputations of their predecessors, but these signals of quality are more important to newcomers such as women. Legislator-level data from twelve democracies and candidate-level data from Ireland and Sweden support the idea that dynastic ties are differentially more helpful to women, and that the quality of predecessors may be more relevant for the entry and evaluation of female successors than their male counterparts. The role of informational inequalities is also reflected in the declining dynastic bias over time (as more women enter politics), and in the differential effect of a gender quota across Swedish municipalities.