Abstract
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.
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Notes
- 1.
Norway is an exception, with constitutionally fixed four-year terms. See Goplerud and Schleiter (2016) for a comparative overview of dissolution powers.
- 2.
Her party differed with the LDP mainly on restarting nuclear power plants and raising the consumption tax. See Arai and Nakajo (this volume, p. 149) for a more complete analysis of the policy issues in the campaign.
- 3.
The results of the pre-election candidate survey conducted by the University of Tokyo and the Asahi Shinbun (UTAS) suggest that Koike would have had difficulty enforcing this command, as many Party of Hope winners were from the DP and opposed Abe’s collective defense bills.
- 4.
For additional background details on recent years in Japanese politics, see Pekkanen and Reed, Chap. 2 in this volume, p. 15.
- 5.
The number of SSDs was reduced from 295 in 2014 to correct for malapportionment. The number of seats (district magnitude) in the regional PR districts varies from six (Shikoku) to 28 (Kinki), and the total number was reduced from 180 in 2014. A candidate may run in both tiers, and can be elected in the PR tier despite losing the FPTP race in his or her SSD if he or she is ranked high enough on the party list. Most parties rank dual-listed candidates at the same position, and then rerank them in descending order of how close they came to winning their SSD contest (the so-called sekihairitsu), in order to determine who will ultimately be elected from the list. For this reason, many SSD races feature the district incumbent running against at least one PR incumbent.
- 6.
NHK News Web, November 11, 2017: http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/web_tokushu/2017_1024.html.
- 7.
See Asahi Shinbun, November 1, 2017: http://www.asahi.com/articles/ASKBZ515ZKBZUTFK00K.html. Klein and McLaughlin (this volume, p. 53) provide further insight into possible fissures within Kōmeitō.
- 8.
The JCP’s losses may in part be due to its willingness to help the left-wing opposition as a whole. The JCP withdrew its candidates in districts where the CDP was running, and apparently campaigned hard for these CDP candidates.
- 9.
In fact, on the day of the election, three independents who won were given ex-post nominations and joined the LDP; one independent winner was given an ex-post nomination for the CDP.
- 10.
The remaining parties each got less than 10% of the so-called floating vote of independents.
- 11.
Under the single non-transferable vote (SNTV) system in use from 1947 to 1993, the LDP consistently dominated rural constituencies, winning about two-thirds of rural seats, while its main rival, the Japan Socialist Party (now the SDP) typically won the other third. Opposition parties have always won most of their votes in urban Japan, particularly the metropolises along the stretch between Tokyo and the Kansai area.
- 12.
Population density runs from a value of close to 0 for very rural districts where the population is widely dispersed to 1 for metropolitan districts where the population is densely packed. For 1996 we place 102 districts into the rural category and 99 into the mixed and urban categories because the 100th, 101st, and 102nd most rural districts all had the same level of population density. Rather than arbitrarily placing one into the rural category and the other two into the mixed box, we categorize all three as rural.
- 13.
Specifically, we categorize all districts with a population density score of 0.409 or less as “rural,” those with a score of greater than 0.78 as “urban,” and everything in between as “mixed.”
- 14.
With massive migration to the cities in the early postwar period, but relatively little reapportionment of seats, there have typically been significantly more voters per seat in urban districts than in rural ones, thus allowing the LDP to win many rural seats with relatively few votes. This pattern was particularly stark under the old SNTV system, which featured multiseat constituencies that exacerbated the malapportionment. The disparity was reduced substantially with the switch to SSDs starting in 1996, but it was not entirely eliminated. The reduction in the number of (rural) SSDs in 2014 and 2017 was intended to partially remedy this disparity.
- 15.
If the nine SSDs in which the coalition runs a Kōmeitō candidate are included, the differences in vote margin between rural and urban districts are roughly the same, but the difference in seat outcomes is less stark, with the coalition in 2014 and 2017 respectively winning 79 and 78% of urban SSDs. This is because most of the Kōmeitō candidates run in urban SSDs and win.
- 16.
Indeed, research in other contexts shows that many voters will abstain when their preferred party or candidate withdraws from competition (e.g., Fiva and Smith 2017), and in our analysis of the 2014 election (Scheiner et al. 2016) we found that candidate withdrawal was correlated with reduced district-level turnout, suggesting that voters chose to stay at home (or were not mobilized) when party options were limited.
- 17.
Beginning prior to the 2016 House of Councillors election, the first national election to be held with the lower voting age, high school students were also given increased instruction on the right to vote. Older teens who had already left high school would have missed this civic education.
- 18.
Population density is measured as the proportion of citizens living in census-defined densely inhabited districts (DID). We thank Ko Maeda for supplying this measure.
- 19.
We measure precipitation and wind speed at the prefectural level due to challenges in mapping these data into SSD boundaries and incomplete availability of data across all SSDs. Thus, these weather variables are proxies for weather conditions. We cluster our standard errors at the prefectural level (47 clusters) to account for this issue. Weather data come from the Japan Meteorological Agency: http://www.data.jma.go.jp/gmd/risk/obsdl/index.php. We thank Yuki Yanai for locating these data for us.
- 20.
Age demographics data at the SSD level were compiled by Akira Nishizawa at the University of Tokyo: http://www.csis.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~nishizawa/senkyoku/index.html.
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Scheiner, E., Smith, D.M., Thies, M.F. (2018). The 2017 Election Results: An Earthquake, a Typhoon, and Another Landslide. In: Pekkanen, R., Reed, S., Scheiner, E., Smith, D. (eds) Japan Decides 2017. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76475-7_3
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