Abstract
We know that politicians use different strategies to get reelected under different electoral systems. Masahiko Asano and Dennis Patterson add to our understanding of these strategies by showing that the factors that make candidates more or less electable change under different electoral rules. Specifically, they explore the impact that holding a ministerial post had on the electability of candidates competing for seats in Japanese district elections from 1967 to 2012 inclusive. They show that being a minister had a strong, positive impact on the ability of candidates to be elected in successive elections under the old multimember district (MMD) system with single nontransferable vote (SNTV) but that this positive impact was greatly reduced under Japan’s new mixed member majoritarian (MMM) system that replaced it in 1994.
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Notes
- 1.
Hosokawa Morihiro, founder of the Japan New Party (JNP), is an exception as he was elected only once before heading a multiparty coalition that pushed the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) out of power for the first time in 38 years.
- 2.
See Rosenbluth and Thies (2010).
- 3.
See, for example, Hickman (1992) who investigated the impact that open seats had on the ability of first-time challengers to win.
- 4.
Hayama (1992) notes that Japan’s high incumbent rates are lower than in the US House of Representatives because members of the US Congress have fewer restrictions on their ability to conduct campaigns and enjoy additional benefits like franking privileges and extensive staff.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
This applies to any political party whose goal was to obtain more than one seat in a district election.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
This does not mean that Japan’s electoral system is not important for our analysis. As mentioned briefly above, it figures prominently in our analysis in the context of Japan’s leaders abandoning the old set of rules for an entirely new electoral system. We discuss this in more detail later.
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
See Naoi and Krauss (2009), p. 877.
- 15.
These figures are calculated using the lower house election results between 1955 and 1993 for SNTV whereas between 1996 and 2014 for SMD, and the 102,167 or 50.4 % figure declines to 46.4 % of the vote share (94,484 votes) when zombies are included.
- 16.
See, for example, Pekkanen et al. (2006) for a discussion of these adjustments.
- 17.
PARC is the LDP’s Policy Affairs Research Council. The party originally allowed up to four affiliations whereas under the new system it allows virtually unlimited affiliations. See, for example, Krauss and Pekkanen (2004, 2010).
- 18.
The overall average of this primary explanatory factor was 17 days with a standard deviation of 90 days. Moreover, since the majority of Members of Parliament in our data sought district seats without holding a ministerial post, this variable’s minimum value was a 0 while its maximum value was 1497 days or just over 4 years.
- 19.
In our data, 43 % of those entering district contests were incumbents while 57 % were not.
- 20.
In our analysis, 8.8 % of district elections involved candidates with jibans that were inherited from their predecessors but less than 1 % (0.73 %) where candidates had jibans that were not inherited.
- 21.
We measured JSP endorsements for elections up to the 1993 lower house election and DPJ endorsements for the five contests from 1996 to the present.
- 22.
We also checked whether the levels of multicollinearity among regressors were sufficiently high to inflate the variances of the coefficients, but found no evidence of this.
- 23.
To confirm our results, we conducted parameter encompassing tests. These tests allowed us to determine if the explanatory power of the ministerial status variable in both models was effectively equal to zero and, thus, added no explanatory power to our models, allowing us to eliminate it. We compared the log likelihoods of our estimated model with all the original variables in it to a restricted model, one where the ministerial status variable was dropped. We made this comparison for both the MMD/SNTV and MMM/SMD estimations, and results indicated that the number of days a candidate served as a minister added to the explanatory power of the models in a statistically significant manner.
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Asano, M., Patterson, D. (2016). Holding on to Power: Politicians and Reelection. In: Steel, G. (eds) Power in Contemporary Japan. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59193-7_12
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