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Japan’s Lower House will prove to be competitive. In many of these cases, candidates
may not need to spend extensive resources in order to secure their election.
While the level of competition is an important dynamic in Japan’s Lower House,
scholars have been limited in their ability to measure it precisely. One approach has been
to calculate the closeness between the first place and second place candidates after the
election results have been determined (Reed 1999). Although this measure is post hoc, it
should still reveal useful information about the expected relationship between the
competitiveness of the district, expenditures and vote shares. Another measure I include is
the number of candidates competing in each district. More party-affiliated and
independent candidates are likely to enter contests where the incumbent has retired or is
vulnerable to defeat, which should make the district more competitive in the vote-
gathering process.
Having detailed the expected effects for own and rival expenditures on vote shares
and the importance of candidate and district-specific characteristics, I turn to a discussion
of the types of expenditures possible in Japan’s new electoral system. The legislation for
the new electoral system was passed with stricter campaign finance regulations in the
hope to promote greater transparency in how politicians raise and spend money. The
campaign finance reforms were also passed with a new public subsidy system available to
political parties, which was hoped to increase the importance of local party branches vis-
a-vis the personal support networks long used by LDP and other conservative candidates
(Reed and Thies 2001; Carlson 2003).
Convention