2
“BUYING” VOTES IN JAPAN’S LOWER HOUSE
1.
Introduction
In 1994, politicians in Japan adopted a mixed-member majoritarian electoral
system for the Lower House that currently combines 300 single-member districts (SMD)
with 180 proportional representation (PR) seats.
1
In addition, stricter campaign finance
regulations were introduced to encourage greater transparency in how politicians raise and
spend money. Many political reformers and scholars of Japanese politics expect the new
rules to reduce corruption and the expensive costs of elections (Ozawa 1994; Sato 1997;
Christensen 1998). However, apparently Japanese politicians still spent vast sums of
money, possibly more than had been necessary in the old system (Otake 1998).
In this paper, I examine how politicians in Japan’s Lower House have
strategically adjusted to the incentives of interparty competition in their ability to convert
financial expenditures into votes for their SMD contests. To what extent are the levels of
spending by individual candidates related to their percentage of the district vote? Given
the end of intraparty competition that had been a central feature of the old system, what
are the new effects of interparty competition upon campaign expenditures and vote
shares? If vast sums of money are still required to “buy” votes, politics in Japan would
appear to be not changing substantially from what many political reformers and scholars
had expected.
With the introduction of Japan’s new electoral system, candidates no longer face
intraparty competition at the election stage. In the previous single nontransferable vote
(SNTV) electoral system, candidates from larger parties typically faced competition from
1
A previous version of this paper was presented at the Western Political Science Association annual
meeting, March 11-13, 2004, Portland.
Convention