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Paper short abstract

Among the electoral systems that form the basis of representative democracy, the electoral districts have been particularly controversial in recent years. In this report, we will identify how changes in electoral district districting have affected Japanese politics and explore future developments.

Paper long abstract

The electoral system, which is the foundation of representative democracy, has been the subject of much debate in Japan in recent years. These include lowering the voting age, relaxing restrictions on electoral activities, and reexamining electoral administration.

Among these, the electoral district system has become the most controversial issue. As a result of the campaign to correct the disparity in the number of votes and the "unconstitutional state of affairs" ruling by the Supreme Court, a major revision of the electoral districts for the House of Representatives was made in November 2022.

Based on the principle that members of the National Diet are representatives of the people, the current electoral district allocation, which insists on the demarcation of basic municipalities, is questionable. On the other hand, while leaning on the "myth of representation of the people”, the fact remains that regional representatives have been selected. We can find the strong path-dependency, not just the pursuit of reelection possibilities for the representatives.

How then, have Japan's electoral districts been divided and changed? There have been major revisions of the electoral district system in 1889, 1900, 1919, 1925, 1945, 1947, and 1994. We can confirm that amendments, which were extremely frequent in the prewar period, became rare in the postwar period. This is inseparable from the instability of party politics and democracy in the prewar period and its stability in the postwar period. At the same time, it is also the institutional basis for the high probability of regime change in the prewar period and the establishment of one-party rule in the postwar period. Japan's electoral district system can be said to be a spatial political system that has strongly defined Japanese politics in the prewar and postwar periods.

In other words, understanding the effect of electoral districts reform is a major aid to understanding Japan's political culture and climate. In this report, we focus on the continuum of the electoral districts in order to examine their influence on Japanese politics.

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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how local candidates combined offline and online campaign strategies in a local (prefectural) election by investigating online media use during the December 2022 Ibaraki prefectural coucilors election.

Paper long abstract

Election campaigns in Japan have traditionally involved direct means for candidates to appeal to the public. During officially designated election campaign periods, candidates often use street speeches and loudspeaker trucks as direct forms of campaigning. Since the Public Offices Election Law was amended in April 2013 to allow for Internet-based campaigning, candidates have supplemented such traditional practices with websites, email, and, more recently, with social media use such as Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube.

To date, much academic attention has been paid to election campaign media use in national elections with little research investigating media use in smaller elections at the prefectural or municipal levels. However, as direct means of campaigning were curtailed during the COVID-19 period in many local elections, plus the growing interest in Internet-based voting, online campaigning also continues to evolve in Japan alongside traditional campaign practices.

In this paper, I investigate how candidates integrated offline and online campaign practices and media use during Ibaraki’s councilor election in December 2022. Based mainly on a content-analysis approach, I examine the similarities and differences among candidates’ use of various campaigning means, including their social media use. The implications of evolving media use in Japan will shed new light on campaign practices.

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Paper short abstract

This study estimates the ideologies and dimensions of conflic for subnational elections in Japan through the content analysis of campaign manifestos for national and gubernatorial candidates.

Paper long abstract

Partisan conflict and ideologies in Japan’s subnational politics have largely been interpreted within the national conservative-progressive cleavage dimension. Following two decades of substantial decentralization and growing autonomy of local governments, however, recent research has paid greater attention and discovered more uniquely “local” dimensions and issues. These include phenomena such as populist neo-liberal chief executives in large cities, rising regionalist identity politics in certain regions like Fukushima and Okinawa, and various policy conflicts between central and subnational governments that go beyond national partisan divides. Despite expanded awareness of such complexities, there is still no systematic understanding of how Japanese subnational politics diverges from the national level in its ideological dimensions. This paper begins to fill this gap by applying content analysis of electoral campaign manifestos (senkyo kōhō) of nearly 400 national and gubernatorial candidates. The unique data set is analysed through two approaches. First, through a supervised learning method, the paper seeks to estimate the closeness of different types of subnational candidates to eight ideological groups (economic/cultural left and right, nativist, populist, feminist, and ecologist) generated from referent manifestos at national level. Second, through an unsupervised learning method, the paper seeks to capture dimensions of conflict in different types of gubernatorial and mayoral elections, comparing those with the national level. Our findings point to the existence of traditional progressive-conservative cleavage, as well as other dimensions which differ by population size of local governments. We also point out the existence of a wide range of ideological positions (including feminist, ecologist, and nativist) among subnational candidates, with differences between subnational candidates based on gender, incumbency, and electoral success.

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