Elsevier

Electoral Studies

Volume 32, Issue 1, March 2013, Pages 1-12
Electoral Studies

Localism and coordination under three different electoral systems: The national district of the Japanese House of Councillors

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2012.11.005Get rights and content

Abstract

Democratic representation involves tradeoffs between collective actors – political parties seeking to maximize seats – and individual actors – candidates seeking to use their personal vote-earning attributes (PVEAs) to maximize their own chance of election and reelection. We analyze these tradeoffs across three different electoral systems used at different times for the large-magnitude nationwide tier of Japan's House of Councillors. These electoral systems – closed and open-list proportional systems and the single non-transferable vote – differ in the extent to which they entail candidates seeking individual preference votes and in whether collective vote shares affect overall party performance. We use local resources as a proxy for PVEA and seek to determine the extent to which parties nominate “locals” and how much the presence of such locals affects party performance at the level of Japan's prefectures.

Highlights

► Comparison of three electoral systems: SNTV, Closed-List PR, and Open-List PR. ► Variations in vote pooling and preference voting affect party, candidate incentives. ► Many local candidates on open lists; their “personal votes” accrue to the party. ► Minimal local candidates under SNTV, because broader appeal needed to win. ► Few locals on closed lists, most commonly found at marginal ranks.

Introduction

A critical tension in democratic representation is that between political parties, as collective actors, and individual legislators (and candidates to be legislators). This tension becomes more acute when districts elect many legislators, meaning the different strengths of different candidates in the same party, who appeal to different segments of the party's vote base, may affect the party's overall performance. To what extent do candidates nominated by a party spread their geographical representation around a district, or specialize locally? Does this tendency vary with electoral formula? We compare candidates' campaign strategies and parties' nomination patterns under three different electoral formulas used at different times in the national tier of the second chamber of the Japanese parliament (the House of Councillors, HoC). This tier has consisted of a single nationwide district in each time period, electing around 50 members.1 The allocation formula, however, has changed twice: initially it was single non-transferable voting (SNTV, 1947–1980), then closed-list PR (CLPR, 1983–1998), and finally open-list PR (OLPR, 2001–).

Our main concern in this paper is with personal vote earning attributes (PVEAs) that candidates exhibit under different electoral rules to attract votes separate from their party affiliation (Cain et al., 1987; Shugart et al., 2005). Of various PVEAs useful for attracting personal supporters, we are particularly interested in localness, defined as the presence of candidates who have a local base and profile of some sort, as opposed to candidates who may be more national in scope. We define localized candidates as those who focus their campaign efforts on geographical subsection(s) within a district, even though they in theory represent the entire district. Several studies have investigated how localized candidates campaign and how parties strategically nominate them in different electoral systems (e.g. Ames, 1995; Crisp and Desposato, 2004; Hirano, 2006; Latner and McGann, 2005), but very few studies have been able to compare systematically the effect of different systems. Thus by focusing on Japan's HoC, this study is aimed at carrying out systematic comparisons with other factors held constant, while offering general implications for the impact of different formulas in districts that, like the HoC, have very large magnitude (e.g. various districts in Spain and Portugal (CLPR), Brazil and Finland (OLPR), and Afghanistan and subnational Japan (SNTV)).

We argue that PVEAs are valuable resources for both candidates and their parties. They are the most valuable when the system is “personalistic”, meaning that votes are cast for individual candidates (SNTV and OLPR) and much less so when there are no such votes (CLPR). As previous literature (Carey and Shugart, 1995) has argued, the incentive to cultivate personal votes is greater under SNTV than under OLPR, and greater under either of these systems than under CLPR. Our analysis of each of these three systems in one country affords us almost a natural experiment and allows systematic tests of this basic proposition.

However, as we will develop theoretically below, differences in mechanical features – vote pooling and preference votes – generate very contrasting consequences for the usefulness and desirability of different PVEAs. Specifically, local PVEAs, as captured by previous experience serving as local politicians, are useful and desirable in a very large-magnitude district only under OLPR. Given such high magnitude as we see in the HoC upper tier, candidates are unable to succeed under SNTV only by concentrating their personal-vote seeking activities in the localities where they build their local experience: As we will show later, the votes a candidate might gain from local office experience were rarely sufficient to pass the required vote threshold for winning a seat under SNTV. Therefore a party would like to limit such candidates. Nonetheless, those who are nominated should try to take advantage of their local personal networks for their own reelection goals, as parties have little influence beyond coordinating the number of candidates. In contrast, under CLPR and OLPR, where parties have no fear of overnominating candidates, localized candidates are encouraged to concentrate on their home turf, as whatever votes they obtain by doing so accrue to the party collectively, although such candidate strategies are clearly effective only under personalistic OLPR.

The paper is structured as follows. First we sketch out a theory of how each of these electoral systems impacts the value of local experience for candidates and parties. Then we situate our study of the Japanese House of Councillors in the context of the comparative literature. We offer an aggregate overview of the presence of locally oriented candidates in Japan's second chamber over time. We then proceed to two distinct empirical analyses: (1) How the two personalistic systems (SNTV and OLPR) affect local campaign efforts; and (2) how the two list systems (open vs. closed) affect local candidates' placement on the lists. In the conclusion we discuss implications of our findings for understanding how collective and individual incentives are related under each electoral system, and for the relationship of localism and the personal vote.

Section snippets

Theory: electoral systems and localness

Because the district that is the subject of this study is a very large district, we could find many candidates who have a nationwide appeal, such as senior party leaders, and sporting, business, and entertainment figures. On the other hand, we may find localized candidates whose appeal is concentrated in a few or even just one prefecture. In other words, we might observe different candidates having different types of PVEAs. Yet the manner in which parties nominate candidates with local PVEAs,

Key features of Japan as a case

Japan's House of Councillors (HoC) has a two-tier system, with some seats elected from regional districts coinciding with the country's 47 prefectures and the rest elected in a nationwide “upper tier.” The 47 prefectural districts have district magnitude ranging from one to five, with the electoral system being SNTV. The upper tier, which is the focus of our research, uses a nationwide district with a magnitude of around fifty. This large, single nationwide, district has used three different

Empirical analysis

In most of the remainder of this paper, we carry out two sets of empirical analyses. In the first we compare vote concentrations in the two systems that entail preference voting, SNTV and OLPR. Our method here is to use the candidate-level dataset, which includes HoC candidates' prior local-level electoral experience and the distribution of their votes by prefecture. This analysis also includes multivariate models examining how candidates campaigned under different systems. In the second

Discussions and conclusions

In this paper we use the case of Japan's second chamber to explore how local PVEAs affect candidates' campaigning styles and parties' nomination strategies under different electoral formulas. The literature on personal votes tells us that experience in local politics is a valuable asset for individual candidates under personalistic systems (SNTV and OLPR) and much less under a party-centered one (CLPR). However, we argue that parties' strategies to nominate such candidates systematically vary

Acknowledgments

An earlier version was presented at the 70th Annual Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, April 11–14, 2012. The authors would like to thank Kenichi Ariga, Kentaro Fukumoto, Len Schoppa and other panelists for comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are ours. Shugart acknowledges the support of National Science Foundation award SES-0452573.

References (33)

  • Bergman, M.E., Shugart, M.S., Watt, K.A., 2012. Patterns of Intra-party Competition in Open-list & SNTV Systems....
  • B.E. Cain et al.

    The Personal Vote: Constituency Service and Electoral Independence

    (1987)
  • B.F. Crisp et al.

    Constituency building in multimember districts: collusion or conflict?

    Journal of Politics

    (2004)
  • G.L. Curtis

    The 1974 election campaign: the political process

  • R.F. Fenno

    Home Style: House Members in Their Districts

    (1978)
  • R.Y. Hazan et al.

    Democracy Within Parties: Candidate Selection Methods and Their Political Consequences

    (2010)
  • Cited by (38)

    • Is there a friends-and-neighbors effect for party leaders?

      2021, Electoral Studies
      Citation Excerpt :

      First, friends-and-neighbors voting tendencies are more prevalent among voters in rural areas, where a stronger sense of community exists (Fenno, 1978; André et al., 2012). Urban voters, on the contrary, are less sensitive to place-based identities and less attached to local communities (Nemoto and Shugart, 2013), and move around more frequently than their rural counterparts (Hicken, 2007). This leads to more individualized voting behavior and less dependence on voting cues such as local ties of politicians.

    • Fighting over friends and neighbors: The effect of inter-candidate geographic distance on intra-party competition

      2020, Political Geography
      Citation Excerpt :

      Under electoral rules that pit co-partisan candidates against each other, local attributes are instrumental for cultivating personal votes and winning intra-party competition (Shugart, Valdini, & Suominen, 2005). A growing body of research indeed shows that candidates who are born locally or have local-level political experience are not only electorally more successful (e.g. Tavits, 2010), but also considered valuable resources by party selectorates in personalized electoral systems (Nemoto & Shugart, 2013). Other work discusses how and which voters look for local candidates (Blais & Daoust, 2017; Collignon & Sajuria, 2018; Jankowski, 2016).

    • Looking for locals under a closed-list proportional representation system: The case of Portugal

      2018, Electoral Studies
      Citation Excerpt :

      Of utmost importance is the inclusion of the variable “incumbent” (dummy variable 1 = incumbent17), which accounts for the higher probability that incumbent candidates have of being nominated to higher positions on lists (Schwindt-Bayer, 2005). Finally, a last control variable was added for major parties (dummy variable 1 = major party) because the political strength of a party is likely to play a crucial role on the allocation of candidates to the lists (Nemoto and Shugart, 2013: 4). In particular, while heads of lists of major parties have guaranteed places as MPs in almost all districts, the same is far from true concerning secondary parties, which have small chances in low magnitude districts.

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text