A mainstream ruling party has just appointed a chief steward within the party, and the steward subsequently lost the election in its own parliamentary district. In this general election, the party won an “absolutely stable majority” of seats.
This kind of rare incident happened to the 72-year-old Gan Liming of the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party. He was once regarded as a trader of “Abenomics”, and is the current Liberal Democratic Party vice president Taro Aso relies heavily on his own faction, but his previous alleged bribery scandals are still unclear.
Under the ashamed face, Gan Liming resigned as the chief secretary. However, relying on the Japanese electoral system, the defeated Am Liming “resurrected” in the proportional representation zone and is still re-elected as a member of the Diet. This has also become a news point in this election.
We can take the example of Kam Liming to look at Japan’s electoral system and the ideas behind it.
After the war, Japan has long implemented a middle constituency system. The current electoral system was officially adopted in 1996. It is a combination of small constituencies and proportional representation constituencies. This year the House of Representatives has 465 seats, of which 289 are small constituency seats and 176 are proportional representation seats.
There are a total of 289 small constituencies in the country, and each small constituency has only one winner. Each political party nominates at most one candidate for its own party in each small constituency. There are 11 proportional representation districts in the country. Each political party can put forward a number of candidates in this constituency, and how much it can win depends mainly on the party’s overall vote rate in the district. Participants can sign up for the small constituency and proportional representation constituency at the same time.
When voters vote, they have two ballots in their hands, one for a small constituency, to choose candidates. Unlike other developed countries, Japan’s ballots do not list the names of the candidates, but voters themselves fill in the names of the people they want to vote. The other is a proportional representation district ballot. This ballot only fills in the party you want to vote. In other words, the small constituency elects “persons”, and the proportional representation of the district votes elects “political parties.”
The small constituency is relatively simple. After the votes are counted, the one with the most votes is elected. In the proportional representation area, the seats corresponding to the electoral area are allocated based on the number of votes each party receives.
Take Kam Liming as an example. This big boss’s small constituency is the 13th constituency in Kanagawa Prefecture near Tokyo. There are two major candidates for this electoral district: Gan Liming and Tai Rongzhi of the Cadet. As a result, Tai Rongzhi got 130,000 votes and Gan Liming got 124,000 votes. Too Rongzhi, Gan Liming.
The defeated Kam Liming also signed up for the South Kanto district in the proportional representation constituency. There are 22 proportional representatives in Nanguandong District. In this constituency, the two political parties with the most votes are the Liberal Democratic Party (2.59 million) and the Cadet (1.65 million). According to calculations, the two parties can get 9 and 5 seats respectively, and the remaining 8 seats are used by other minorities. The party carves up. The Liberal Democratic Party has a total of 35 candidates in this proportional representation constituency. According to the votes obtained in the small constituency (known in Japan as the “lost rate”, which means losing in a small constituency, but also gaining a certain percentage of votes) ranked among the 35 candidates. Second, so he was successfully “resurrected” in Nanguandong District.
Nobuaki Ishihara, the leader of the Ishihara faction of the Liberal Democratic Party, was not so lucky. He lost the small constituency and failed to “resurrect” in the proportional representation constituency, and he was determined to lose the election.
It can be seen that the Japanese electoral system will give the defeated legislators a second chance, but whether it can be grasped depends on the personal efforts and the popularity of the political party in the proportional representation constituency. The high local popularity of the party to which you belong can make up for your personal bad luck.
This method of remedy makes sense. One explanation is that candidates who lost in small constituencies also have many supporters. Although Gan Liming lost to Tai Rongzhi, he also won 124,000 votes. The voices of these voters cannot be ignored, so in the proportional representation constituency, these voices are given another chance.
