The LDP victory was really overwhelming. With 296 LDP seats combined with coalition partner Komeito’s 31, Prime Minister Koizumi has a two-thirds majority. Under Japan’s constitution, this means even if the upper house (the House of Councillors) again defeated the postal privatization bill, it would not matter, because a 2/3 majority of the lower house can overturn an upper-house veto of a bill.
The result also demonstrates the extent to which the Japanese electoral system is fundamentally majoritarian in spite of containing a mix of single-seat districts and proportional repersentation (with the voter having separate votes in each type of race) that is superficially similar to the “mixed-member proportional” systems of New Zealand and Germany (who also have elections this month).
In fact, as much as this is being spun as a “mandate” for Koizumi and the postal privatization that was almost all he talked about in the campaign, his party obtained only thirty eight percent of the party preference vote. Komeito’s 13.3% brings the coalition up to a bare majority of the votes. This is a net gain of only 1.8 percentage points over the 2003 election for the two parties.
Details of the LDP’s advantage from the single-seat districts in Japan’s system in the Mainichi Daily News today: The LDP won 219 of the 300 single-seat races with 47.8% of the votes cast in these races. (I do no thave the Komeito total in these races, but it would be only a little more, as the two parties do not put candidates up against each other in single-seat districts.)
Also, the postal-privatization rebels (the LDP’s ‘traitors’) held on to only thirteen of the thirty seats they held before the election, losing the rest to Koizumi’s ‘assassins.’
UPDATE: In the comments, RAC provides a more accurate count of the traitors vs. assassins.
More on the postal dissidents, from japantoday.com:
37 dissidents were not allowed to run as LDP in SSDs.
“Koizumi’s governing coalition picked proponents of postal privatization in all the 300 single-seat districts”
Some formed new parties:
New Party Nippon won one seat but the dissident lost the SSD
Others formed the People’s New Party: they won their SSDs and received 4 total seats
27 ran as independents against LDP challengers, 13 of those won
3 dissidents did not run
From:
http://japantoday.com/e/?content=news&id=348773
Seed planted by rac — 12 September 2005 @ 11:35
Thanks for the info. I knew of 37 defectors but Mainichi listed 30 running under its column for rebels(of whom 13 won).
Now I see that Mainichi listed the rebels running as independents separately from those running under new party labels.
Your numbers match Mainichi. I was just forgetting to include those running under new labels in my count.
Seed planted by Matthew Shugart — 12 September 2005 @ 12:56
Should Prime Minister Koizumi send China a thank-you note?
Japanese journalist Yoichi Funabashi (h/t Simon) provocatively writes that Prime Minister Koizumi’s resounding victory in Japan’s September 11 poll may be less a case of successful political rebranding of the LDP as a “reform party&#…
Scion grafted by matthewstinson.net » blog — 18 September 2005 @ 08:20
[...] The Japanese election of September was not close, but it was remarkable for its traitors and assassins. When Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi called the election, it looked like his long-predominant Liberal Democratic party might finally get the boot, but he wound up with a big win. Sure, it was bigger in seats than in votes, owing to the nonproportional features of Japan’s mixed-member system (in contrast to Germany’s and new Zealand’s proportional variants). Nonetheless, there is little doubt of the mandate that Koizumi received, and no election in the history of Japan had been so clearly fought on issues (or maybe we should just say “on issue.”) [...]
Scion grafted by Fruits and Votes » Blog Archive » Half a year of Fruits and Votes: A remarkable series of elections — 11 February 2006 @ 17:30