THE GOVERNMENT OF MODERN JAPAN: JAPAN'S ELECTORAL SYSTEM Japan's Electoral System from 1925-1994 |
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Gerald L. Curtis :: Different democracies have different ways of electing people to office, because they have different "electoral systems." In the United States we have a system, for example, for members of the House of Representatives in which each district elects one person — so whoever gets the most votes in the district becomes a member of the House of Representatives. In a lot of countries in Europe they have what's called a "proportional representation system," in which voters don't vote for individuals, but they vote for political parties, and if a party gets 20 percent of the popular vote, it gets roughly 20 percent of the seats, and a party that gets 6 percent of the popular vote gets 6 percent of the seats. In other words it gets representation proportional to its vote. The electoral system that was used in Japan until 1994 is different from the electoral systems used elsewhere in the modern democratic world, whether it be the so-called "first-past-the-post" kind of system that's used for the U.S. House of Representatives and the British House of Commons, or a P.R., proportional representation system, such as is used in many European countries. The Japanese have a system called the "medium-size election district" system. This system was first adopted in Japan in 1925, and it was the electoral system that was in effect from 1925 until 1993, with the exception of just one election immediately after the Second World War. So for Japan, the modern history of elections in Japan is a history almost entirely of this "medium-size election district" system. |
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