THE GOVERNMENT OF MODERN JAPAN: JAPAN'S ELECTORAL SYSTEM Objectives and Results |
|
Gerald L. Curtis :: So, the election reform in Japan has changed politics in some ways, but it has not had the dramatic effect of changing Japanese politics that a lot of the people who supported election system change had expected that it would. One of the objectives of election reform was to make elections less expensive. The idea was that since so much money was spent by LDP [Liberal Democratic Party] politicians because of intra-party competition under the old election system, that if they weren't competing against each other they wouldn't have to spend this much money. But we know that elections are very expensive in all countries. Elections are very expensive in the United States, where politicians spend a lot of money on media advertising. They're also very expensive in Japan. There isn't very much money spent on media advertising, because there are limitations on what politicians can do in terms of advertising in newspapers and television and on the radio. But a lot of money is spent for hiring staff, for doing all the things that we think about as being essential components of an election campaign. In the United States, many of those things are paid for by the government — members of the Congress are given funds to hire staff. In Japan, only three staff members are paid for by government funds. In the American House of Representatives, on the average there's about twenty. In the Senate, it's typical for senators to have fifty or sixty or even more staff members. In Japan, anything over three the politician has to pay for himself. This is a huge expense, and the new election system has done nothing to reduce that expense. Also, in the modern world, things like posters — four-color posters advertising the politicians face and his name — these are all essential parts of election campaigns. They are very expensive. So, the new election system has been disappointing to many people because it didn't reduce the cost of election campaigns. It also did not accomplish or has not achieved its intended goal of changing the focus of election campaigns away from the candidates and to questions of high national purpose and differences in basic party platforms. Because, after all, candidates who run in a local constituency are going to say the things that are important to the people who vote in that local constituency, and that tends to be issues that are of direct relevance to their daily life — whether they get more subsidies, if they're in a rural community or whether they get more daycare centers, if they're living in an urban community — and other issues that are very local and that don't relate to big issues of Japan's role in the world or issues of overriding national importance. |
| Back to Asian Topics Home |
