When the Hosokawa government — with Ozawa Ichiro, then secretary-general of one of the leading parties of the eight-party coalition backing the government — passed electoral reform in 1994, one of the arguments made then and ever since by Japanese politicians (and American political scientists) was that the new mixed single-member district/proportional representation electoral system …
Tag: two-party system
All signs point to stasis
Asahi published the results of a survey conducted with Tokyo University that looks at the policy positions of victorious LDP and DPJ candidates in the House of Councillors election. (The detailed study will be published in the October issue of Ronza.)Accompanied by one of those marvelously convoluted charts that Japanese newspapers seem to revel in …
The frog and the scorpion?
From August 3rd to 6th, Jiji asked voters what kind of government they would prefer. The top? An LDP-DPJ grand coalition, with 27.5% of respondents supporting it. Only 11.9% wanted the LDP-Komeito coalition to continue, while only 10.8% wanted a solely LDP government. Respondents seemed indifferent to which party was at the center of the …
Tobias S. Harris 