Two Modes of Sophisticated Voting and the Formation of a Coalition Government under Japan's New Electoral Law

概要

論文の詳細を見る
Recently, Japan has undergone a major change in the electoral law for the House of Representatives. The new law enacted in fall 1994 has installed a "parallel system" combining proportional representation (PR) and plurality rule or a small district (SMD) system. This study examines two types of sophisticated voting-strategic voting and strategic balancing-that can be operative in the parallel system. It is shown that the SMD system contains institutional provisions (double candidacies and the loser-winner ratio) that reduce the extent of strategic voting and thus weaken a tendency toward local two-partism. When more than two effective parties compete in a plurality election, parties holding similar policy and political orientations ought to pursue interparty electoral coordination in order to prevent the opposing parties from gaining electoral victory. Under the parallel system, however, the parties have disincentives to coordinate their SMD candidacies. Thus, Downsian centrist policy pressures are not imposed upon the winning parties formulating a new government. In order to pressure it toward centrist policy, moderate voters with two votes under the parallel system perform the acts of balancing so that a coalition government is formed to check policy extremism that is otherwise pursued by a pluralist party constituting the core of a new government.
関西学院大学の論文