A Study of Class-Electoral System for Electing City Assemblymen in the Major Cities

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Limited elections took place universally in Japan under the Imperial Constitution. But the adoption of three( or two-)class electoral system was only limited to the election of city, town and village assemblymen. The present study is to deal with the city council election in four major cities: Osaka, Nagoya, Kobe and Yokohama. The fundamental data for the present study is based on the electoral registers of each class, but it is surprising that there are very few ones. I could refer nothing but the electoral registers drawn up in Yokhama, Kobe and Nagoya respectively in 1889. In 1889 when the municipality organization act came into force, the city counsil election consisted of the three-class electoral system, election of half the members and the plural ballot system. First-class voters are least in Yokohama, and city rates each of them paid reached a very large amount. When cities begandevelop with the arrival of the twentieth century and their growth caused the increase of vested rights, the number of upper-class voters decreased remarkably in other citie, and evils developped that local influential people so-called "Bosses" united to occupy all the seats in city councils.We still had the three-class electoral system when the municipality act was amended in 1911, but the election of city assemblymen was reformed to the system of election of all the members and the introduction of a single ballot system. With the development of capitalism, however, there increased constituencies in which a very tiny minority of the first-class voters could decide assemblymen, with the result that party executivese could hold their seats in such a kind of constituencues; while on the other hand there appeared promising statesmen who ran for the third-class election to enter the political world. To make a study of assemblymen's activitities belonging to each class in these four cities is also the subject of the present study, but a ststistical research is yet to be made.