Research on the impact of the electoral reform: the "inconsistency of electoral systems" hypothesis

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Different electoral systems may cause different candidate competitions that are either centripetal or centrifugal. This paper considers the organizational links between the competitions of candidates for General election and local assembly elections. We argue that centrifugal candidate competition at local assembly SNTV/MMD (single non-transferable vote/multi-member district) hinders the realization of the theoretical expectation that a candidate competition at SMD (single-member district) of the House of Representatives converges to the policy position of the median voter. We tested this "inconsistency of electoral systems" hypothesis by using aggregated election results (Horiuchi and Natori 2007), candidate's electoral platform data (Tsutsumi and Uekami 2007), field data (Yamada 2007), survey research data (Maeda 2007), and election outcomes of 15 countries (Nishikawa 2007). Overall results of these tests seem to be good. So we can conclude that we have to take linkage between national and local politics into consideration when we study effects of electoral systems upon party politics.