New Electoral System and Party Realignment in Japan

最近，日本对众议院选举法进行了重大修改。1994年秋季颁布的新法律建立了一个“平行制度”，结合了比例代表制和多数规则或小地区制度。本研究探讨两种类型的复杂的投票-战略投票和战略平衡-可以在并行系统中操作。结果表明，并行系统包含的制度规定（双重候选人和失败者-赢家的比例），使SMD票的非排他性和可转让的PR部分，从而减少了战略投票的程度，削弱了地方两党主义的倾向。当两个以上的有效政党在多数选举中竞争时，政策和政治倾向相似的政党应该协调他们的候选人，以防止反对党获得选举胜利。然而，在并行制度下，各方不愿意进行协调。因此，唐氏中间派的政策压力不会施加在制定新政府的获胜政党身上。为了向中间政策施压，在平行制度下拥有两票的温和选民进行平衡，从而形成联合政府，以遏制构成新政府核心的多元化政党所追求的政策极端主义。战略平衡的程度被发现与反对派协调失败的程度。

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 parallel system contains institutional provisions (double candidacies and the loser-winner ratio) that make SMD votes nonexclusive and transferable to the PR portion, hence reducing the extent of strategic voting and weakening 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 coordinate their candidates in order to prevent the opposing parties from gaining electoral victory. Under the parallel system, however, the parties have disincentives to coordinate. Thus, Downsian centrist policy pressures are not imposed upon the winning party 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. The extent of strategic balancing is found to be associated with the degree of opposition coordination failures.