The Liberal Democratic Party seems to have forgotten the primary purpose of election system reform for the House of Councillors. If the substance of the LDP's electoral reform proposal is to pursue its own interests, it will not be able to gain the understanding of the public.
The LDP has put together a reform plan for partially introducing a new system for proportional representation races in upper house elections, by which the winners would be chosen based on binding ranked lists prepared by their respective parties. The proposal has been presented at the upper house reform council. The LDP hopes to submit to the current Diet session a bill aimed at revising the Public Offices Election Law.
The current system, which entails non-binding lists of party candidates, stipulates that voters cast their ballots based on the names of individual candidates or respective parties, a formula that determines the winners in order of their vote tallies. The LDP proposal would enable each party to decide on the rankings of the top two candidates for seats to be contested every three years. The plan would also increase the number of seats to be contested for reelection in the proportional representation race by two.
The LDP plan would transform the current system into a complicated and extremely hard-to-understand formula. The motive behind the proposal is largely for the LDP to aid people for whom no room can be found in lists of candidates running in the integrated electoral districts under constituency-based races.
In next summer's upper house election, the seats held by four LDP incumbents in the two integrated constituencies of Tottori-Shimane and Tokushima-Kochi will come up for reelection. The LDP is considering the idea of giving preferential treatment to candidates in the proportional representation race if they cannot run in these integrated constituencies, thereby enabling them to be elected in the election.
Earlier, Diet members from the prefectures covered by the integrated constituencies had complained that the integration would make it difficult to have "the voices of provincial areas" heard. There is an ulterior motive behind the LDP plan to calm that kind of discontent, and the proposal will inevitably be criticized as a self-benefiting arrangement.
Fix vote-value disparities
Starting with the 2001 upper house election, the binding ordered list system was replaced with the non-binding one in the proportional representation races. At that time, the LDP intended to stimulate vote-gathering activities by its support organizations, thereby raising the total number of votes it collected.
Questions must be raised about the LDP's move to repeatedly change the system in a manner suited to its intraparty situation.
The LDP has sought to dissolve the integrated constituencies through amendment of the Constitution. The party has put together a draft provision that includes a clause based on which at least one person would be elected from each prefecture-wide constituency every time upper house seats are contested for reelection.
The LDP is attempting to alter the election system simply because it is not clear when and whether the Constitution can be revised, but its approach must be viewed as an attempt to deal with the issue on a patchwork basis.
Another pillar of the LDP proposal is to correct the disparity in the relative weight of a vote.
The plan would increase the number of seats up for reelection in the Saitama Prefecture-wide constituency by one. This would likely reduce the vote-value discrepancy to less than three, compared with up to 3.08 times in the 2016 upper house election. The full number of upper house members would be raised by six to 248.
Assuming the overall framework for an election system involving prefecture-wide constituencies is kept in place, there is a limit to how far the disparity can be rectified if the full number of upper house seats is maintained. Given this, increasing the full number of upper house members is a viable option.
The revised Public Offices Election Law, which introduced the integrated constituencies, includes a supplementary clause clearly stipulating that "a conclusion be certainly reached" about a fundamental review of the system in preparation for the 2019 upper house election, based on discussions regarding how the upper house should function.
The ruling and opposition parties have a responsibility to fulfill their pledge. They must discuss the power of the upper house and what kinds of roles should be divided between the upper and lower houses, thereby considering an election system suited to these objectives.
(From The Yomiuri Shimbun, June 4, 2018)
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