Japan's electoral system — and the political discussion on its reforms — may often be hard to follow. The latest proposal for reform of the Upper House electoral system, put forth by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, may make it more complicated and even harder to comprehend — for what is widely viewed as partisan considerations. The LDP should think twice about the proposal.
Members of both chambers of the Diet are elected through a combination of electoral districts and proportional representation. And in both chambers, the sharp disparity in the value of votes between electoral districts with larger populations per representative and those with smaller populations has been a growing problem as courts have given sterner rulings on the gap in light of the principle of equality under the Constitution.
Changes in the demarcation of some electoral districts and a reallocation of seats across constituencies introduced in time for the last Upper House election in 2016 reduced the maximum gap in vote values from 4.77 to 1 in the previous race in 2013 to 3.08 to 1. But the changes resulted in creating two electoral districts that combined pairs of less-populous prefectures — Shimane with Tottori and Tokushima with Kochi — with fewer seats allocated to each of these districts. That meant that some of the incumbents elected from these prefectures — traditional strongholds of the LDP — were unable to run in their home constituencies.