Electoral Incentives in Mixed-Member Systems: Party, Posts, and Zombie Politicians in Japan

Abstract

H ow do electoral incentives affect legislative organization? Through an analysis of Japan's mixedmember electoral system, we demonstrate that legislative organization is strongly influenced not only by the individual legislators reelection incentives but also by their interest in their party gaining power and maintaining a strong party label. Electorally vulnerable legislators are given choice legislative positions to enhance their prospects at the polls, whereas (potential) party leaders disproportionately receive posts with greater influence on the party's overall reputation. Members of Parliament elected from proportional representation (PR) lists and in single member districts also receive different types of posts, reflecting their distinct electoral incentives. Even small variations in electoral rules can have important consequences for legislative organization. In contrast to Germany's compensatory mixed-member system, Japan's parallel system (combined with a "best loser" or "zombie" provision) generates incentives for the party to allocate posts relating to the distribution of particularistic goods to those elected in PR.

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Namentliche Abstimmungen als Währung individualisierter Repräsentation

“…Prominent vertreten sind dabei Überlegungen, die eine Verbindung zwischen Anreizen des Wahlsystems und verschiedenen Facetten des Handelns und der eigenschaften von Abgeordneten und Parteien knüpfen. Dazu gehören etwa die Mitgliedschaft in bestimmten Ausschüssen (Stratmann und Baur 2002), persönliche Charakteristika von Kandidaten (shugart et al 2005), das Engagement für Wahlkreisbelange (Heitshusen et al 2005), Wahlkampfstrategien (Zittel und Gschwend 2007), Wiederwahlwahrscheinlichkeiten (Manow 2007;Manow und Nistor 2009), die Einbringung von Gesetzen und Änderungsanträgen (Crisp 2007), Repräsentationsfoki (Klingemann und Wessels 2003, S. 293-294) und das Abstimmungsverhalten (Becher und Sieberer 2008;Kunicova und Remington 2008;sieberer 2010 (Pekkanen et al 2006;samuels 1999). 3 Dabei wird allerdings zu wenig gewürdigt, dass der alleinige Blick auf das Wahlsystem wenig über die tatsächlichen effekte auf das Repräsentationshandeln verrät.…”