Japan's electoral geography and agricultural policy making: The rural vote and prevailing issues of proportional misrepresentation

To boundary or not: The structural bias of ‘fair representation’ in rural areas

“…Boone and Wahman (2015) found that malapportionment occurred frequently in African democracies, generating a rural bias in electoral outcomes. Similarly, Jakobsen and Kjaer (2016) found amalgamations in Denmark created over-representation in smaller jurisdictions; while Feldhoff (2017) observed that small agricultural areas in Japan were significantly over-represented. In the United States, winning the rural vote in smaller states was a key to Donald Trump's unexpected victory at the 2016 presidential election (Monnat and Brown, 2017).…”

Passive Revolution in Japan: The Restoration of Hegemony under Abe?

“…Finally, Abe's agriculture and trade reform measures included two main elements: (1) liberalization of agriculture through disempowering Nōkyō (Japan Agriculture), a group of agricultural cooperatives that have served as a powerful interest group in Japanese politics, lobbying on behalf of farmers and rural communities and winning significant concessions from LDP governments over the years; and (2) promotion of free trade, particularly through participation in the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). After years of recalcitrance on the part of Nōkyō, Abe succeeded in forcing through administrative changes to the organization that weakened its centralized control, an important political victory for Abe given Nōkyō's steadfast opposition to agricultural trade liberalization (Feldhoff, 2017;Mulgan, 2015;Sasada, 2015). This served as an important prerequisite for Japan's accession to the TPP Agreement (now CPTPP), which Abe enthusiastically led as a way of shoring up export markets for Japanese goods and counterbalancing Chinese influence in the Pacific region.…”

Visual Representations of Radiation Risk and the Question of Public (Mis-)Trust in Post-Fukushima Japan

“…Such exclusive policy networks operating in specific policy fields are highly problematic from the point of view of democracy theory. They are based on institutionalized patterns of power and authority and the clear delineation of insider and outsider group positions [33,72]. Collusion, poor regulation and a lack of transparency and control fueled by vested interests, combined with overconfidence in the controllability of the technology, bred carelessness in the nuclear industry as it failed to correctly implement even 'the most basic safety requirements' [73].…”

“…The non-transparency of 'nuclear village'-like policy communities supports a state of low visibility of critical issues and a lack of policy alternative debate with negative consequences for citizens' participation in the political process. Low voter turnout in general elections might well be interpreted as an indication of a deficit of the legitimacy of Japan's liberal democracy favoring non-transparent particularistic legislative organization [33].…”

“…This also includes a prudent assessment of the increasing importance of the 'enlightening emancipatory power' of citizen science [29][30][31] in Japan, a society where policy issues still tend to be tackled and solved in a largely technocratic, paternalistic, top-down manner. As there has been a growing sense of political mistrust, disaffection with democratic institutions has also been spreading [32,33]. At the time, the nuclear disaster triggered a hitherto unknown wave of anti-nuclear demonstrations [8,9,34].…”