History of Women’s Under-representation in Japanese Local Politics and Its Accompanying Issues
A Case Study of Tottori Prefecture
2019 Volume 35 Issue 1 Pages 60-75
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2019 Volume 35 Issue 1 Pages 60-75
Although 73 years have passed since the first women were elected to the Japanese Diet, the proportion of female members in Japan still hovers at a low level both in national and local politics. Now that the countries with high rates of women councillors have overcome this issue by introducing the gender quotas, it is clearly time for Japan to consider the countermeasures, including this method, to improve the women’s share in local politics. This paper has two objectives: one is to clarify the causes of women’s under-representation in Japanese local politics, and the other to discuss countermeasures to address this issue. For achieving these two, we traced back the election history of Tottori Prefecture from the post-war till now and investigated the electoral triumph of women councillors in it. For the effective analysis, we divided the 72 yearhistory of women’s franchise in Tottori into 4 periods and extracted issues from each period. Based on the results, we also proposed the introduction of the gender quotas into Japanese local politics, fostering of necessary personnel, implementation of the enlightenment education, and electoral reforms.
