This article deals with the effects of national party realignment and strengthening competition between two major parties on local politics in Japan, based on the data of the component of governing parties and their seat ratio at prefectural politics. Also, authors see the state of independent governors and local parties. Our analysis shows that the changes of local politics toward the two-party competition are much slower than those of national level. The number of independent governors is almost stable; the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) hardly wins the gubernatorial elections without the coalition with the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). As for the prefectural assemblies, the seat ratio of DPJ including its proxy is gradually uprising. It will take more time to establish the two-party competition, if DPJ maintains the status as the second major party at national politics and challenges the dominance of the LDP and Komeito at local level.

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Japanese national representatives and local politicians align to form links for mutual electoral support. If these links, or “keiretsu”, were strong, many LDP members in local assemblies would have switched to new parties along with former LDP representatives. However, the “Political Realignment” which started in 1993 did not have such an effect on local politics. While many LDP members formed new parties at the national level, LDP members joined these new parties in only some prefectural assemblies. In addition, many prefectural-level politicians later returned to the ranks of the LDP. The impact of “Political Realignment” on SDP at the local level was limited as well. Despite the decline of SDP and the formation of DPJ at the national level, SDP factions were still found in many prefectural assemblies in 2003. This means that DPJ has not built a political base and prefectural assemblies are still largely controlled by LDP. In short, the new parties established after the “Political Realignment” have yet to sink their roots into local politics.

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This article examines city mayoral elections after the municipal merger of the Heisei Era. Former studies examining this issue focus mainly on the factors or mechanism of the merger and not fully investigate its impact on local politics. Thus, this article compares cities which experienced the merge with ones which did not, and explores the effect of the merge on types of electoral competition, the characteristics of candidates, and voter turnout.

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Though most observers agreed that pension was the biggest issue in the 2007 Japanese Upper House Election, how people viewed this issue has not been fully discussed in electoral studies. This research examines the structure of the election issues as well as the meaning of the pension issue for Japanese society using 3 types of text data: 1) diet member’s statements, 2) coverage of newspapers, and) people’s answers to open-ended questions about the election issues. Analysis of text data possesses the advantage of avoiding preconceived notions about the meaning of the issues, since it uses spontaneous remarks from people. The results show that though political elites mainly discuss the pension system and the media focuses on the opinion of parties about the pension issue, ordinary voters’ views did not depend on attitudes toward the pension system itself but on their evaluation of the policies and the performance of the government of that period.

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This paper analyzes an election campaign of DPJ (Democratic Party of Japan) candidate who run for the 2007 Upper House Election in Kagawa Prefecture district. In analyzing, We especially focus on what type of election campaign system candidate/party construct and what candidate/party appeal to voters, with paying attention to the relationship between party organization and individual candidate. This paper finds that DPJ candidate’s campaign system is, though local party organization actively works, not firmly unified one that individual candidate keeps autonomy. We also uncover that the appeal to voter is based on candidate’s characteristics. New knowledge presented in this paper not only develops the study of DPJ candidate’s election campaign but also provides important informations for investigation of the DPJ party organization.

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The turnout rate in the House of Councilors elections has had cyclic downs at intervals of 12 years. These phenomena have been called “Idoshi Genshou”. According to Masumi Ishikawa’s explanation, “Idoshi Genshou” has resulted from the decline of electoral mobilization, which local politicians have caused. But this explanation of “Idoshi Genshou” contradicts the property of the Japanese conservative party, which has come to look different from what it used to be. Therefore in this paper, through analyzing electoral mobilization in Japan, I verified that electoral mobilization dose not affect voter turnout and also I investigated cause of “Idoshi Genshou”.

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In 1986, the United States Supreme Court held that a political gerrymandering case was justiciable under the equal protection clause of the United States Constitution. There was, however, no majority opinion on “a judicially manageable standard to determine whether a redistricting plan was a product of unconstitutional gerrymander. For more than two decades, the Supreme Court hasn’t found the reliable standard yet. In this note article, I briefly outline the relationship of gerrymandering claims and “one person, one vote” principle which is used mainly in malapportionment cases. After describing the deadlocked development of political gerrymandering case law, I introduce some attempts to regulate a political gerrymandering, using procedural law for redistricting and independent redistricting commissions. Those methods are based on a state constitution rather than federal one, and can be understood in terms of judicial federalism.

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