Do The Forces Of Constitutional Revision Have A Chance? (2)

[Part 2 of 2. Part 1 I published yesterday.]

Assuming that everything goes perfectly -- and I do mean perfectly -- for the Liberal Democratic Party in the district seat elections on July 21, and assuming its allies in constitutional revision the Japan Restoration Party and the Your Party pick up the majority of the seats remaining after one subtracts the four seats the New Komeito must/will win, the combined forces of constitutional revision will control 123 of the 161 162 seats they need to have a 2/3rds majority in the House of Councillors.

Can the forces of revision win the further 38 39 seats they need to reach the magical 161 162 total?

In addition to voting for the district candidate, voters write either the name of a party member or the name of a party on a separate ballot. These votes are tallied according to party, with the vote for the individual counted as a vote for the party with whom he or she is affiliated.

The 48 seats up for election on this separate ballot are the proportional vote. Seats are divvied up using the d’Hondt method, meaning the vote totals are divided by one, then by two, then by three..with the largest remaining result getting the next available seat.

If you do not want to think to too much about the method but just want the results, here is a great calculator (Tip of the hat to Tobias Harris of Observing Japan).

The first guess one needs to make regarding the inputs, and it is a doozy, is how many folks will show up at the polling stations on July 21. As I insinuated in a post the other day major elections of the past year have featured record-breaking or close-to-record-setting low levels of voter turnout.

The causes of the low level of voter participation in 2013 are not hard to discern:

-a secular reduction in interest in elections since electoral reforms in the 1990s,

-a reduction in interest in politics after the collapse of the credibility of the Democratic Party of Japan as an alternative to the LDP,

- the exhaustion from having had a national election and a change of government only six months earlier and local elections only a few weeks ago,

- ridiculously high support ratings for both the Cabinet and the LDP in the public opinion polls (the demoralization factor) and

- the absence of real policy choice in between the parties.

The last items does not mean that the parties are indistinguishable, for they do offer different mixes of policies. However, none of these mixes is either inspired or inspiring, leading voters more likely to choose, when they show up, the parties that can enact any policies.

To these reasons for sitting out this election out we have to add the possibility of unpleasant weather on election day actively dissuading folks from leaving their homes to go to the polling stations (this summer has been naaaaassssty!).

The number of persons casting ballots I come up with, in a brutish, what-the-hell calculus, is 48,000,000 . That is a whopping 12 million voters down from the House of Councillors elections in 2007 and 2010. It is also a greater drop than the huge fall in between the 2009 and 2012 House of Representatives elections, when 10,000,000 voters who showed up in 2009 failed to show up last year.

The voting rate in this guestimate is nevertheless still more than 44.67% recorded in the 1995 House of Councillors election. The median age of the voters has risen since 1995, and older voters vote more, so that despite all the negative forces listed above, a turnout rate of 46% (based on the latest, July 8 figure from the Ministry for General Affairs and Telecommunications of 104,780,660 persons eligible to vote) seems about right.

Now, how will these votes be divided up?

Let us make two incredibly generous assumptions to critics who find me too solicitous of the LDP, one supposition regarding the DPJ based on atmospherics and one boneheaded assertion. The first is that the LDP does no better in the vote than its current 42% rate of support in public opinion polls, despite the concentration of power the drop in voter participation gives to vote machines. The second is that centrist voters, wary of giving the LDP too much support, will give their votes to the main center-right opposition DPJ, JRP and Your Party in about equal amounts. The third is that public trust in the DPJ has sunk to the point where the Your Party and the DPJ win exactly the same number of votes. The fourth, the dumb one, is that at least 7,000,000 folks plunk down for the New Komeito and its candidates.

The voting numbers I get, in aggregate, are:

LDP 20,000,000
New Komeito 7,000,000
DPJ 5,000,000
Your Party 5,000,000
JRP 4,500,000
JCP 3,500,000
SDP 1,800,000
Other parties 1,200,000

Plugging these raw vote totals into the D’Hondt calculator, the following proportional seat distribution pops out:

LDP 22
New Komeito 7
DPJ 5
Your Party 5
JRP 4
JCP 3
SDP 1
Other parties 0

The projection, biased upon the assumption of no last minute reversal of the decay of support for the DPJ, still only secures only 31 seats for the revisionists, 7 seats short of Constitutional Revision Nirvana.

The fly in the constitutional revision crowd's punch bowl is...surprise! (not really) the NEW KOMEITO. Unless the leaders of the New Komeito or That Which Cannot Be Named tell their voters to not show up on the 21st, their immobile mass will outweigh any projected "rightward shift" in favor of constitutional revision.

I invite readers to play around with the calculator, trying out higher voter turnouts and different support levels based on the public opinion survey the individual reader may fancy.

Fiddle as one might, the leap to the 161 162 seats needed for constitutional revision -- even when making assumptions equivalent to pretty much everything goes the revisionists' way on election eve -- remains just too far off.

Faith In Numbers (1)

In the dip in the popularity polls of the Kan Cabinet after the quite responsible shout out by Prime Minister Kan Naoto to the Liberal Democratic Party to stop the catcalls from the sidelines and instead join with the ruling coalition in reforming country's revenues base (i.e. - raise taxes) the nation's liberal news organizations are beginning to lose their marbles panicking.

Here are the latest seat projections for the various parties in the upcoming House of Councillors election from The Asahi Shimbun.

And here are the projections from the Tokyo Shimbun


According to the median view of the of the Asahi, the DPJ will end up with exactly the same number of seats -- 54 -- in the House of Councillors as it now controls. In the Tokyo Shimbun, the party will actually lose two spots, slipping to 52 seats. In both cases, the DPJ will have to go hat in hand post election in search of (a) coalition parther(s), as it needed to win 60 seats in order to have a 50%+1 majority in the House of Councillors.

Not having a majority in the upper house is not the end of the world, of course. The most important piece of legislation, the national budget, goes into effect 30 days after it is passed by the House of Representatives, no matter what the House of Councillors does with it. The DPJ holds a comfortable 307 out of 482 480 seats* majority in the House of Representatives - so the budget is safe. However, for all other legislation or the confirmation of officials, the DPJ will have to rely on the kindness of strangers to make it to the 122 votes it needs to get anything done on the legislative front.

There also so problematic issues of control of committee chairmanships in the House of Councillors should the DPJ fail to win an outright majority. These are not on a par, however, with the simple fact that no legislation is guaranteed passage without a 50%+1 majority of the House of Councillors members present -- which opens up some interesting opportunities in the case the DPJ fall just a few votes short of an absolute majority for sudden absences of independents from the chambers at crucial moments. Two of the seven independent members of the House of Councillors are up for reelection this year, meaning that at very least, in the next Diet session, 119 votes might be sufficient for passage of legislation which the DPJ really want to see passed.

Anyway, both the projected polls leave the DPJ far short of the majorities it needs. Just how they do this seems unsound.

First is the pass given to the microparties in both polls. There are not just five, as listed in both sets of results. There are eight seven. Two of the left: the Social Democratic Party and the Women's Party. Six on the right: People's New Party, Sunrise Party (Tachiagare Nippon), New Renaissance Party (Shinto kaikaku), The Spirit of Japan (Nihon Soshinto) and the Happiness Realization Party.

The larger the number of little parties, the greater likelihood they will zero each other out the d'Hondt system, which is the method used to assign seats in the proportional part of the election. In each of the last three House of Councillors elections a party had to secure 2.2% of the national vote to win even a single proportional seat. At present, only the SDP is polling greater than 2%.

To see how the winnowing process happens, check out the wonderful d'Hondt system calculator here.

Using the calculator, I have run a basic scenario, assuming conservatively that

1) just as many voters show up in 2010 as in 2007
2) skeptical non-aligned voters choose Your Party as the non-DPJ, non-LDP alternative
3) that the Communists and the Socialists stay put
4) that Your Party captures the business lobby vote
5) that the conservative microparties steal votes that would have gone to the LDP, and
6) some voters will vote for the LDP out of nostalgia or force of habit

The results of the simulation, which you can see here, assigns the 48 available proportional seats this way:

DPJ 19
LDP 11
New Komeito 6
Your Party 6
Japan Communist Party 3
Democratic Socialist Party 2
Sunrise 1

One can fiddle about and get New Renaissance a seat that the cost of one DPJ seat. However, failing a huge jump in turnout of folks boiling mad at the DPJ, these are likely to be the results we see in the morning paper on July 12.

Sic transit nunc gloria the microparties and their purported seats.

If my simulation can be faulted, it is for being too generous to the LDP. The party chose last year to run as the anti-Ozawa Ichiro party, choosing stances not based upon their logical coherence but on whether or not Ozawa was for them or against them. Other than anti-Ozawaism, the party failed to produce a convincing reason for its wavering supporters to stick around, the reason why Masuzoe Yo'ichi quit, dismissing "LDP" as the acronym for "Lousy Dumb Party."

Which brings up my second, much larger objection to the Asahi and Tokyo Shimbun projections: the presumption of viability of the LDP as a political force in the district elections - the subject of my next post.

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*Kobayashi Chiyomi resigned from her seat the day after the close of the regular Diet session. The by-election for her Hokkaido #5 district seat will be in October. One other seat is also vacant.