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Abstract
An electoral system generates political consequences through two routes, one directly
through the mechanical working of the system and the other indirectly through actors’
strategic reactions. This paper demonstrates that a comprehensive anatomy of the single
non-transferable vote (SNTV) system’s mechanical and strategic effects together provides
the key with which to understand how the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) survived the early
electoral competition and consolidated its governing power in postwar Japan. More
specifically, we establish that the mechanical effect of the SNTV was such that ceteris
paribus LDP’s seat share increased, not decreased, as the LDP reduced its number of
candidates. We also show that such factors as urbanization, occupational distribution and the
concentration of elderly population had no independent effects on the number of LDP
candidates, substantiating that the process of LDP’s candidate nomination was strategic and
politically determined, not socio-economically generated as conventionally believed (146
words).
Convention