Youth Representation and Parties’ Nomination Strategy in Mixed Member Systems

• In Event: Electoral Institutions, Candidate Strategy, and Legislative Behavior

Abstract

Proportional representation (PR) systems generally promote minority representation, including youth representation. Given that mixed member electoral systems, which elect legislators from both single member districts (SMDs) and party lists, are expected to provide the “best of both worlds”, youth underrepresentation in the Japanese case is anomalous.
I argue that the interaction between the two tiers of the system, namely dual nomination, contributes to the underrepresentation problem in the country. Dual nomination allows political parties to nominate their candidates simultaneously in the SMD and PR tiers. In other words, parties can give their SMD candidates an “insurance ticket”, which might let them win a seat even if they lose in their SMD district. I hypothesize that parties tend to nominate candidates with higher seniority on safer list positions under dual nomination, diminishing the representational advantage of the PR system.
I test the contamination hypothesis presented above by analyzing a comprehensive dataset of the Japanese House of Representatives Election. I include all PR candidates in the elections after the 1994 electoral reform. To test the hypothesis on the relationship among candidates’ age, seniority, and list rank, I operationalize parties’ evaluation of candidates by using two indices of candidates’ position in the PR list. The first is the rank of candidates in the list, the most straightforward measure of parties’ evaluation of candidates. The second is the rank electability index, an ordered variable indicating how likely the party expects a candidate in the rank to be elected. This measurement is intended to capture parties’ subjective evaluation of candidates based on the information available to them at the time of nomination.
First, I show that candidates’ list positions are 1. not significantly associated with their age, 2. positively associated with their seniority, and 3. positively associated with their dual nomination status. That is, while young candidates in the PR tier are no more likely to be placed on a favorable position, candidates with higher seniority or those who are also nominated in the SMD tier are more likely to be placed higher on the list.
Next, I show that those relationships might disappear or be reversed in the absence of dual nomination. I consider the following counterfactual scenario: parties cannot nominate their SMD candidates in PR blocs, and they nominate alternative candidates in the PR tier. Varying the age of alternative candidates, I show that in some cases there is a negative, significant relationship between candidates’ age and their list positions.
The result of this paper speaks to the literature on representation and electoral systems: mixed member systems might spoil the representational benefits of PR systems without proper institutional arrangements.

Author

• Dai Sasaki, The University of Tokyo