Nominating Candidates Under New Rules in Italy and Japan: You Cannot Bargain with Resources You Do Not Have

Abstract

In the 1990s, Italy and Japan both adopted mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) electoral systems that combined single member districts (SMDs) with proportional representation (PR) (Shugart and Wattenberg 2001b). Political parties in both countries were thus faced with the novel problem of deciding who to nominate in each SMD. In both countries, SMD nominations were made through complex negotiations among candidates, parties, and coalitions, but the form taken by those ­negotiations were quite different. In Italy, nominations were allocated through a centralized bargaining process among the parties participating in a pre-electoral coalition (PEC). PECs allocated winnable SMDs to the participating parties in proportion to the overall contribution of the party to the national vote of the coalition. Italian parties thus “proportionalized the SMDs” (D’Alimonte 2005). In Japan, nominations were determined by decentralized negotiations at the district level between candidates and the central party headquarters. In Italy, there was a single national bargaining table for each electoral coalition, while in Japan there were 300 different bargaining tables for each party, one for each SMD. Why did the response to such similar problems differ so widely?