DPJ to win 308 lower house seats in simulation based on Sunday polls

Japan Policy & Politics, July 19, 2004

TOKYO, July 12 Kyodo

The main opposition Democratic Party of Japan, which took big strides in Sunday's House of Councillors election, would win more than 300 spots in the 480-seat House of Representatives, a Kyodo News simulation of the upper house poll results showed Monday.

The election outcome, in which the DPJ narrowly defeated the ruling Liberal Democratic Party with 50 to 49 seats among the 121 seats contested, translates to a whopping 308 seats for the DPJ in the lower house through a simple calculation of votes won in the proportional representation section of Sunday's election.

But if the LDP and its governing coalition partner, the New Komeito party, were to cooperate in the lower house's single-seat constituencies to optimize their winning strategies, the ruling bloc would secure 320 seats overall, the calculations showed.

The simulation brings to light the importance of the LDP's cooperation with the New Komeito in the single-seat district section of a general election.

According to the test calculations, if the LDP were to tackle the lower house election on its own, it would lose in all of the single-seat district races in 15 prefectures, including Hokkaido, Tokyo and Osaka, and win only 68 seats in such constituencies nationwide.

In the proportional representation blocks, the ruling party would garner 62 seats for a combined 130 seats. The LDP currently holds 246 seats in the lower chamber.

In contrast, the DPJ would win in 232 single-seat constituencies and grab 76 proportional-representation spots for a total of 308, compared to the current 176.

The New Komeito, which currently holds 34 seats in the lower house, would have only 27, while the Japanese Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party would get the same number of seats as they now have of nine and six seats, respectively.

The New Komeito, the JCP and the SDP would be able to win only proportional representation seats, the calculations showed.

If, however, the LDP and the New Komeito were to fully cooperate in terms of strategically fielding candidates for the most effective results, the simulation shows the coalition partners together would win 231 seats in the single-seat districts.

Together with 89 proportional representation seats calculated for both parties, their total would come to 320 seats.

In this case, the DPJ would have to settle for 69 seats in the constituencies and 76 in the proportional representation blocks for a combined 145, or less than it currently holds in the lower house.

But if the DPJ and the SDP were to fully cooperate in the election, the LDP and the New Komeito would win 173 seats over 127 for the DPJ and the SDP among the small districts.

In the event the JCP were to take part in the opposition partnership, the three parties would notch a total of 205 seats while the current ruling bloc would gain only 95.

The simulation involved taking the number of votes each party won in the non-segmented proportional representation portion of Sunday's upper house election and distributing them proportionally to the lower house's single-seat constituencies and proportional-representation blocks.

For the single-seat constituencies, the party with the most votes was given ''victory'' in the respective districts, while seats allocated to parties in the proportional representation section was based on the d'Hondt formula, in proportion to the total number of votes cast for each party or its candidates.

In Sunday's upper house election, the DPJ topped the LDP in the share of valid votes in both the prefectural constituencies and the proportional representation section.

In the proportional representation portion, it won about 21.1 million votes, or 37.79 percent of the total, over the LDP's 16.8 million. The New Komeito garnered 8.6 million, followed by the JCP at 4.4 million and the SDP at close to 3 million.