The Effect of Sex on Vote Choice in the Block Vote System in Japan

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Abstract

When women were given the right to vote for the first time in Japan in 1946, 39 women were elected to the lower house of the Diet. The percentage of women in the lower house at that time was 8.4%, but it declined sharply thereafter, hovering between 2 and 3% until 1993. Why were so many women elected in the 1946 election? Researchers and pundits suggested that this is partly due to the use of the block vote system in the 1946 election that allowed each voter to write in the names of up to two or three candidates on the ballot. In contrast, after 1947, the single non-transferable vote (SNTV) system was adopted in which each voter could write in only one candidate’s name on the ballot in a multi-member district. Under the former system, voters may have been incentivized to write in the names of woman as well as man candidates on their ballots to achieve gender balance, resulting in an increase in the number of women winners. We tested this hypothesis by conducting a survey experiment with Japanese voters in which we manipulated the number of candidate names that respondents could write on their ballots. The results showed that women candidates were actually less likely to be selected under the block vote condition than under the SNTV condition, although there was a tendency among respondents to change the gender of the second and third candidates selected under the block vote condition. This suggests that the higher percentage of women legislators in the first postwar elections was not necessarily due to the use of the block vote system

Authors

• Yoshikuni Ono, Waseda University

• Hirofumi Miwa, Gakushuin University

• Yuko Kasuya, Keio University