About Len Schoppa's very interesting points concerning "rat cho", Cox's work on
Britain, and Japan's electoral reform, a few questions occurred to me:

1) Len mentioned in passing the switch to "larger electoral districts" also at
some time . How much before the switch to single-member districts was this? This
may be a key point. We know that the larger the district, the more likely voters
need some sort of "guidance" for how to vote since voting on the basis of
personalism doesn't work as well. Often this is provided by party label. The
work of Flanagan in Japan makes this connection clear: if I'm not mistaken, he
found during some of his analyses years ago that the larger the electoral
district [from HOR local districts through HOC local to HOC 'national'
districts] the more voting behavioir was based on party not
personality/individual candidate.

Thus it occurred to me if the British changed the SIZE of electoral districts
BEFORE they changed the number of representatives [from 2 to 1] that might
account for the earlier change to party voting. Just an idea.

2)The question of "size" of the district is also a complicated one that may be
interesting in the Japanese reform. To wit, the actual geographic "size" of
districts under the reform should be smaller than in the multimember system
[after all it goes from about 130 districts to about 500), yet the actual number
of voters the candidate must reach to win may be much higher [you could get
elected under the multimember system with only 15-20% of the vote; now you'll
need a higher percentage], or if not the number, at least the percent. How will
these two, somewhat contradictory , changes play out?

3) FYI: Steve Reed, Hiroshi Ando, and I are planning/hoping to do a survey of
Diet member candidates both before and after the next HOR election to ask them
how they have changed, if they have, their strategies, organizations, koenkai,
fund raising, use of media, etc. to respond to the new electoral system. Indeed,
we hope to do this over th e next few elections to see how much, how, and how
fast a change in institutions actually does bring about a change in behavior on
the part of pols. Rat cho sometimes assumes that politicians are all political
scientists who rationally deduce and correctly so the ways they should respond
to new electoral rules of the game; maybe. Maybe not. One needs empirical data
to test deductive hypotheses. Or am I just old fashioned?

Anyway, where are Steve Reed and Scott Flanagan who can probably contribute a
lot to this dialogue?

Best,
Ellis Krauss