Richard Katz writes:

"What's wrong with putting micro-parties at a disadvantage?" (2012/11/09)

Rick poses a general question that goes well beyond the scope of my original aside-to-an-aside regarding "regional micro-parties" and cannot in my view be answered in the abstract. I will try to demonstrate this by responding to the specific points that he raises to support his rhetorical question.

Thresholds are not imposed in a vacuum. The only formal thresholds that I can recall are set at 5%, and I assume that Rick's memory tells him the same. Now if my memory serves me correctly-always a dubious proposition, so caveat spectator-the 5% threshold is instituted solely in more-or-less straight proportional systems. But Japan's national electoral system is a hybrid, where in both Houses only a minority of the seats (48 x 2) is apportioned through proportional representation while the majority of the seats (73 x 2) are allocated by way of SMDs. In the House of Councilors, the numbers are 73 x 2 48 x2. It's easy arithmetic to confirm that the proportional part as configured has the rough equivalent of a 2 % threshold.
(The de facto threshold rises and falls with the number of proportional seats, which is significantly smaller in any of the regional districts in the House of
Representatives.) This HOC as a whole seems to be reasonably pari passu with pure proportional system with a 5% threshold.

Of course, the arithmetic, a little more elaborate this time but straightforward nevertheless, shows that the DPJ after the 2009 HOR general election would not have had a HOC majority if all 121 X 2 seats had been allocated proportionally with a 5% threshold. Of course, the overrepresentation of outback prefectures in the Japanese electoral system means this would have been the case if only the current 48 X 2 proportional seats had been allocated with a 5% threshold. The policy distortions from Rick's perspective, which BTW I share on what I think are his specifics, may have been caused by the presence of the two micro-parties, but the broader political paralysis that has gripped the political scene of late is rooted in the unequal distribution of voting rights between the metropolitan and the periphery. In fact, it can be plausibly argued that it was the presence of the two micro-parties that enabled the incoming regime to do anything at all. It was arguably a case of no tail, then no wag.

Of course a counterfactual argument can be made that the DPJ would have had no choice but to work with the LDP and/or Komeito from the get-go and the ensuing legislative process could have wound up to be more constructive than in the current "twisted" Diet.
However, I do not think that this is likely to have resulted in the kind of reforms that I believe Rick supports, which I again share, as long as the two major parties each lack coherence and consistency in the policy inclinations of their Diet members. Whether that in turn would have resulted in an earlier precipitation of political realignment we shall never know. But change one thing and so many other things are likely to change, generating any number of alternate presents and futures, so I'll stop right there before my imagination gets out of hand. I will add one fact though; the Japanese political system got along just fine for many decades with a HOC that could and did generate micro- and mini-parties well before a subsidy system that favored large parties was instituted. Think about that.

Finally, as a matter of logical consistency, Rick must be in opposition to independent legislators. Naughty, naughty; what would George Washington say to that if he were alive today?