Sekihairitsu

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Sekihairitsu" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (August 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Sekihairitsu (惜敗率, literally the "narrow loss ratio", sometimes translated as "ratio of margin of defeat", "best loser calculation" or "second-chance rule"^{[nb 1]}) is a method used in the proportional representation (PR) constituencies ("blocks") for the Japanese House of Representatives to determine the order of candidates placed on the same list position by their party.

Under the PR system introduced in the 1996 general election for 176 (initially 200) of the House of Representatives' 465 (initially 500) seats, political parties are free to nominate candidates running or not running concurrently in one of the 289 single-member first-past-the-post electoral districts. The parties may rank the PR list candidates they nominate in a regional "block" in any order they decide. However, they are allowed to (but don't have to) place some or all of the PR candidates concurrently running in a single-member district on the same position on their PR list. In that case, the sekihairitsu is used to determine the order of candidates. It is calculated by dividing the number of votes a candidate received in his electoral district by the district winner's votes. After all district winners are struck from the list—as they already have won a seat and thus cannot be elected by PR—all remaining candidates put on the same list rank are then arranged according to their sekihairitsu in descending order.

While the sekihairitsu system allows – depending on a party's nomination strategy and electoral success – more successful candidates (those "narrowly losing" their districts) prioritized election by PR, it does not change the fact that the Japanese voting system is a parallel, i.e. non-compensatory voting system: The number of PR seats for a party is independent from the results in the single-member districts and is exclusively determined by the number of PR votes the party receives. And unlike the Open list proportional voting system used since 2001 in elections for the House of Councillors of Japan where voters may choose to cast a preference vote for a single PR candidate, the sekihairitsu system doesn't allow the voters to influence directly who is elected by PR.

The new electoral system was initially unpopular and poorly understood – an Asahi poll in October 1996 found that 19 % of respondents liked it while 60 % were unhappy with it; a Yomiuri poll in the same month found that only 5 % of voters found they understood the system well, 32 % somewhat, and more than 60 % according to their own estimate understood little or nothing at all of it.

It has been criticized by several newspaper editorials, and many voters mistakenly identified the sekihairitsu system as the culprit for the "resurrections" that occurred under the new system, that is, the possibility that a candidate who loses his majoritarian district election may still win a seat in the proportional election. But in fact, it is the dual candidacy that makes this possible whereas the sekihairitsu system on the contrary creates a link, albeit indirect and conditional on the parties using the system in their nominations, between a candidate's personal district success (or the "narrowness of his defeat") and his chance to be elected in the proportional vote.^[1]

Cite error: There are <ref group=nb> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=nb}} template (see the help page).