Political Consequences of the MMM Electoral Systems\r\nin Taiwan and Japan

Abstract

Since electoral systems structure how representation works, it is not surprising that changes in electoral rules and their consequences always attract close attention.This paper intends to explore how some differences in less-high-profile rules might have caused divergent speed and extent of reaching some theoretically expected political consequences.\r\nWe compare two East Asian countries, Japan and Taiwan, because both of them abandoned the decades old single nontransferable vote multimember district(SNTV-MMD) system and endorsed the similar mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) system. Focusing on three differences between Japan and Taiwan, including dual candidacy, regional PR constituency, and PR threshold, we tap their possible consequences on macro-level party systems and district-level strategic voting patterns.Further careful comparative studies and rigorous causal analyses are called for to study this topic.