Turnout: 54.70%
About this election
Japan held elections for half of the 242-seat House of Councillors on 10 July 2016. The Liberal Democratic Party won 55 of the 121 seats contested and, with Komeito (14), the Initiatives from Osaka (7) and other amenable forces, the parties favouring constitutional revision reached the two-thirds majority needed to propose amendments in the upper house for the first time — having already held such a majority in the lower house. The Democratic Party — the main opposition, freshly merged that spring — took 32 seats. Turnout was 54.70%. It was the first national election in which 18- and 19-year-olds could vote, after the voting age was lowered from 20.
The House of Councillors is the upper chamber of the National Diet. Its members serve fixed six-year terms and the house cannot be dissolved; instead, half of it is renewed every three years, so each councillor faces the voters once every six years. The chamber cannot bring down a government through no confidence, but it can delay and amend legislation, and a budget or treaty can become law only with time even against its wishes. A ruling coalition that loses control of the upper house faces a "twisted Diet" that can paralyse its programme, so command of the chamber is highly prized. In 2016 the house had 242 seats, of which 121 were up for election.
Councillors are elected by parallel voting. In 2016, 73 were chosen in 45 prefectural districts — single-member districts decided by first-past-the-post and larger multi-member districts by single non-transferable vote, in which each elector casts one vote and the top finishers win — and 48 by open-list proportional representation in a single nationwide constituency. This cycle introduced two merged two-prefecture districts, Tottori–Shimane and Tokushima–Kōchi, to reduce the disparity in the value of a vote between thinly and densely populated areas; both are shaded identically on the map. The prefecture map colours each district by the party that won the most of its seats.
Prime Minister Shinzō Abe framed the election around "Abenomics" — monetary easing, fiscal stimulus and structural reform — and used the result to justify a second postponement of a scheduled rise in the consumption tax to 10%. The opposition concentrated its fire on Abe's 2015 security laws, which reinterpreted the constitution to permit limited collective self-defence, and warned that an upper-house pro-revision supermajority would open the door to rewriting the pacifist Article 9.
For the first time, the Democratic Party, the Japanese Communist Party and smaller liberal parties fielded joint candidates in all 32 single-member districts to consolidate the anti-Abe vote. The pact won eleven of those duels — a striking proof of concept that would shape opposition strategy for years — but it was not enough to deny the government its commanding overall position, and cooperation with the Communists discomfited some Democratic supporters.
The governing LDP and Komeito were challenged by the newly formed Democratic Party (created in March 2016 from the merger of the Democratic Party of Japan and the small Japan Innovation Party), the Japanese Communist Party, the Osaka-based Initiatives from Osaka (the forerunner of today's Nippon Ishin), and minor parties including the Social Democrats, the People's Life Party and the conservative Party for Japanese Kokoro.
Securing a two-thirds pro-amendment bloc in both houses was a historic milestone for Abe, the first time since the constitution took effect in 1947 that the conditions for proposing an amendment existed simultaneously in each chamber. Yet divisions among the pro-revision parties over what, exactly, to change meant no amendment was ever put to the required national referendum. The LDP led the great majority of prefectural districts, with the Democratic Party competitive mainly in a handful of urban and northern districts.
The debut of votes at 18, following a 2015 reform, added roughly 2.4 million young electors to the rolls. Their turnout lagged the national average, and the change prompted a wave of civic-education efforts in schools, but it did not noticeably alter the overall balance of the result.
The 2016 election was the first held under boundaries reshaped to tackle the upper house's long-standing malapportionment, the wide gap in the value of a vote between sparsely populated rural prefectures and the crowded cities. The Supreme Court had repeatedly ruled earlier elections to be in a "state of unconstitutionality" because rural ballots could carry several times the weight of urban ones. The merger of Tottori with Shimane and of Tokushima with Kōchi into combined districts, each electing a single councillor, was the central remedy — controversial in those prefectures, which feared losing their own representation, but designed to bring the maximum disparity below the roughly three-to-one ceiling the courts had signalled they would tolerate.
Turnout of 54.70% was a modest improvement on the 2013 upper-house election, though still low by the standards of earlier decades, reflecting the same long-run disengagement seen in lower-house contests.
Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (Sōmushō) and NHK — soumu.go.jp.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.