Principle Of Equality In Election In Japanese Election Law And Its Practice

The project of the Electoral System should accord with Election of the principle of equality, which is established gradually after long democratic struggle. Nowadays, every country in the world pays more attention to the democratic value which reflects in the Equality Electoral. The principle of equality about the right to vote, in fact should include three aspects:the election of people, should be the voting rights of equality, is the one man one vote, equal representation; for the person to be elected, is the opportunity to candidates and parties, elected for equality of opportunity; from the election process, should be the constituencies, seats, representing the ratio of the nomination, etc. always implement the electoral equality.However, the principle of equality embodied the design intention of election system and the actual operations are often different, Japan is a typical representative of the state. Since after the Meiji Restoration, Japan election system step by step toward the principle of equal election forward, from a limited election originally to the general election, from the Western electoral system according to the situation to change, the Japanese electoral system more and more attention to the equal protection in more than one hundred years, but we still need to pay attention to in the provisions, system and law, practice has not kept pace. Especially in the demarcation of constituencies, distribution of seats and nomination of these systems, practice and theory to draw further apart.In the demarcation of constituencies, and the results of the demarcation of constituencies and constituencies during the final population against the1:2principles of law, causing votes value is not balanced; and, the redistricting requires the full consideration of the administrative divisions, to ensure the integrity of the division, however, in the practice of administrative region but arbitrary segmentation, damage to the equality of the election.On the distribution of seats, the law provides for the principle of priority in the allocation of a seat, which is contrary to the principle of equality from the legislation, which allows the opportunity inequality between urban and rural, sparsely populated countryside itself take the initiative, while the population of the city is dense competition tragic.11proportional representation district and300small constituencies were calculated, the highest number of votes obtained by a small constituency seats, seats are allocated according to the proportion of area proportion of votes each party, which was likely to cause the attendance of parties and the vote gap is too large, contrary to public opinion, but also conducive to large institutional party, undermined the equal right to compete for a small party.On the nomination of candidates, the system has been criticized for repeat candidates. The purpose of this system is to ensure that an important set of candidates for the party even in small constituencies unfortunately lost the election can be resurrected once again given the opportunity to be elected in the proportional region. However, the creation of such a system, so the opportunity to elect candidates of different unequal, potentially increasing the part of privileged;and contrary to the small district can only elect a person’s requirements, elected by proportional area who makes some constituencies even2-3people can be elected, which exacerbates the problem with different voting rights; same time, the system is not suitable for all political parties, it’s more likely the statutory conditions set big party, which also makes the competition is not between the large and the small party equality.In short, the development of the system is always in order to better perform in order to achieve the purpose for which the development of research principles of their departure from the electoral system and electoral equality in theory and practice, both can understand Japanese, but also as a warning to Japan, in theoretically fully understand the relevance, importance and principles of the system, in practice, the gap between full attention to the specific implementation and system design goals and principles between.