Current Candidate Nomination Mechanism and “Kobo”

DPJ: The kenrens (県連, prefecture branches) choose candidates for each district, and the national head quarter approves them. When kenren cannot select candidates, the decision is handed over to the headquarter which uses the kobo.

There is an iron rule of giving priority to incumbents when making nomination. Competition arises only when there is no incumbent for the district, and there are more than one new faces. Yet, if an incumbent loses two district-level elections in a row, he/she will not be protected anymore as the automatic nomination rule will not be applied. In short, the focus of the nomination process is to select someone who is electable.

The kobo system was a mechanism designed for the party out of power to recruit candidates so that party could compete nationwide. Now that DPJ is in power now, the kobo is conducted before each election only if necessary. Because the system does not have a fixed uniform format, the following descriptions summarize the essence of the system based on the 2003 and 2005 elections in which the kobo was used extensively.

major newspapers with national circulation. The cost is somewhere between 50,000,000 to 100,000,000 yen. Each ad rakes in about 2,000 applications. Applicants submit CVs and essays.

Paper screening is done by five party secretariat officers. Those at least three officers gave a lenient pass for proceed to the next stage. The pool is narrowed down to one tenth during this stage. When evaluating the essays, the enthusiasm for politics is weighted more heavily than expert knowledge of policy issues. Those approximately 200 applicants who passed the paper screening proceed to face-to-face interviews.

For these interviews, two MPs in charge of the election committee join the process, and ask questions such as what they want to do by becoming MPs. Each interview lasts about 20 minutes.

What interviewers look into is whether the applicant mentally strong and tough enough to endure the irrational labor that accompanies campaigns, get along with others in the party, and not give up easily for the coming years. After the interviews, about 100 will qualify as the “reserve” nominees.

The headquarter sometimes attempts to assign these reserve nominees to the vacant districts while consulting the kenren. The district being DPJ-vacant means it has an LDP incumbent. Thus, most of the vacant districts are “difficult” ones by definition. Among them, relatively easier ones tend to have been already secured by local favorites or challengers from last time. Thus, this assignment process can be very tormenting. For the new faces, geographic connection is deemed important in the matching process because that may be the only way to justify a kobo candidate parachuting from the center. Often, reserve nominees are left on their own to hunt for promising districts. They will have to visit each vacant district in person to find out whether the district is truly empty or there are already informal nominees. Just about 50 of reserves actually get district nominations, and start receiving the activity stipend of 700,000 yen a month. One becomes an official candidate (“konin”) only after getting a district assignment. Those who passed the paper screening but did not get district nomination are provided with an opportunity to experience “field work” at some MP’s office or are encouraged to run in local elections.

Table 2 summarizes the number of candidates nominated by the kobo system and the number of such nominees actually got elected. Although the success of the kobo system was limited in early years (prior to 2004), the system seems to have contributed significantly to the DPJ’s landslide victory in 2009.

Table 2: DPJ Nominations and Wins by Kobo System, 2000-2009

Year Number of

Candidate by kobo

Number of Wins Winning % of kobo candidates

2000 17 3 17.6%

2003 18 7 38.8%

2004 29 6 20.7%

2009* 41 30+ 73.1%

kobo competition, too. Including those “insiders” and those previously had entered politics through the kobo, about 60 ran and most of them won the elections.

LDP: LDP also protects incumbents, the same way the DPJ does—that is, all incumbents are given priority for nomination unless there is some dire reason not to. For open seats, the nomination procedure starts from the bottom of party structure. Local branches are allowed to propose candidates to the national headquarter. Although the party chair reserves the ultimate authority over nomination, local preferences are mostly respected. If the local branch cannot agree on a candidate, the decision is passed over to the headquarter, which is very rare.

After the loss to the DPJ in the 2009 elections, the use of the kobo for all open seats was established as requirement within LDP. Seshu (i.e. hereditary candidate) is not prohibited, but everyone has to be selected through the kobo for an open seat. Two general guidelines have been adopted for future nomination: First, the branch chooses the branch chair, who becomes a reserve nominee for the district. As the election approaches, the branch chair is officially nominated as the candidate to run in the district. Second, those who lost in previous general elections will automatically be assigned to the branch chair if they are not over 65 years old, and scored above 70% in the sekihairitu (惜敗率, margin of defeat). Others, in principle, have to compete in the kobo with new faces. In general, public opinion polls conducted by the party are used extensively, but they are strictly internal and the numbers are never published. The focus is on the electability of the candidates, especially when the decision is passed over to the headquarter.

Conducting the party member primary is rarely considered an option, since it is not just time- and money-consuming but can be unfairly biased toward old faces who have their own group of registered party members. Introducing the open primary seems to be out of question so far.

To start the kobo selection procedure, the branch puts up ads on the Internet, newspapers, and party devices. The selection committee could consist, when most open, of 100 to 200 general affairs staff, who vote on candidates. The most typical, however, is a committee with 20 members or so, who discuss and give scores to candidates. The local branches preside over the paper selection and interviews. The headquarter double-checks the chosen candidates through additional interviews.

Regarding the selection criteria, being under 55 years old is regarded important (so that the person could serve in the Diet at least for 20 years). Career and zest count. Having policy preferences that match those of LDP is important, too. Lastly, whether the person can prepare cash for his/her own campaign is crucial.

There is a huge diversity in the ways the kobo is currently conducted across districts/prefectures, reflecting the strength of local organizations and the decentralized nature of LDP. In general, an applicant need to fill up an application form, write up an essay, collect a letter

to promise not to run as an independent if he/she does not get nominated by the party. All the common patterns aside, there exists no uniform format for LDP’s kobo. Local branches use different criteria to regulate the selection procedure, such as age limit, hometown residency, or even love for LDP.

The impetuses for adopting the kobo system can be summarized as following: The introduction of the SMD led to a realistic perspective for the major opposition party to take over power, which in turn led to an adoption of the kobo system. In the 1990s, although LDP was shaky, it still maintained a solid base to dominate the government most of the time. Any serious opposition party needed to come up with a way to run candidates against LDP in most SMDs if it wanted to win the government. Necessity of filling all districts led to the extensive application of the kobo system.

III. Conclusion

With kick-in of the new electoral regime (i.e., MMM system) mainly consisted of SMDs, the importance of achieving party nomination increased than ever. Under the SNTV system, for example in Japan, while the party headquarter had the power to nominate, a candidate could run in an election as a conservative independent and join LDP once elected. One could even run as an independent while retaining the party membership. The right to run in elections was widely guaranteed. This is not the case anymore. Under the SMD system, one cannot run in an election as an independent without giving up the LDP membership. The polling primary and the kobo were both widely applied under this context.

Following the seat-maximization assumption under SMD, we argued early on that a party would adopt a candidate selection mechanism that could build up its competitiveness in elections and settle intra-party competition. For this, “electability of the nominee” and “fair conflict resolution” become the two major considerations that a party takes into account when designing its candidate selection mechanism. Taiwan’s polling primary fulfills these two purposes. When adopting polling primary, a party tries to use “numbers” to select someone who is most likely to win a plurality. Additionally, it delegates the power to the general public to resolve its intra-party competition. Japan’s kobo system worked to recruit candidates into difficult districts which otherwise could have remained empty. The system enhances the electoral prospect of the party by appealing to the public of the openness of the recruitment path. Although the current kobo scheme is not as transparent as it could be as a conflict resolution mechanism, it helps the party look better in the way of coping with the internal conflict, at least than the previously dominant old-fashioned behind-the-smoke deal.

These new methods are not problem-free, though. Taiwan’s polling primary could ruin the party allegiance of candidates. It also destroys party organization by making dues-paying

opens door to new comers only when the party is out of power. Incumbents are heavily protected, and the ruling party necessarily stiffens. In other words, the two new methods introduced in Taiwan and Japan could open a window for research topics such as the possible changes of congressional behavior of parliamentary members, incumbent advantages, and party system brought about by changes in candidate selection methods.

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