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53-425: The establishment of Nikkō National Park dates to the early 20th century. The Diet of Japan designated Nikkō an imperial park ( 帝国公園 , teikoku kōen ) in 1911. The National Parks Law was passed in 1931, and Nikkō National Park was established in 1934. The park was expanded throughout the 20th century. Oze National Park was once part of Nikkō National Park, but became a separate national park in 2007. The park

106-470: A hypercorrection that attempts to limit the term parallel voting to refer only to mixtures of first-past-the-post and proportional representation. Parallel voting can use other systems besides FPP, and can have any mixture of winner-take-all , semi-proportional , and proportional components. Although the two are often mistakenly conflated , mixed-member majoritarian representation and parallel voting refer to two different things. Parallel voting refers to

159-448: A quorum and deliberations are in public unless at least two-thirds of those present agree otherwise. Each house elects its own presiding officer who casts the deciding vote in the event of a tie. The Diet has parliamentary immunity . Members of each house have certain protections against arrest while the Diet is in session and arrested members must be released during the term of the session if

212-427: A rule for computing each party's representation in a legislature, which involves two voting systems operating in parallel, with one being layered ( superimposed ) on top of the other. By contrast, mixed-member majoritarian representation refers to the results of the system, i.e. the system retains the advantage that some parties parties get in the winner-take-all side of the system. For this reason, parallel voting

265-708: A winner-take-all system with party-list proportional representation (PR). While first-preference plurality with PR is the most common pairing in parallel voting, many other combinations are possible. The proportion of list seats compared to total seats ranges widely; for example 30% in Taiwan, 37.5% in Japan and 68.7% in Armenia . Parallel voting is used in both national parliaments and local governments in Italy , Taiwan , Lithuania , Russia , Argentina , and other countries, making it among

318-622: A bill must be first passed by both houses of the Diet and then promulgated by the Emperor . This role of the Emperor is similar to the Royal Assent in some other nations; however, the Emperor cannot refuse to promulgate a law and therefore his legislative role is merely a formality. The House of Representatives is the more powerful chamber of the Diet. While the House of Representatives cannot usually overrule

371-406: A different method; the main difference between the houses is in the sizes of the two groups and how they are elected. Voters are also asked to cast two votes: one for an individual candidate in a constituency, and one for a party list. Any national of Japan at least 18 years of age may vote in these elections, reduced from age 20 in 2016. Japan's parallel voting system ( mixed-member majoritarian )

424-399: A gerrymander can help a local candidate, but it cannot raise a major party’s share of seats, while under AMS the effects of gerrymandering are reduced by the compensation) Japan , and subsequently Thailand and Russia adopted a parallel system to provide incentives for greater party cohesiveness. The party is sure to elect the candidates at the top of its list, guaranteeing safe seats for

477-459: A government. Those who favour proportional representation see this as an advantage as parties may not govern alone, but have to compromise. It is also argued that parallel voting does not lead to the degree of fragmentation found in party systems under pure forms of proportional representation . Because voters have two votes, one for a constituency candidate and one for a list, there is a critique that two classes of representatives will emerge under

530-412: A parallel voting system: with one class beholden to their electorate seat, and the other concerned only with their party. Some consider this as an advantage as local as well as national interests will be represented. Some prefer systems where every constituency and therefore every constituent has only one representative, while others prefer a system where every MP represents the electorate as a whole as this

583-405: A possible replacement for the single-member plurality (SMP) system in use at the time. The commission came to the conclusion that parallel voting would be unable to overcome the shortcomings of New Zealand's previous SMP system. The total seats won by a party would likely remain out of proportion to its share of votes—there would be a "considerable imbalance between share of the votes and share of

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636-477: A result of these early conflicts, public opinion of politicians was not favorable. The Imperial Diet consisted of a House of Representatives and a House of Peers ( 貴族院 , Kizoku-in ) . The House of Representatives was directly elected, if on a limited franchise; universal adult male suffrage was introduced in 1925 when the Universal Manhood Suffrage Law was passed, but excluded women, and

689-582: A result, the mixed-member system utilized in the Philippines is not representative at all of the share of the vote that "normal" political parties obtain (even amongst mixed-member majoritarian systems), let alone for those in full proportional representation systems. In New Zealand , the Royal Commission on the Electoral System reviewed the electoral system in 1985-86 and considered parallel voting as

742-405: A secret ballot. It also insists that the electoral law must not discriminate in terms of "race, creed, sex, social status, family origin, education, property or income". Generally, the election of Diet members is controlled by statutes passed by the Diet. This is a source of contention concerning re-apportionment of prefectures' seats in response to changes of population distribution. For example,

795-464: A very strong base in certain constituencies to gain individual seats. Smaller parties are still disadvantaged as the larger parties still predominate. Voters of smaller parties may tactically vote for candidates of larger parties to avoid wasting their constituency vote. If the smaller party close to the threshold may refrain from voting for their preferred party in favour of a larger party to avoid wasting their list vote as well. In countries where there

848-528: Is considered one of the most beautiful in Japan, and is a popular tourist destination. Beyond its striking scenery, the park is noted for its historical Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines , most notably the Nikkō Tōshō-gū and Rinnō-ji . They are designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site as the " Shrines and Temples of Nikkō ". The park is free entry and is divided into three zones, such as Nikko, Kinugawa/Kuriyama, Nasu Kashi/Shiobara. Nikkō National Park

901-493: Is no interaction between its systems to exploit in a way that makes it irrelevant. However, other types of tactical voting (such as compromising) are more relevant under parallel voting, than under AMS, and are virtually irrelevant under MMP. Tactical voting by supporters of larger parties in favour of allied smaller parties close to a threshold, to help their entry to parliament are a possibility in any parallel, AMS or MMP system with an electoral threshold. Parallel systems support

954-427: Is not always mixed-member majoritarian. For example, parallel voting may use a two proportional systems like STV and list-PR and then it would not be mixed-member majoritarian, and a majority bonus system (which is not the same as parallel voting) may also be considered mixed majoritarian. In addition, some mixed-member majoritarian systems are not parallel, in that they allow for interaction (limited compensation) between

1007-420: Is not to be confused with the mixed-member proportional systems used in many other nations. The Constitution of Japan does not specify the number of members of each house of the Diet, the voting system, or the necessary qualifications of those who may vote or be returned in parliamentary elections , thus allowing all of these things to be determined by law. However it does guarantee universal adult suffrage and

1060-1023: Is noted for numerous species of plants and trees, including mizu-bashō , the white skunk cabbage of the Ozegahara marshland, maples , firs , and magnificent stands of sugi , the Japanese cedar that line the roads around Nikkō. Nikkō National Park is a popular destination for hiking , skiing , camping , golfing , and its numerous historical onsen hot spring resorts. Diet of Japan Opposition (92) Unaffiliated (9) Vacant (8) Opposition (242) Unaffiliated (2) Naruhito [REDACTED] Fumihito [REDACTED] Shigeru Ishiba ( LDP ) Second Ishiba Cabinet ( LDP – Komeito coalition ) [REDACTED] [REDACTED] Fukushiro Nukaga Kōichirō Genba [REDACTED] Masakazu Sekiguchi Hiroyuki Nagahama Saburo Tokura Kazuo Ueda The National Diet ( Japanese : 国会 , Hepburn : Kokkai )

1113-434: Is one dominant party and a divided opposition, the proportional seats may be essential for allowing an effective opposition. Those who favour majoritarian systems argue that supplementary seats allocated proportionally increases the chances that no party will receive a majority in an assembly, leading to minority or coalition governments . ; the largest parties may need to rely on the support of smaller ones in order to form

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1166-436: Is reflected in the electoral system as well. Parallel systems are often contrasted with mixed-member proportional systems (MMP) or the additional member system (AMS). There are a unique set of advantages and disadvantages that apply to these specific comparisons. A party that can gerrymander local districts can win more than its share of seats. So parallel systems need fair criteria to draw district boundaries. (Under MMP

1219-552: Is the national legislature of Japan . It is composed of a lower house, called the House of Representatives ( 衆議院 , Shūgiin ), and an upper house, the House of Councillors ( 参議院 , Sangiin ). Both houses are directly elected under a parallel voting system . In addition to passing laws, the Diet is formally responsible for nominating the Prime Minister . The Diet was first established as

1272-665: The Cabinet Legislation Bureau of the government, as well as to the ruling party. Japan's first modern legislature was the Imperial Diet ( 帝国議会 , Teikoku-gikai ) established by the Meiji Constitution in force from 1889 to 1947. The Meiji Constitution was adopted on February 11, 1889, and the Imperial Diet first met on November 29, 1890, when the document entered into force. The first Imperial Diet of 1890

1325-580: The Constitution describes the National Diet as "the highest organ of State power" and "the sole law-making organ of the State". This statement is in forceful contrast to the Meiji Constitution , which described the Emperor as the one who exercised legislative power with the consent of the Diet. The Diet's responsibilities include not only the making of laws but also the approval of the annual national budget that

1378-598: The Kurokawa decision of 1976, invalidating an election in which one district in Hyōgo Prefecture received five times the representation of another district in Osaka Prefecture . In recent elections the malapportionment ratio amounted to 4.8 in the House of Councillors (census 2005: Ōsaka/Tottori; election 2007: Kanagawa/Tottori ) and 2.3 in the House of Representatives (election 2009: Chiba 4/Kōchi 3). Candidates for

1431-592: The Liberal Democratic Party had controlled Japan for most of its post-war history, and it gained much of its support from rural areas. During the post-war era, large numbers of people were relocating to the urban centers in the seeking of wealth; though some re-apportionments have been made to the number of each prefecture's assigned seats in the Diet, rural areas generally have more representation than do urban areas. The Supreme Court of Japan began exercising judicial review of apportionment laws following

1484-522: The advice of the Cabinet . In an emergency the Cabinet can convoke the Diet for an extraordinary session, and an extraordinary session may be requested by one-quarter of the members of either house. At the beginning of each parliamentary session, the Emperor reads a special speech from his throne in the chamber of the House of Councillors. The presence of one-third of the membership of either house constitutes

1537-517: The Diet and the Emperor. This meant that while the Emperor could no longer legislate by decree he still had a veto over the Diet. The Emperor also had complete freedom in choosing the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, and so, under the Meiji Constitution, Prime Ministers often were not chosen from and did not enjoy the confidence of the Diet. The Imperial Diet was also limited in its control over

1590-429: The Diet if the House of Representatives passes a motion of no confidence introduced by fifty members of the House of Representatives. Government officials, including the Prime Minister and Cabinet members , are required to appear before Diet investigative committees and answer inquiries. The Diet also has the power to impeach judges convicted of criminal or irregular conduct. In most circumstances, in order to become law

1643-418: The House demands. They are immune outside the house for words spoken and votes cast in the House. Each house of the Diet determines its own standing orders and has responsibility for disciplining its own members. A member may be expelled, but only by a two-thirds majority vote. Every member of the Cabinet has the right to appear in either house of the Diet for the purpose of speaking on bills, and each house has

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1696-492: The House of Councillors on a bill, the House of Councillors can only delay the adoption of a budget or a treaty that has been approved by the House of Representatives, and the House of Councillors has almost no power at all to prevent the lower house from selecting any Prime Minister it wishes. Furthermore, once appointed it is the confidence of the House of Representatives alone that the Prime Minister must enjoy in order to continue in office. The House of Representatives can overrule

1749-562: The Imperial Diet in 1890 under the Meiji Constitution , and took its current form in 1947 upon the adoption of the post-war constitution . Both houses meet in the National Diet Building ( 国会議事堂 , Kokkai-gijidō ) in Nagatachō , Chiyoda , Tokyo . The houses of the National Diet are both elected under parallel voting systems. This means that the seats to be filled in any given election are divided into two groups, each elected by

1802-1022: The LDP and the Japan Socialist Party (now Social Democratic Party ), which in fact had sponsored the reform. There are three types of sessions of the National Diet: Any session of the National Diet may be cut short by a dissolution of the House of Representatives (衆議院解散, shūgiin kaisan ). In the table, this is listed simply as "(dissolution)"; the House of Councillors or the National Diet as such cannot be dissolved. Parallel voting Condorcet methods Positional voting Cardinal voting Quota-remainder methods Approval-based committees Fractional social choice Semi-proportional representation By ballot type Pathological response Strategic voting Paradoxes of majority rule Positive results In political science , parallel voting or superposition refers to

1855-451: The budget. However, the Diet could veto the annual budget. If no budget was approved, the budget of the previous year continued in force. This changed with the new constitution after World War II. The proportional representation system for the House of Councillors, introduced in 1982, was the first major electoral reform under the post-war constitution. Instead of choosing national constituency candidates as individuals, as had previously been

1908-407: The case, voters cast ballots for parties. Individual councillors, listed officially by the parties before the election, are selected on the basis of the parties' proportions of the total national constituency vote. The system was introduced to reduce the excessive money spent by candidates for the national constituencies. Critics charged, however, that this new system benefited the two largest parties,

1961-491: The creation of single-party majorities more often than MMP or AMS systems, this may be a positive or a negative depending on the view of the voter. Parallel voting is currently used in the following countries: The Philippines' electoral system for Congress is an exceptional case. Political parties running for party-list seats are legally required to be completely separate from those running in constituency seats. Furthermore, political parties are capped at 3 seats (out of 61). As

2014-460: The government submits and the ratification of treaties. It can also initiate draft constitutional amendments, which, if approved, must be presented to the people in a referendum. The Diet may conduct "investigations in relation to government" (Article 62). The Prime Minister must be designated by Diet resolution, establishing the principle of legislative supremacy over executive government agencies (Article 67). The government can also be dissolved by

2067-499: The leadership. By contrast, under the MMP or AMS system a party that does well in the local seats will not need or receive any compensatory list seats, so the leadership might have to run in the local seats. Certain types of AMS can be made de facto parallel systems by tactical voting and parties using decoy lists, which (other) MMP systems generally avoid. This specific type of tactical voting does not occur in parallel voting systems as there

2120-542: The legislature, under parallel voting, proportionality is confined only to the list seats. Therefore, a party that secured, say, 5% of the vote will have only 5% of the list seats, and not 5% of all the seats in the legislature. The major critique of parallel systems is that they cannot guarantee overall proportionality. Large parties can win very large majorities, disproportionate to their percentage vote. Parallel voting systems allow smaller parties that cannot win individual elections to secure at least some representation in

2173-466: The legislature; however, unlike in a proportional system they will have a substantially smaller delegation than their share of the total vote. This is seen by advocates of proportional systems to be better than elections using only first-past-the-post, but still unfair towards constituents of smaller parties. If there is also a threshold for list seats, parties which are too small to reach the threshold are unable to achieve any representation, unless they have

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2226-467: The lower house must be 25 years old or older and 30 years or older for the upper house. All candidates must be Japanese nationals. Under Article 49 of Japan's Constitution, Diet members are paid about ¥1.3 million a month in salary. Each lawmaker is entitled to employ three secretaries with taxpayer funds, free Shinkansen tickets, and four round-trip airplane tickets a month to enable them to travel back and forth to their home districts. Article 41 of

2279-597: The results for each system separately based on the votes alone, then adding them together. A system is called fusion (not to be confused with electoral fusion ) or majority bonus , another independent mixture of two system but without two tiers. Superposition (parallel voting) is also not the same as " coexistence ", which when different districts in the same election use different systems. Superposition, fusion and coexistence are distinct from dependent mixed electoral systems like compensatory (corrective) and conditional systems. Most often, parallel voting involves combining

2332-522: The right to compel the appearance of Cabinet members. The vast majority of bills are submitted to the Diet by the Cabinet. Bills are usually drafted by the relevant ministry, sometimes with the advice of an external committee if the issue is sufficiently important or neutrality is necessary. Such advisory committees may include university professors, trade union representatives, industry representatives, and local governors and mayors, and invariably include retired officials. Such draft bills would be sent to

2385-465: The total seats"—and it would be unfair to minor parties (who would struggle to win constituency seats). In the indicative 1992 electoral referendum , parallel voting was one of four choices for an alternative electoral system (alongside MMP , AV and STV ), but came last with only 5.5 percent of the vote. An overwhelming majority of voters supported MMP, as recommended by the Royal Commission, and

2438-456: The two components, for example this is the case in South Korea and Mexico. In South Korea, the hybrid of parallel voting and seat linkage compensation, being between the MMP and MMM type of representation has been called mixed-member semi-proportional representation as well. Unlike mixed-member proportional representation , where party lists are used to achieve an overall proportional result in

2491-470: The upper house in the following circumstances: Under the Constitution, at least one session of the Diet must be convened each year. Technically, only the House of Representatives is dissolved before an election. But, while the lower house is in dissolution, the House of Councillors is usually "closed". The Emperor both convokes the Diet and dissolves the House of Representatives but in doing so must act on

2544-436: The use of two or more electoral systems to elect different members of a legislature. More precisely, an electoral system is a superposition if it is a mixture of at least two tiers, which do not interact with each other in any way; one part of a legislature is elected using one method, while another part is elected using a different method, with all voters participating in both. Thus, the final results can be found by calculating

2597-526: The world's most popular electoral systems. In parallel voting, voters cast two (or more) votes, one for each method the system contains. However, these votes do not interact in any way: the vote in one method has no effect on the calculation of seats in the other methods. Under the most common form of parallel voting, a portion of seats in the legislature are filled by the single-member first-preference plurality method (FPP), while others are filled by proportional representation . This sometimes leads to

2650-481: Was a common name for an assembly in medieval European polities like the Holy Roman Empire . The Meiji Constitution was largely based on the form of constitutional monarchy found in nineteenth century Prussia that placed the king not as a servant of the state but rather the sole holder of power and sovereignty over his kingdom, which the Japanese view of their emperor and his role at the time favoured. The new Diet

2703-487: Was limited to men 25 years or older. The House of Peers, much like the British House of Lords , consisted of high-ranking nobles chosen by the Emperor. The first election by universal suffrage without distinction of sex was held in 1946, but it was not until 1947, when the constitution for post-war Japan came into effect, that universal suffrage was established In Japan. The word diet derives from Latin and

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2756-577: Was modeled partly on the German Reichstag and partly on the British Westminster system . Unlike the post-war constitution, the Meiji constitution granted a real political role to the Emperor, although in practice the Emperor's powers were largely directed by a group of oligarchs called the genrō or elder statesmen. To become law or bill, a constitutional amendment had to have the assent of both

2809-560: Was plagued by controversy and political tensions. The Prime Minister of Japan at that time was General Count Yamagata Aritomo , who entered into a confrontation with the legislative body over military funding. During this time, there were many critics of the army who derided the Meiji slogan of "rich country, strong military" as in effect producing a poor country (albeit with a strong military). They advocated for infrastructure projects and lower taxes instead and felt their interests were not being served by high levels of military spending. As

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