07.13.09, 03:35 AM EDTJuly 13 (Reuters) - Japan's embattled Prime Minister Taro Aso plans to call a general election on Aug. 30, a top ruling party official said on Monday, despite prospects that his long-ruling conservative party is headed for a big defeat.
The long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its junior partner, the New Komeito party, are all but certain to lose the huge majority they gained in the last lower house poll in 2005, and analysts say they are likely to be defeated by the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan and its smaller allies.
Following are some key facts about how the election works.
TERM OF OFFICE, CAMPAIGN PERIOD
-- The lower house is the more powerful of parliament's two chambers and has the right to select the prime minister as well as enact the budget.
-- Lower house members are elected for four-year terms, but the prime minister has the right to dissolve the chamber at any time and call an election.
-- Election campaigns last for 12 days.
-- The number of eligible voters, including Japanese living overseas, stood at 104 million as of Sept. 2, 2008, according to the government.
-- The last lower house election was in September 2005, when popular Junichiro Koizumi called a poll as a referendum on his plan to privatise the postal system and his economic reform platform more broadly.
-- Voter turn-out in the 2005 election was 67.5 percent.
-- Upper house members serve a six-year term, with half standing for re-election every three years on fixed election dates. The next upper house election is due in 2010.
-- Opposition parties won a majority in the upper house in 2007, creating a political deadlock because the chamber can delay bills approved by the more powerful lower house.
SEATS
-- There are 480 lower house seats, of which 300 are for single-member districts, where the candidate with the most votes wins.
-- The remaining 180 are for multiple-seat proportional representation districts from 11 regional blocks in which voters vote for a party.
-- The LDP had 303 seats in the lower house before the election and its coalition partner New Komeito 31. The opposition Democrats had 112, the Communists nine and the Social Democrats seven. The remainder were held by small parties or independents, and there are two vacancies.
RURAL VOTER CLOUT
-- The way electoral districts are drawn up has traditionally given a disproportionate amount of influence to less-populated rural areas that have been the backbone of support for the LDP. In some urban areas, one vote is worth less than half of that of the most sparsely populated rural district.
-- However, an electoral reform law enacted in 2002 resulted in the number of such under-represented districts falling to nine from 95.
(Reporting by Linda Sieg)
(linda.sieg@thomsonreuters.com; Reuters Messaging: linda.sieg.reuters.net@reuters.com; 81-3-6441-1881)
Posts
