History of Candidate Selection by the KMT and the DPP

The KMT, as the ruling party, began to implement local elections in Taiwan in the early 1950s, thereby providing opportunities for candidate nomination within the KMT. Ample studies highlight that the KMT's main intention in implementing local elections was to strengthen its grassroots support on the island. These local elections were also meant to highlight the sharp contrast between the KMT's Taiwan and the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP's) China. In this way, the KMT regime was able, to some extent, to create a democratic image, which helped it garner international support. But in fact, due to enduring confrontations with the CCP, the KMT still had to maintain an authoritarian political system and a centralized party structure. Therefore, having some process of candidate selection did not signify meaningful democracy. Candidate nomination within the KMT was no more than a competition for power among party leaders. Candidates were chosen based on their loyalty to the party (or said party leaders).

In addition to conducting local elections, the KMT regime made a limited portion of legislative seats electable in the late 1960s. Again, the nomination of legislative candidates revealed a pattern similar to that of local elections. Most of the time, party leaders chose candidates for legislative elections. The KMT party bylaws laid out the basic format regarding the selection process for legislative candidates: the local and central party organizations were to share the authority for nomination, i.e., three levels of party organizations (the local party branches, the provincial party headquarters, and the central party headquarters) were supposed to work together to choose legislative candidates. However, these ‘rules’ on paper did not carry significant weight in practice. More often than not, legislative candidates were chosen by the higher levels of party organizations – the provincial or central party headquarters – rather than by local party branches. The central party headquarters would provide a candidate list to the local party branches before elections took place. It was not unusual to find task forces in the central party headquarters formed to take charge of candidate nomination. The members of these task forces were appointed either by the party leader or by the party's most powerful organization, the Central Standing Committee. Regardless of any opinions or reviews, the local party branches submitted, the central headquarters had the final say on the candidate lists. This pattern did not change until the late 1980s, when the KMT adopted the party primary.

This new method of candidate selection, adopted in 1989, was notable in terms of intra-party democracy. The party members were invited to participate formally in the process of candidate selection for the first time. The local party members cast their votes in the primary; the final results would then be determined by the central party headquarters. Even though the central party headquarters continued to retain the final say, the decisions of the party headquarters, overall, did echo the results from the party member primaries. There was a shift of power from the centre to the local party organizations, and the former did not monopolize the power associated with candidate nomination any longer. Local party members and local party officials were asked to participate more actively.

The balance of power shifted again in 2001, when ordinary citizens (non-party members) were invited into the process of candidate selection by telephone polls (i.e., a polling primary). That year, both the party member primary and the polling primary were given an equal say (i.e., 50% for each part) in KMT candidate selection. It was the first time that citizens played a significant role in the process of KMT candidate nomination. The importance of polling primaries continued to increase in 2004. That year, the results of polls accounted for 70% of the final outcome, compared to 30% contributed by party member primaries. This format remained in effect in both the 2008 and 2012 elections.Footnote ¹

In contrast to the KMT's long history of candidate nomination, the DPP had not engaged in candidate nomination until the party's formal establishment in 1986. The DPP's leadership has not generally comprised a unified group, but rather has consisted of various anti-KMT individuals and factions, which used to occupy offices in the local representative bodies. This unique pre-party history gave the DPP a decentralized structure of power distribution, and the decentralized pattern extended to the process of candidate selection as well. Negotiations and compromises became the major mode of identifying legislative candidates. If the party leaders were unable to reach consensus, the rules dictated that party members cast votes to finalize the candidacy. In practice, however, the leadership of the DPP always tried to reach consensus through compromise, and DPP party member votes were rarely seen in the 1980s.

The DPP's method of candidate nomination took a different turn in the 1990s. The party retained previous processes of leaders reaching consensus through compromise, but added an optional review processes to be conducted by local party officials as an alternative to the party member vote in case the consensus building failed. The introduction of voting by party cadres signalled an increasing importance of local party branches and a de-emphasis on party members in the nomination process. One reason for this was to address an increasing tendency for aspirants to register large numbers of new party members as their supporters. The aspirant would typically pay the party dues for and control the votes of these ‘head voters’, and many DPP leaders and supporters saw this as a growing form of corruption or vote buying (Wang Reference Wang2006). In fact, the problem was so rampant that the KMT was not immune to the ‘head voters’ issue either.

The importance of local party officials had diminished by the early 2000s as the DPP started to emphasize the need for citizen participation in the process of candidate nomination. The DPP began using polls to choose candidates for the Legislative Yuan elections in 1998, with the polls dictating 50% of the final candidate selection outcome. The other 50% of the score would be determined by the votes of the party membership. From then on, opinion polls became the predominant method of candidate selection. In 2001, the party member vote was weighted to amount to only 30%, while the citizen opinion polls were made to count for 70% of the final tallies. The proportion represented by the polls was increased to 100% in 2012 so that the outcome was to be determined entirely by the opinion polls.Footnote ²

In sum, the candidate nomination schemes evolved along the trajectory of democratization in Taiwan. Top party leaders played decisive roles in the process of candidate nomination in early periods. Then, as the KMT regime began to initiate political liberalization in the 1970s, local party branches and members were allowed to participate in candidate selection. The extension of participation to party members resulted from the KMT's need to increase its social support at that time; it was also part of the KMT's response to increasing challenges posed by the opposition DPP. The DPP started out with more decentralized candidate selection methods than those of the KMT and paved the way for polls-only candidate selection. The more citizens participated in the nomination process, the more legitimacy the results carried, and thus the harder it became for party headquarters to ignore the results. Thus, the power of candidate nomination in Taiwan has come to reside more often at the local level than at the central level.

We should not overlook the fact that the final step towards the dominance of polls took place in the context of the 2005 electoral reform and its implementation. A constitutional amendment in 2005 cut down the number of seats in the Legislative Yuan from 225 to 113, making protection of incumbents impossible for either party. Seventy-three out of 113 seats were to be elected using the first-past-the-post system in the SMDs, where party labels, i.e., the official party nomination, counted more than ever. This process gave party leaders the power to impose whatever candidate selection methods they deemed best. To party leaders, polling primaries seemed to be the best way to measure candidates’ electability and also allowed them to relegate the difficult task of conflict resolution to outside polls. Additionally, the polling primary was relatively fairer as it was free from any manipulation by ‘head voters’, which had been one of the major problems in party member primary.

The various factors described above compounded to support the enhanced use of polling primaries by both parties after 2005. The electoral reforms were first implemented for the 2008 elections; the elections were fought under the SMD system for the second time in 2012. In short, the introduction of SMDs completed the dominance of polls as a method for choosing candidates.

Polling primary in 2012

This section elaborates the CSMs adopted by the KMT and the DPP in the 2012 Legislative elections. Both parties used a three-phased nomination procedure – registration, negotiation, and polling primary, as specified in Figure 1.Footnote ³

Figure 1

KMT and DPP's CSMs in 2012 legislative election

The candidate selection processes of both parties started with the registration of aspirants. It is important to note that in Taiwan, incumbents did not automatically get nominated. All aspirants, including incumbents, had to register for nomination. While the KMT opened all 73 SMDs for registration, the DPP did not. The DPP classified some districts in which it had received less than 42.5% of the party-list vote in the 2008 legislative elections as ‘difficult districts’, and the party headquarters held full authority to choose candidates for these districts. The major reason for doing so was to make sure that the KMT could not manipulate the DPP nomination process. Because quality DPP aspirants lacked incentives to run for those ‘difficult districts’ where the KMT enjoyed favourable margins, there was a possibility that the KMT would send in their aspirants to seek DPP nominations. Before the election, former DPP Deputy Secretary General Hung Yao-fu stated that:

Even if only one aspirant registered for nomination, the person did not automatically become a nominee unless he or she was an incumbent. Rather, parties would assess the electability of any unopposed aspirant by internal polls. The KMT even specified that any unopposed aspirant needed to pass the 30% threshold of support in order to qualify for nomination. The DPP headquarters also stated that the party could reject weak aspirants and had the right to choose stronger alternatives if available.

If more than two aspirants registered for nomination, the procedure proceeded to the second phase, negotiation, which could be a time-consuming mechanism that involved closed-door bargaining. However, the process was handled so that the conflicts were solved within the party and heated intra-party confrontation was avoided down the line. During the negotiation period, parties sometimes used non-binding polls to see who had a better chance of winning and to persuade runners-up to drop out of the races. Additionally, the party headquarters would send senior party officials (normally assigned by the party leader) to mediate the negotiation process. In some cases, the negotiation process was completed smoothly and the party successfully nominated a candidate without further intensifying intra-party competition. A good example was the KMT case of Lee Hung-chun vs. Hsu Bing-kuan in the 4th district of New Taipei City. Lee, a professor of engineering and a Ph.D. from Nihon University, was an incumbent who had served as a legislator for three terms prior to the 2012 election. Hsu, former mayor of the Hsin-chuan area (one of the largest municipalities within the New Taipei City metropolitan area) and former speaker of Taipei County Assembly, had significant grassroots support and intended to expend his political career from the local to the national level. It was expected to become a very competitive race when both of them registered. Yet, because Lee and Hsu had known each other for more than 30 years and were very close friends, Lee attempted to withdraw at the beginning of the negotiation process and support Hsu to represent the KMT in the general election. However, the KMT leadership strongly preferred Lee to Hsu due to the many important positions Lee held in the legislature. Given the fact that Lee still enjoyed strong popularity in the 4th district, in the end Hsu agreed to withdraw and wait for future opportunities.Footnote ⁵

Such a peaceful settlement, however, was not always achievable. Quite often, multiple contenders for the same slot all refused to step down, sending the negotiation process into chaos. For example, in the 2nd district of New Taipei City in 2012, the DPP incumbent Lin Shu-fen was challenged by former Legislator Huang Chien-hue, who also competed against Lin for the DPP 2008 legislative nomination. Huang eventually dropped out in the 2008 DPP primary due to an accusation that he installed thousands of ‘ghost’ telephone numbers within the district to manipulate polling results. Being supported by one of the DPP major factions, Huang returned to challenge Lin and to seek the party's legislative nomination again. Soon after the registration deadline, the DPP headquarters sent a senior party leader, Yu Shyi-Kun (former Premier in the DPP government), to initiate the formal negotiation process. However, the negotiation broke down quickly as Huang had strong factional support and showed no sign of withdrawal. According to Lin, the negotiation process was perfunctory. Lin commented:

Although Lin seemed to be a very strong DPP incumbent candidate prior to the election, the presence of a quality contender who insisted on challenging her made a polling primary unavoidable. Furthermore, the negotiation process, at least in this case, seemed to be a ceremonial phrase and did nothing to resolve the intra-party conflict. As both parties set up no official rules for the negotiation phase, the success of negotiation seemed to depend on ad hoc factors. In fact, no candidate obtained the DPP nomination through negotiation.

If the negotiation phase did not work, both parties’ CSMs moved on to the third phase, the polling primary. Obviously, the two major parties did not have equal strength in every district. It was predictable that intra-party competition for nomination would be intense in the districts where one party consistently enjoyed a favourable margin. That is, in a district where the party was strong, the intra-party competition tended to be more severe than the inter-party competition, because one could expect to win easily in the general election once he/she passed the hurdle of primary. Given the fact that the two major parties had incentive to delegate power to the general public to resolve their intra-party conflict, the polling primary became the dominant tool for mediation in both parties when multiple contenders sought nomination in the 2012 elections. We illustrate some operational details for comparison below.

KMT: The typical KMT questionnaire used in the polling primary included two sections: one for testing intra-party support and one for testing inter-party viability. In the first part, potential candidates had to compete among themselves for the best supporting rate. This part accounted for 15% of a candidate's total score. In the second part, each KMT candidate was matched up against the corresponding DPP nominee in order to see who had the best odds of winning in the general election. This part accounted for the remaining 85% of the total score. Candidates negotiated to determine the date of the polling primary. On the day of polling, two companies, pre-selected by candidates, conducted telephone surveys (1,067 interviews per company on average) using random samples of telephone numbers drawn from the district. In-house sampling (i.e., sampling within the household) was implemented for every call made.

DPP: The standard DPP questionnaire used in the polling primary compared inter-party strength of the aspirants. If the KMT candidate had not been determined yet, or if the DPP contenders agreed to it, the DPP headquarters accepted the use of other methods of comparison (e.g., intra-party support). The only thing about polling primaries that the headquarters insisted on controlling was the polling date. In order to test contenders’ ability to mobilize voters, the headquarters withheld the announcement of the polling date until the morning of each primary. The DPP headquarters designated a period for the Legislative Yuan primaries, and every morning during the primary period, a district was randomly selected for the primary. The contenders were informed of this selection at around 10:00am. Because the DPP survey did not adopt in-house sampling, whether the supporters were home to answer the phone became an important factor in shaping the results. Thus, once the primary was announced for a district, it was crucial for the contenders to mobilize their supporters to stay home after 6:00pm to wait for possible phone calls. Each primary was held within a single day (from 6:00pm to 10:00pm), with three companies conducting the telephone surveys. Each company continued until it had finished about 1,200 interviews. The DPP believed that this method was the best way to test which contender had the best campaign organization to mobilize supporters on the day of the election.Footnote ⁷

The two parties adopted very similar procedures for conducting the polling primary (Table 1). The most significant difference between the two was the use of in-house sampling. While the DPP focused on contenders’ ability to mobilize voters and thus welcomed contenders’ attempts to communicate with potential recipients of the polling calls, the KMT cared more about accurate representation of voters in the survey sample and tried to avoid possible manipulation.

Table 1.

Key features of polling primary

To summaries, the polling primary was the default system in the 2012 election. Direct recruitment and negotiation worked when there was no meaningful intra-party competition. Competition arose when the party had a significant chance of winning in the district. The driving forces underpinning the adoption of the polling primary were twofold.

First, the public opinion poll was an efficient way to help find electable candidates. The DPP legislator Kao Chi-peng cited the comment of former President Chen Shui-bian in an interview, ‘A candidate with a high mark in opinion poll rarely loses the election.’Footnote ⁸ To party leaders, opinion polls became the most reliable source in predicting the electability of candidates. Specifically, under the SMD rule, each candidate needed to obtain plurality (or normally majority in a two-way competition) to win the district. Both major parties wanted to nominate a person who could appeal to the ‘centre’ of the political spectrum and garner the majority of popular support. Opinion polls not only gave the best assessment on the general popularity of each aspirant, but also told the party who was the ‘right’ person in any one-on-one set-up. As Dr Hsieh Shiang-ching, a former senior analyst of the KMT think tank, put it:

Second, parties looked for a way to resolve their intra-party conflicts with the lowest cost. Delegating power to the general public to make the final call seemed to be an acceptable solution. Hung Yao-fu said in the interview: ‘We just need a quick and fair rule to decide our candidates . . . and we do not want to see heated intra-party competition for nomination.’Footnote ¹⁰ Dr Hsieh also commented:

Thus, the polling primary became an ideal option as it allowed parties to prevent active mobilization of supporters by the aspirants. Now the aspirants could only ask supporters to stay home and answer the call if they were selected for the poll. According to KMT Vice Chairman John Chiang, who was an incumbent legislator in 2012 but defeated in the polling primary by 0.57 percentage points, ‘Unless people can figure out how to fix the problem of ‘head voters’, polling primary so far is the fairest and most acceptable way to determine nomination.’Footnote ¹²

History of candidate selection

The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP, 1955–), the long-time ruling party in post-war Japan, used to have each of its ‘habatsu’ (factions) recruit candidates under the single non-transferable vote, multi-member district (SNTV/MMD) system. The supply of candidates came mainly from prefectural assemblies, local chief executive posts, bureaucrats in the national government, and the sons and daughters of influential local figures and politicians. In the early 1990s, the prevalence and evils of ‘seshu’ (hereditary succession of electoral turf through bonds of kinship) within the LDP became well known, with most people outside the inner circle seeing little opportunity to enter politics. However, with the implementation of the SMD portion of the 1994 electoral reform for the 1996 HR election and the eventual takeover of power by the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ, 1998–) in 2009, the kobo system became an established entrée into national politics. Kobo is a supposedly competitive selection mechanism used by political parties to recruit quality candidates openly from the general public. We discuss its historical development below.

In its early days, the kobo system was tested predominately by the opposition parties. The Socialist Party of Japan (SPJ, 1945–1996), then suffering from a shortage of qualified candidates, was the first of the major national parties to use kobo to recruit candidates for elected positions in 1990, although their use of the mechanism was limited to the local city/ward levels. It is widely recognized that the first political party to adopt kobo for national elections was the Japan New Party (Nihon Shinto, 1992–1994). In the 1993 HR election, it fielded three candidates whom it had recruited through kobo, and one of them, Yukio Edano, who later became a leading figure in the DPJ, won a seat. After the 1994 reform, which introduced the SMD combined with proportional representation through party lists, it became imperative for any opposition party vying for power to field candidates in most of the 300 SMDs. The New Frontier Party (Shinshinto, 1994–1997) used the kobo system extensively and fielded candidates in as many as 235 districts in the first election under SMD in 1996. It was the first time the largest opposition party had fielded candidates for a majority of the HR seats since the SPJ did so in the 1958 general election.

The kobo system, which was given a boost by the introduction of SMDs, was first made visible nationally and was established by the DPJ. As an opposition party aspiring to a position of power between the 2000 and 2009 HR elections, the DPJ had to overcome a serious shortage of candidates by repeatedly conducting kobo on a massive scale every few years. As will be discussed further below, DPJ kobo has been managed directly by the DPJ national headquarters. There is consensus that the DPJ was able to seize the opportunity to take power in 2009 only because it had prepared by fielding candidates in most of the 300 SMDs with the help of the kobo system. However, between 2009 and 2012, motivation for the DPJ to utilize kobo largely receded due, first, to the disappearance of empty districts, and, then, to the unpopularity of the DPJ. Interestingly, it was under the LDP, an opposition party between 2009 and 2012, that the kobo system further developed in a decentralized and diverse manner, reflecting the structural character of the LDP, which featured entrenched local organizations and support networks.Footnote ¹³

Early on, the introduction of SMDs gave even the LDP, the ruling party at the time, a motivation to adopt kobo by generating some empty districts. In 1994, the LDP national headquarters permitted ‘kenrens’ (prefecture branches) to use kobo in SMDs without incumbents, hoping that kobo would make the party appear more open and fair to voters. It was the very first time the LDP adopted kobo in selecting HR candidates since its establishment in 1955. Several kenrens responded by selecting candidates through kobo. Devastating defeat in the 2003 House of Councillors elections led the LDP national headquarters to institutionalize the kobo system. Behind this decision was the understanding that qualified potential candidates had been drawn to DPJ's kobo while the LDP kept the door closed to fresh blood (Seko, Reference Seko2006). When the LDP posted a last-minute national kobo in August 2005 for the coming HR election (following the rejection of the postal privatization bills), 868 applications were filed in just four days. In the 2005 election, the LDP fielded 24 kobo-recruited candidates in SMDs, out of whom 12 won seats in SMDs and nine won seats under proportional representation. Although the LPD's use of kobo waned after it won big in the 2005 election, kobo regained its significance once the LDP fell from power in 2009. Now less attractive as the opposition party, the LDP was no longer able to recruit enough quality candidates through the traditional channels. Kobo thus came to be widely used by the LDP kenrens.

In the following subsections, we summaries the forms of CSM used by the two major Japanese parties up to 2012, focusing on the different features kobo came to incorporate under each party.

Top-down kobo by the DPJ

Within the DPJ, the kenrens normally chose one candidate for each district and asked the national headquarters to endorse their choice. When the kenrens failed to field or agree on candidates, the headquarters took over the candidate selection process and initiated the kobo process. Incumbents were given priority over others and were automatically re-nominated in most cases. Candidates who had lost two elections in a row were not nominated for a third time. We now turn to the typical DPJ kobo process used between 1999 and 2009, when the party was in opposition.

Because the DPJ, as a relatively new party, had weak local organizations, kobo recruitment for national elections had to be conducted directly by the national headquarters. The party tried to use kobo as an opportunity to enhance its publicity and to appeal to its constituencies. The first step of the kobo process was thus to put large ads in major newspapers, spending about 50 to 100 million JPY each time. Applicants had to clear two hurdles in order to become official DPJ nominees: first, passing a paper screening, and, second, obtaining the district nomination. The first round took place at the national headquarters. The applicants submitted curricula vitae and essays, which were examined by five to six DPJ officials. According to one party official, applicants’ ‘passion for politics’ was more highly valued than their policy expertise.Footnote ¹⁴ Those who passed the initial document screening advanced to the second round, which involved in-person interview sessions. Two MPs, the chair, and the vice-chair of the election campaign committee of the party joined at this stage. They interviewed each applicant for about 20 minutes on what he or she wanted to do as an MP and in which district he or she wished to run. Interviewers again paid less attention to applicants’ policy expertise than their personalities in an attempt to predict whether the applicants would endure the sometimes-irrational hardships of electoral campaigns, get along with the local party staff, and pursue a political career for an extended period of time. The total number of applicants increased from 564 in 1999 to nearly 2,000 in 2009 just after the DPJ took over power. Overall, the odds of passing the paper screening and the interview to advance to the next stage were about one in nine.

These kobo-qualified ‘finalists’ were eligible to advance to the next stage, seeking district nomination. The headquarters acted as an intermediary by matching some of the finalists with local chapters of ‘empty’ districts. The applicants’ local credentials in the district or prefecture counted more than any other factors. With an informal nomination by the kenren and the district chapter, and a formal endorsement by the headquarters, an applicant finally became an officially nominated candidate of the party. Finding a district in which to run was often the toughest hurdle for an applicant. In the past, less than half of the kobo-qualified finalists eventually became official party candidates. When the DPJ was an opposition party, it had many districts with no official candidates. Many of those ‘empty’ districts, however, either were solidly LDP and offered little prospect for a DPJ candidate to win or were projected to go to an informal local favourite son of the local chapter, leaving little room for a kobo parachute candidate to maneuver. An MP who was one of the early kobo competitors described his experience as follows:

On average, only about 2% of the initial applicants were formally nominated by the DPJ. In essence, DPJ kobo was used to fill the empty districts, and it rarely functioned as a tool of conflict resolution. The party opened up entry to the candidate selection processes, but the selection criteria seemed arbitrary, the participation in the decision making was strictly limited to a small number of leaders, and much of the process remained informal and non-transparent. Under this top-down kobo system, the national party headquarters retained the final say, and it even managed to tighten its control over the nomination process by sometimes using kobo candidates to subvert local choice. At the same time, kobo exacerbated the party's weakness and made it harder for the leaders to maintain cohesion among MPs. Being composed of a hodgepodge of groups with different backgrounds and support bases, the DPJ could not use policy orientation as criterion in the screening process. This limitation led to selection based more on personality and curriculum vitae than policy preference. English proficiency, experiences living abroad, youth, and good looks were often the signals the party had to rely on. The DPJ kobo produced a generation of ‘young, good-looking elites’ who may have been more appealing than the older cohort but lacked strong party loyalty and policy coherence.

Bottom-up kobo by the LDP

The LDP candidate selection process for SMDs was, in general, ‘bottom-up’ in terms of the relationship between the national headquarters and the kenrens. The kenrens always played a major role in candidate selection, although the headquarters had the final say. While the headquarters were supposed to take charge of candidate selection when a kenren could not find or agree on a candidate, this did not happen very often in practice. The kenrens would even take an extra step to demonstrate their commitment to self-governance when the national headquarters attempted to intervene, for example by designating a district for electoral cooperation with an allied party.

The most prominent principle in LDP candidate selection was the protection of incumbents. Even unsuccessful candidates in the previous election automatically qualified for re-nomination as long as they were under 65 years old and their ‘sekihairitsu’ (narrow loss ratio)Footnote ¹⁶ was over 70%. The kobo system was implemented widely after the party lost dramatically in the 2009 HR election; the headquarters then instructed the kenrens to make kobo the default CSM for choosing new candidates for empty districts. The LDP once attempted to ban ‘seshu’, but the party ended up allowing it as long as the candidate sought nomination through the kobo system. For the 2012 HR election, the LDP had nominated 288 candidates running in SMDs, 114 of whom were newly endorsed candidates. Kobo was used to choose 85 of them. Despite being selected through the kobo processes, many were from traditional pools of recruitment: 23 former local politicians, 14 former national bureaucrats, ten seshu candidates, and nine close relatives of politicians.

In preparation for the 2012 HR elections, kobo was conducted with considerable variations in applicant eligibility criteria and requirements across prefectures and districts. In most cases, applicants were expected to have some connection to the prefecture to which the district belonged. An ad hoc committee with fewer than 20 members, at either the kenren or the district level, was usually set up for each kobo selection, and the committee members gave scores to each finalist. It was common to invite ‘externals’, such as prominent intellectuals or key local figures, to the committee in hopes of adding transparency and a sense of fairness to the selection process and decision. Applicants’ personal information was never disclosed in detail, except for those who were ultimately chosen as the party's official candidates. It was therefore difficult for the public to know exactly from what pool of applicants and by what criteria the party chose the nominee. According to an MP chairing the election campaign committee at the headquarters, the party checked the applicant's education and career records, aspirations, policy orientations, and financial resources.Footnote ¹⁷ The headquarters preferred candidates under 55 years old so that, if elected, they could remain active in Parliament for at least two decades. As an attempt to boost party cohesion, many kenrens listed ‘commitment to the LDP’ as a condition of application, while some even asked applicants to fill out a policy questionnaire.

It often took longer than planned for the LDP kenrens or district chapters to nominate candidates. Sometimes the kobo process ended up not nominating anyone. This happened when there was no qualified applicant, or when the intra-party competition was too complicated or fierce to mediate through kobo. The fact, for example, that many kenrens required kobo applicants to sign an oath not to run in the general election in that district if they lost in the kobo selection implies that intense intra-party competition often existed. In a sense, it shows that LDP kobo functioned to some extent as a tool of conflict resolution. Although the national headquarters retained the final say on party nominations, having kobo institutionalized at the district level made it harder than it was before for the headquarters to reject the local decisions. In that sense, LDP kobo decentralized the effective location of nomination power to some extent. Table 2 compares the key features of kobo under the DPJ and the LDP.

Table 2.

Key features of kobo in Japan

Party membership primaries in Japan

While it is true that kobo opened the door to new blood in politics, kobo decision making within the party headquarters or closed district selection committees lacked transparency and open participation. Party leaders dictated the composition of the committee, the scores given to each competitor by the committee members were not made public, and the process the committee members used to reach their final decision remained unrevealed. Accordingly, there has been a constant call to adopt a party member primary for candidate selection in both parties, especially from within the LDP. Some incumbent MPs from both parties even argued that a proper primary election would ensure newcomers’ right to challenge incumbents. Primary elections to choose HR candidates, however, have not been conducted very frequently.

The DPJ has little experience with district-level primaries, as the national headquarters always took charge in the kobo process. The LDP has tried primaries in some districts. Often, however, these LDP primaries ended up not creating opportunities for newcomers but rather entrenched the status quo. This is because both incumbents and those who lost in previous elections have cultivated support within the party membership, while outsiders normally have not. Also, some LDP experience proved that fiercely competitive primaries could worsen intra-party conflict and division, which in turn would hurt the party's performance in the general election. For the 2012 HR election, only a few LDP kenrens held primaries to choose HR candidates, and, in some of those cases, the kenrens avoided letting the primary outcome dictate the final decision. In one case, a kenren institutionalized primaries for kobo, but circumvented the actual holding of a primary by declaring that it had already picked the most electable candidate. These cases show both the party leaders’ willingness to take advantage of the democratic and transparent image of primaries but also their anxiety about ceding their control over nomination.

In sum, kobo developed in different ways within the DPJ and the LDP, and this was natural considering the qualitatively different and quantitatively uneven organizational structures of the two parties. The DPJ used top-down kobo mostly to fill candidacy slots in the ‘empty’ SMDs because in many districts it did not have local chapters strong enough to recruit candidates on their own. With entrenched local party organizations and many local aspirants, the LDP had to go bottom-up in selecting candidates. In this context, kobo often turned out to be a useful tool to mediate intra-party competition.

Following its recent defeat in the 2012 election, the DPJ may have ceased to be one of the two major parties in Japan. Some DPJ officials have stated that, given the party's unpopularity, holding kobo to fill vacancies would no longer attract enough quality candidates. The top leaders will decide whether the centralized kobo system will stay in place. Meanwhile, the decentralized kobo system may establish itself within the LDP structure, regardless of the recent or future electoral outcomes. The fact that the LDP kobo processes are bottom-up and diverse provides a great opportunity to observe how the choice of candidate selection method may be affected by different factors. Whether we will observe some nationwide convergence in kobo methods across the LDP prefectural branches remains to be seen.