2001 Japanese House of Councillors election


Elections for the Japanese House of Councillors were held in Japan on 29 July 2001. It was the first national election since Junichiro Koizumi was appointed as prime minister after Yoshiro Mori resigned in April 2001. The Liberal Democratic Party and its election allies, were the major winner, provided Koizumi a strong mandates to move forward with his reform policies. The ruling coalition performed well, and regain their majority in the House of Councillors.

Results

* Two seats were vacant by the law at the time of election.
The electoral reform enacted in 2000 became effective for the first time:
As a result of the party realignments of the 1990s, several two-member districts were represented by two Councillors from the same party before the 2001 election. Some of these Councillors lost the official nomination of their party, others retired. Most of these district split seats between ruling coalition and opposition again, in the case of both incumbents seeking re-election resulting in one of the two losing their seat.

Proportional representation results

The 2001 election was the first to use an open list system to elect proportional representation seats in the House. Under this system, voters may vote for either a political party or a specific candidate. The proportional seats are distributed among the parties by D'Hondt method according to their overall proportional votes, including candidate votes. The ranking of candidates on each party list is then determined by the candidate votes.
The results for the major parties were as follows :
  1. Liberal Democratic Party : 21,114,727, 38.6%, 20 seats
  2. Democratic Party : 8,990,524, 16.4%, 8 seats
  3. New Komeito : 8,187,804, 15.0%, 8 seats
  4. Japan Communist Party : 4,329,210, 7.9%, 4 seats
  5. Liberal Party : 4,227,148, 7.7%, 4 seats
  6. Social Democratic Party of Japan : 3,628,635, 6.6%, 3 seats
  7. Conservative Party of Japan : 1,275,002, 2.3%, 1 seat
  8. Other parties : 2.988.442, 5.5%, no seat
The final ranking of PR candidates and their individual vote counts were as follows:

Prefectural races

Elected candidates in bold
Compiled from JANJAN's "The Senkyo" and Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications official election results.
Notes:
Party abbreviations used: