Abstract
More Japanese women lost parliamentary seats than won them in the December 2012 House of Representatives (HR) election. Women now make up 7.9 percent of the lower house, down from 9 percent in 2005 and 11.3 percent in 2009. Tokyo is farther away from its goal of increasing women’s share of leadership positions to 30 percent by 2020. According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, women’s representation in the Lower House is well below the regional (18.5 percent) and the global average (20.7 percent). Even so, this election yields valuable takeaways that substantiate some widely recognized barriers to women’s entry to elite politics and throw others into question. This chapter begins with a broad overview of female candidacies in the 2012 HR election, evaluating how well the patterns that emerge square with the conventional wisdom about how political parties can support or hinder women. Next, I evaluate factors that affected women’s success party by party. I conclude with the policy implications of women’s chronic underrepresentation in the Japanese Diet.KeywordsLiberal Democratic PartyFemale CandidateSocial Democratic PartyWoman CandidateParty PositionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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