The Japanese public is once again losing patience with the Liberal Democratic Party.

Unable to address public concerns about the LDP faction bosses’ misuse of political funds and the nation’s weak economic performance, the Kishida Cabinet’s support rate has stood in the 20-30 percent range since the start of 2024.

Recent polls show that a plurality of voters would like to see an opposition-led government, rather than an LDP-led one, coming out of the upcoming general election.

Prospects for an opposition victory remain slim, however, because the opposition parties are having difficulty coordinating on candidate selection in the single-member districts (SMDs).

The LDP and Komeito have coordinated at every election since 1999 to run a single jointly backed candidate in each district, winning many seats with less than 50 percent of the vote because the noncoalition vote was split across two or more candidates.

This structural advantage has delivered the ruling coalition large majorities at every election since 2012, despite the parties winning less than half of the proportional representation (PR) vote every time.

What the opposition parties need is a reform agenda that will bring them together to coordinate on SMD candidates and rally independent voters by giving them a reason to believe that this time things will actually change.

The issue that should bring them together is “political reform without the LDP.” The opposition parties disagree on some issues, but they should all be able to get behind this agenda.

Japan has seen this move before. Back in 1993, after an escalating series of money scandals involving LDP faction bosses, the voters put a non-LDP coalition in power for the first time since the party was formed in 1955.

This coalition made electoral reform its priority, since they recognized that the old system made politics expensive and clientelistic and perpetuated the LDP’s hold on power.

But the non-LDP coalition compromised at various stages (at one point relying on LDP votes to pass legislation) and ended up producing an election reform that perpetuated the dominant party’s hold on power and led LDP faction bosses to fall back into the muck of money scandals.

The election reform proposal that can bring the opposition parties together and eliminate the LDP’s structural advantages is a system that is 100 percent proportional representation.

Such systems are common in Europe and have many advantages that should win the support of the non-LDP parties. Moreover, this proposal—by creating a better-functioning political system—will enable parties to push through broader economic and social reforms in the future.

The first advantage of this proposal for the opposition parties is that under a 100 percent PR system, the LDP and Komeito will be unable to win enough seats to form a majority government on their own.

Under this system, they would have fallen short of a majority at every election since they became partners in 1999. The ruling coalition stays in power because they can turn a minority of votes into a majority of seats under the current system.

With PR, a party gets the share of seats that is equal to their share of votes, so if these parties win just 45 percent of the vote, they will get just 45 percent of the seats and will need to negotiate and share power with other parties in order to form a government.

If they cannot do that, they will need to make way for an opposition coalition to come to power.

A second advantage: under this system, every vote counts, which should help motivate the many apathetic voters who have been sitting on the sidelines to join the political process and turn out for elections.

In SMD elections, the votes cast for the losing candidates don’t count. In PR, every vote contributes to the election of a candidate from that party, as long as the party wins enough votes to cross the (low) threshold needed for a PR seat. Parties offer their agenda to voters, and voters vote for the party that offers the most attractive agenda.

A third advantage: a 100 percent PR system would allow Japan to join the many nations that achieve greater representation by women through a quota system.

The parties could write into Japan’s new election law a rule that each party must rank its PR candidates on the party list so that if number 1 and 3 are men, number 2 and 4 need to be women.

This rule would not violate the gender equality provisions of Japan’s constitution since men and women would get equal treatment, and yet it would produce, through the operation of this rule, a Diet that is made up of about 50 percent men and 50 percent women.

A fourth advantage is that a 100 percent PR system will solve the malapportionment problem that has over-represented rural areas of Japan (and helped boost the LDP’s share of SMD seats). Democratic systems should operate according to the one-person, one-vote rule, and that would be achieved by this reform.

The fifth advantage is a little more difficult to explain, but voters will grasp the basic logic. Under the current system, politicians need to appeal for “personal votes.”

They need voters to vote for them by name in SMDs, which requires them to drive around in sound trucks repeating their name over and over. Even those who win PR seats currently earn most of these seats through the best-loser provision, which means even the PR winners have to win personal votes.

Winning personal votes requires candidates to raise substantial political funds since they cannot win with party funds alone.

A 100 percent closed-list PR system (with candidates ranked by parties) will require less political funds since it is cheaper to advertise a platform than to operate a fleet of sound trucks.

This means politicians will be able to focus on governing instead of spending their time raising funds for their personal campaigns or making deals with fringe religious groups to secure volunteers for their personal campaigns in exchange for favors to that group.

Given how frustrated Japan’s voters are with these personalistic, scandalous features of current politics, this political reform should help the opposition parties capitalize on the current problems of the Kishida administration and demonstrate that they have a concrete plan to clean up politics beyond just tinkering with the political fund reporting rules.

There are two criticisms that are sometimes lodged against 100 percent PR systems, but with the right design choices, these problems can be mitigated.

One charge is that PR systems are not as good as SMD system at giving the voters a local representative. This is a particular shortcoming if your PR system allocates seats in a single all-nation district. In a larger country like Japan, a system like this would leave voters from remote areas frustrated if most of the PR winners come from the large cities.

A second charge is that PR systems allow the proliferation of micro-parties, making it hard to form governments. This too can be a problem if the “magnitude” of the PR districts is so large that parties can win seats with less than 1 percent of the vote.

The solution to both of these problems is for Japan to organize its PR districts so that the more populous prefectures get their own PR district while less populous prefectures are paired with a neighbor. For example, if Japan chose to allocate a total of 400 PR seats by population, Hokkaido would have 17 seats; Saitama 23; and Hyogo 17. Districts of this size do not permit micro-parties to win seats with just 1 percent of the vote.

Parties will need about 5 percent of the vote to win a seat in districts with this magnitude. Germany uses a threshold of 5 percent and has avoided the proliferation of parties. This is also a threshold that the main opposition parties could agree on since they have recently been able to win at least this share of the vote.

Ideally, the opposition parties will be able to agree on more than just political reform ahead of the next election. But a campaign focused on political reform to make the system fairer and cleaner is something that will appeal to voters upset by the latest scandals, and these parties argue that it will enable broader reforms in the future.

Once they have that fairer and more competitive election system in place, each opposition party will be able to appeal for votes with a credible claim that they can deliver broader changes.

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Len Schoppa is a professor of politics at the University of Virginia where he teaches Japanese politics and foreign relations.