General elections were held in
Japan on 5 December 1976. Voter turnout was 73.45%. This election was noted for seeing 124 newcomers win seats for the very first time, along with the defeat of some legacy candidates, signalling a generational shift in the Japanese political landscape.
To date, the 1976 election has been the only
post-war general election triggered by an expiration of the term of the House of Representatives; all other post-war elections have been instigated by a dissolution of the House by the Cabinet.
While the
Liberal Democratic Party wound up, as usual, with more seats than any competing party, it lost 22 seats to finish with less than a majority, winning 249 of 511 races (47%),
[第27章 公務員・選挙 http://www.stat.go.jp/data/chouki/27.htm ] this election continued the constant trend of the LDP's popular vote decreasing with each election which had started all the way back in the 1949 election. The 1976 election was heavily informed by the
Lockheed bribery scandals
The Lockheed bribery scandals encompassed a series of bribes and contributions made by officials of U.S. aerospace company Lockheed from the late 1950s to the 1970s in the process of negotiating the sale of aircraft.
The scandal caused consid ...
and became popularly known as the .
The incumbent Prime Minister,
Takeo Miki
was a Japanese politician who served as Prime Minister of Japan from 1974 until 1976.
Early life and family
Takeo Miki was born on 17 March 1907, in Gosho, Tokushima Prefecture (present-day Awa, Tokushima), the only child of farmer-merchant ...
, was seen as a reformer within his own party, and he did not obstruct the investigations into the Lockheed scandal as some of those in his party had desired. Despite this, Miki's cabinet had
lukewarm approval ratings, with positive ratings across different news sources ranging from 41-47% and negative ones being lower at 12-27%. The scandal reflected poorly on the LDP and the party lost 22 seats from the last election, in the process losing its majority control over the House of Representatives for the first time since the party's founding. However, when the LDP's showing is combined with the votes cast for the spin-off
New Liberal Club as well as independents who were not endorsed by the LDP but joined the party after this election, the total number of votes for conservative candidates actually saw an overall increase.
The two left-wing opposition parties, the
Japan Socialist Party and the
Japanese Communist Party
The is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left List of political parties in Japan, political party in Japan. With approximately 270,000 members belonging to 18,000 branches, it is one of the largest non-governing Communis ...
, saw noticeable setbacks. The JSP did gain seats, but it was only five, and in the process two former chairmen (
Kōzō Sasaki and
Seiichi Katsumata) and the incumbent vice-chairman and former chairman
Saburō Eda all lost their seats. The JCP suffered far worse, losing 21 seats and falling to less than half its number of seats compared to the last election, likely due to
protest vote
A protest vote (also called a blank, null, spoiled, or "none of the above" vote) is a vote cast in an election to demonstrate dissatisfaction with the choice of candidates or the current political system. Protest voting takes a variety of forms a ...
s going towards the new moderate options such as the NLC instead of the JCP. The main winners among the traditional opposition were the moderate parties. In the case of
Kōmeitō, the party recovered from scandals in the
1972 general elections by distancing itself from
Soka Gakkai and putting up non-Soka Gakkai adherents as candidates in the 1975 local elections as well as this election. Komeito also reinforced its image as an anti-LDP party by endorsing various leftist campaigns. On the other hand, the
Democratic Socialist Party, which did see a slight decrease in popular votes, nonetheless had managed to gain ten seats in this election.
Following the election, Miki resigned as LDP leader after the LDP's poor showing and
Takeo Fukuda
was a Japanese politician who was Prime Minister of Japan from 1976 to 1978.
Early life and education
Fukuda was born in Gunma, capital of the Gunma Prefecture on 14 January 1905. He hailed from a former samurai family and his father was mayor ...
was elected the new LDP leader and prime minister.
Results
By prefecture
References
{{Japanese elections
Japan
1976 elections in Japan
General elections in Japan
December 1976 events in Asia
Election and referendum articles with incomplete results