{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "So the American occupations rigged the Italian and Japanese post-WWII election systems pretty steeply, as a necessary condition...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/715628531470761985/", "html": "<p><a class=\"tumblr_blog\" href=\"/post/715624878057914368/\" target=\"_blank\">kontextmaschine</a>:</p><blockquote><p>So the American occupations rigged the Italian and Japanese post-WWII election systems pretty steeply, as a necessary condition of keeping Communists out of power (who were expected from Iron Curtain precedent to eliminate any possibility of being removed from power and defect to the Soviet Bloc).</p><p>If you will remember your economic materialism this is what you would expect from industrial powers without imperial hinterlands. (This is what the WWII authoritarian culture-states were meant to prevent while they assembled empires!)</p></blockquote>\n<blockquote class=\"npf_indented\"><p><a class=\"tumblelog\" href=\"https://tmblr.co/MWv0fUOl-Jgq8r3KQDtQdtw\" target=\"_blank\">@youzicha</a> said: Didn\u2019t <a class=\"tumblelog\" href=\"https://tmblr.co/Mw8IE9-bv-wp9cgA_MYiYnw\" target=\"_blank\">@xhxhxhx</a> discuss this petty exhaustively, concluding that the Japanese election system wasn\u2019t rigged?</p></blockquote><p>Maybe? My context is the Cornell Asian Studies program, which is a feeder for/academic arm of the American foreign service/intelligence/military area experts, where my professors were like &ldquo;oh, my grad advisor was at that postwar conference, he told us how they rigged it&rdquo;</p><p>The major elements were</p><ul><li>Orchestrating a merger of the Liberal and Democratic Parties into the pan-establishmentarian LDP, supported by advisors and cash drops </li><li>Multi-member districts in cities, where Communists having greatest strength, 22 individual districts would elect 22 communists but one unified proportional city would send 12 and a smattering of others</li><li>Not updating district borders as rural population flooded into cities, creating &ldquo;rotten borough&rdquo; districts the LDP could buy with agricultural subsidies</li></ul><p>So I minored in Asian Studies (Japan) but beyond just learning about Japan, it was in part an education in mechanics of postwar American empire.</p>"}