1996 Japanese general election
general election in Japan held in 1996
General elections were held in Japan on 20 October 1996. A coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party, New Party Sakigake and the Social Democratic Party, led by incumbent Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto of the LDP won the most seats.
These were the first elections held after the 1994 electoral reforms. Previously, each district was represented by multiple members, sometimes from the same party, causing intra-party competition. Under the new rules, each district nominated one representative, elected using first-past-the-post voting. A separate party-list vote was introduced for voters to choose their favored party in addition to votes for individual candidates, as a way to more accurately approximate the seats in the House of Representatives of Japan to the actual party votes, in an effort to achieve more proportional representation.
Background
The 41st general election of members of the House of Representatives took place on 20 October 1996. A general election for the House of Representatives was not supposed to be due until July 1997, but on 27 September 1996, Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto dissolved the parliament, thus calling for a snap-election. This move to call premature elections had been widely expected as the Prime Minister's last effort to sustain power in the midst of a controversial sales hike.
The last election in July 1993 ended the 38-year-long rule of Japanese politics by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), and no party had a majority in parliament since then.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “1996 Japanese general election” as general election in Japan held in 1996. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as general election in Japan held in 1996. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q165265. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1996, 1994, 1997 and 1993.
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This entry incorporates text from “1996 Japanese general election” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.