Incumbents a Problem for a DPJ-Komeito Coalition

There are so many scenarios in the immediate future of Japanese politics, but you have to start somewhere. Here are some base-case thoughts of mine on an important question concerning Komeito’s future.

Komeito, with its 19 upper house seats, is the only other than the LDP that can ensure an upper house majority by itself in a coalition with the DPJ (not to mention hat would then become a superfluous lower house majority). The policy inclinations of Komeito’s urban, increasingly middle-class Soka Gakkai constituency is relatively easy to accommodate within the DPJ’s policy agenda. So expect a lot of flirting and dancing to go on between the two; otherwise, government will grind to a stop*. But this does not mean that the two parties will be in a position to enter into a formal relationship in the near future.

* Note that the DPJ can pass the budget by itself, but it won’t be able to account for half of it unless it can muster enough votes in the upper house (or a supermajority in the lower house to override its weaker counterpart) so that it can pass the authorization legislation for the multitrillion JGBs needed to cover the revenue shortfall.

Komeito went into the 2009 lower house election with 31 seats and came out with only 21. The loss of all eight incumbents in single-member districts to DPJ or DPJ-supported candidates was particularly keenly felt, since it wiped out the Komeito lower house leadership; not one of the incumbents had been placed on the corresponding regional district list as insurance against a loss in the single-member election. Getting those seats back will the most important part of the asking price—there’s also the upper house and local elections and, yes, policy issues—for a formal coalition.

To accommodate (my hypothetical) Komeito demands, the DPJ would have to force the incumbents (seven DPJ members and Yasuo Tanaka, the maverick New Party Nippon chief) to step down. It might be able to placate its own by putting them at the top of their respective regional tickets, but that would put its own regional district incumbents in peril. These are people who put successful careers on hold, or abandoned them altogether, to cast their lot with the DPJ; they will not go gently into that good night. My guess is that it will take at least another lower house election for the Komeito-LDP relationship to fully unwind—and the DPJ to take Komeito home—if the DPJ and LDP remain in their current configurations if not exact dimensions.

A Mrs. Kan Addendum, Plus Komeito/LDP/DPJ Commentary Lite

I just finished watching a 1 hour, 45 minute Sunday news show (Asahi TV) that I watched regularly. It gave Mrs. Kan’s book at most 5 minutes in a lightly humorous vein, more than the news clips that preceded it, but less than the 15 minutes for the following segment on zoos, 25 minutes for a three-piece set of political stories using two guests from the DPJ and Your Party, and the 30 minutes for an investigative piece on Komeito and electoral collaboration between Komeito and the LDP. It’s only one example, but I think it puts the story in proper perspective.

The last piece was of interest, because it shed light on an important obstacle to full-fledged collaboration between the DPJ and Komeito. Now, the program regulars were of the view that it didn’t work for Komeito on the proportional ballot, where it received help from LDP local chapters in exchange for the Sokagakkai vote for the LDP’s local prefectural district candidate (the same kind of collaboration that has gone on in previous elections, this time without the usual official sanction from party headquarters in Tokyo), since it lost on the proportional vote more than 100,000 votes and one seat from the last Upper House election. I wonder. After all, the LDP lost about 2.5 million proportional votes. Either the LDP bled itself dry for the Komeito proportional ballot, or it hadn’t made good on its promises before. Now, all that Komeito has to do is check the number of local votes against the Sokagakkai members to figure it out. And if the LDP help had been ineffectual in previous eletions, the Komeito/Sokagakkai authorities would have known.

Why Losing the July Election Can Be a Blessing in Disguise to the DPJ

I’ve been saying that the DPJ must dump the SDP in order to bring more coherence to policymaking. But the latest uproar over the joint official announcement on Japan Post by cabinet ministers “Anything But” Shizuka Kamei and Haraguchi to raise the JP deposit limit from 10 million yen to 20 million yen and insurance limit from 13 million to 25 million among other things—I’ll come back to this later if time and professional obligations allow—is yet another piece of proof that the PNP (actually Kamei’s one-man show since Tamisuke Watanuki and Hisaoki Kamei lost their seats in the 2009 Lower House election) is a more expensive drag on the DPJ policy agenda.

Kamei is one of the shrewdest political operators around. He makes outlandish demands, but will settle for what he can get. He has been supremely successful in this game—except for a once-in-lifetime miscalculation in 2005, when Prime Minister Koizumi made good on his threat to toss the LDP Lower House members who voted against his JP privatization bill. Fast-forward to 2010, when the first two rounds of contradictory statements among coalition notables have taken up the better part of the last two days: Kamei’s announcement, the complaints from the other cabinet ministers, Hatoyama’s attempt to play both sides of the debate, Kamei’s counterclaim I had the prime minister’s consent!, Hatoyama and his chief cabinet secretary’s counter-counterstatements---but you get the picture.

However, if the DPJ loses enough seats in the July Upper House election to prevent the current three-party coalition to command a there, the SDP and PNP can become useless, since Komeito—at a minimum likely to break even—will be able to give the DPJ a majority all by its lonesome self. And as I’ve been saying for some time now, Komeito is the natural coalition partner for the DPJ. Now, Komeito may decide to stay out of the cabinet and cooperate on a case by case basis. But how can that be as bad as cohabitation with incompatible bedmates?

Quick Note: Is It the LDP Who Cannot Afford an Alliance with Komeito?

I’ve speculated before that Komeito might be better off without the LDP as its main squeeze—policy-wise, the DPJ would be a more natural ally—and the Komeito leadership has been doing nothing to dampen such speculation. Increasingly evident Komeito antsyness suggests that it’s time to ask, Can the LDP afford an alliance with Komeito?

The DPJ may be Komeito’s more natural ally, but as Ozawa’s aborted efforts at a Grand Coalition in 2007 show, the DPJ is also the LDP’s more natural ally. In fact, a permanent alliance with ideologically narrower—and perforce smaller—parties is inherently confining in that it requires perpetual accommodation of such coalition parties’ defining positions. Thus there is something to be said for the discretion to fight an election on its own undiluted platform, leaving the compromises for later maneuvering.

But what about the Komeito tithe? True, 10 percentage points represent a lot of votes. But it wasn’t that long ago that the bedrock support for the LDP was, say, 10 percentage points higher than the same for the DPJ. And media polls suggest that 1/3 of the voters are floaters. Keeping Komeito in the fold is likely to call for a lot of concessions, new and old, concessions that the LDP cannot afford too many of if it is to position itself opportunistically against the DPJ while lying in wait for the accumulation of a host of DPJ gaffes and errors, the kind of gaffes and errors that, over a period of 3 years and Prime Ministers, consigned the LDP to a severely truncated opposition bench. The odds might be better for the LDP if it went off on its own for the time being, honing its own message; the better to attract the floater vote, which will be looking for the next political black, ready to abandon the DPJ, the same way that it jilted its long time flame, the LDP.

I’m not ready to hazard a guess one way or the other, but it’s at least useful to remember that the coalition entailed costs for the LDP as well.

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I’m seriously behind on counter-comments. Sorry, later. Things happening.

Choices for Komeito

I think that Komeito has three plausible choices in the run up to the next HOR election:

1) Stick with LDP and hope that the changing winds will blow a few HOR SMD seats their way.
With Komeito’s 10%+ available for LDP SMD candidates, it remains a plausible option for at least one more HOR election.

2) Go with the DPJ and get a seat (or two) at the cabinet table.
As your comment implies, this yields immediate benefits for the Komeito leadership. And like you, I can’t figure out a way for the DPJ to help Komeito in the 2010 HOC election either. Moreover, the DPJ will have a hard time making concessions in the next HOR election because it will have incumbents in all the SMD seats that Komeito covets.

3) Go independent and become an HOC/HOR-PR party, offering its support for policy concessions.
Be the party of conscience, standing up for the little guys and keeping the big boys honest. Who knows, non-Sokagakkai voters may decide to give it a second look. Come to think of it, that’s what the Komeito game plan used to be. With two major, middle-of-the-road parties to choose from, Komeito could be the ultimate swing party. It could even join an administration or two if it thinks it’s getting enough concessions. And the DPJ might need them sooner rather than later, depending on the outcome of the 2010 election.

I think I remember Gerry Curtis suggesting something like 3) between the 2004 and 2005 elections.

Supermajority Override on Refueling Operations Possible without Komeito

Let’s see if I can clear out the most recent batch of otakkii clutter in my GlobalTalk 21 draft file. First up—a possible workaround for Komeito’s increasing reluctance to support a supermajority override on the counterterrorist refueling operation in the Indian Ocean (and the Persian Gulf). First, an excerpt from the Japanese Constitution:

Article 59. A bill becomes a law on passage by both Houses, except as otherwise provided by the Constitution.

2. A bill which is passed by the House of Representatives, and upon which the House of Councillors makes a decision different from that of the House of Representatives, becomes a law when passed a second time by the House of Representatives by a majority of two-thirds or more of the members present.

3. The provision of the preceding paragraph does not preclude the House of Representatives from calling for the meeting of a joint committee of both Houses, provided for by law.

4. Failure by the House of Councillors to take final action within sixty (60) days after receipt of a bill passed by the House of Representatives, time in recess excepted, may be determined by the House of Representatives to constitute a rejection of the said bill by the House of Councillors.

Of the 480 seats in the Lower House, Komeito has 31. Subtracting the Komeito seats leaves 441. 2/3 of 441 equal 299.3. The LDP has 304 seats. Therefore, the LDP can override the Upper House by itself provided Komeito members absent themselves during the revote. That’s a last-resort, break-glass-in-emergency option, but it must be something that will cross the minds of coalition members as the extraordinary Diet session unfolds over the coming months.

My Personal Take on Sokagakkai

If I rot in hell, I’ll blame Michael Reimer and Mark Oppenheimer, who inspired this post.

I came into personal contact with Sokagakkai in the early 60s, when it was still an aggressively proselytizing sectlaic organization linked to a prominent Nichirenshu temple*. As such, it promised to heal diseases, repair marriages, revive failing businesses, etc., etc., and chronicled success stories in its official newspaper Seikyo Shinbun. In other words, Daisaku Ikeda was no worse than any American televangelist or mail-order-DVD motivational speaker or, to be honest, any religious entrepreneur of note that I am aware of except Gautama Siddhartha and to a lesser extent Jesus Christ. But Sokagakkai did compete directly with powerful and traditional, mostly heirloom, Buddhist sects** such as Jodoshinshu, which, together with the Shinto shrines, dispensed their own versions of worldly benefaction in exchange for professions of faith as evidenced by offerings of monies and other means of corporeal sustenance. Needless to say, persecution is the fate of all such challengers to the status quo; Jesus was crucified, Mohammed was kicked out of Mecca, Marx died a penurious death in London…

Sokagakkai however has followed the route taken by most if maybe not all successful religions and matured; it has lost its aggressiveness and now, if the absence of its missionaries in my neighborhood is any indication, relies mainly on the offspring of existing disciples to maintain and grow its membership. Thus, it joins the ever-expanding number of heterodoxies, heresies and paganisms that make their way out of the minor league, so to speak, to prosper and enable their leaders to hobnob with kings, presidents, prime ministers and other holders of temporal power.

Speaking of which, isn’t it amazing how Daisaku Ikeda manages to cop photo ops with every university rector, Nobel Prize winner and other prominent members of civil society in emerging-market and developing economies on this planet, yet never appears with any Japanese notables? Does he have Nippon cooties or what? Who is to blame? Sokagakkai, or Japan? Just sayin’.

* The cleric and the laic long harbored an uneasy relationship here that in 1991 ended up with the temple excommunicating Sokagakkai.

** Religious assignments appear to be as hereditary as Diet membership.

The Meaning of Komeito as a Coalition Partner

Working out the first draft of a paper on the Fukuda administration has drained off most of my immediate thoughts on Japanese politics. But there’s something that I promised on this blog before I agreed to work on the write-for-hire piece that I only briefly touched on there: the pivotal role of Komeito in the lead-up to the Lower House general election. Moreover, there’s some guesswork that I wasn’t confident enough to include in the piece.

This is hopefully the first in several memos—in this case a brief introduction to the electoral significance of the LDP-Komeito coalition. If people find it informative, I may also keep building it towards an election primer, mainly for the upcoming Lower House.

Of all the help that the LDP has enjoyed over the years from non-traditional religious organizations, the support from Sokagakkai, a laic offshoot of the Nichiren sect , through its political arm Komeito has been by far the most important. In fact, without the bi-party coalition, now in its tenth year, the LDP would not have been able to remain in power over the past decade.

The help from Komeito goes beyond the obvious voting power of its Diet members and extends to the electoral process itself. Take the Lower House general election, where all 480 seats are contested, 300 of them in single-seat districts and 180 in 11 multiple-seat, regional proportional-representation districts. Komeito delivers the well-disciplined Sokagakkai membership as a voting bloc to the LDP candidate in most (but not all; see below) single-seat districts. Nobody can be sure how much many votes this is actually worth to the LDP—not even Komeito itself gets all the available Sokagakkai votes—but my guess is that it offers, say, a 4% liftt*, likely more in a highly urban district and less in a rural one. This is a significant leg up for the LDP in an increasingly evenly-matched battle against the DPJ.

Komeito of course also benefits electorally from the relationship, for electoral reciprocity is at the heart of the coalition. 8 of Komeito’s 31 Lower House members hold single-seat districts. Although all 8 hail from urban Kanto and Kansai, the traditional Sokagakkai strongholds**, it is obvious that none of them would have been elected unless the LDP had not only declined to field its own candidates against them but also given them the support of their local electoral machines. In certain proportional-representation districts, the LDP also hives off some wards and cedes their supporters there to vote for the Komeito candidate, thereby maximizing the combined electoral value of their supporters. Some of Komeito’s 23 proportional members surely owe their electoral success to this support.

It goes without saying then why am I going to say it? that the coalition also functions in the Upper House general election. 146 of the 242 seats are contested in prefecture-wide elections. (The remaining 96 are contested in a nationwide proportional election.) Sokagakkai throws its support behind the LDP candidates in the single-seat and the smaller multi-seat districts where the Komeito does not field a candidate. The LDP reciprocates by hiving off LDP supporters in selected wards in some larger districts to vote for the Komeito candidate. That way, the two parties maximize the value of the joint electoral power in the Upper House.

This is an intricate arrangement that has been dutifully worked out at the national, prefectural and municipal levels. Any change requires a painstaking, sometimes painful recalibration of the interests and egos of incumbents, aspirants, and their supporters. A switch in coalition partners to the DPJ would result in a dislocation of massive proportions for both parties. This alone ensures that the LDP and Komeito are stuck with each other for the upcoming Lower House election at least.

Looking further into the near future, it is notable that the DPJ is more reliant on independent voters; the support for the LDP is more solid and therefore more dependable. Thus, other things being equal, the LDP brings more benefits to its coalition partner in the short-term.

Finally, I have taken care to distinguish Komeito and Sokagakkai in my explanation. The relationship between the two will be an important element of my next post on the Komeito.

* I may have to alter his number after I look up past voting results, but I think that this is a good ballpark figure.

** The influence of traditional Buddhist sects appear to be stronger among the more conservative, less mobile population in the provinces.

The Indian Ocean—Where Hawk and Dove Pass Each Other in the Night

The headline from the 17 August Asahi says it all:

“Extend Refueling” Even If Revote Override Must Be Used, Emphasizes Mr. Yamazaki of the LDP

The Ruling coalition is getting the jitters over the re-extension of the law authorizing counterterrorist refueling operations by the Maritime Self-Defense Force in the Indian Ocean. Pushing the bill through the Lower House is easy, if still time-consuming, but the bill will stall in the Upper House, where the opposition jointly holds a majority will refuse to vote on it. That means that the ruling coalition will have to cool its heels there for an extra sixty days before it can use it Lower House supermajority to enact the extension. That means a long extraordinary Diet session—including an inevitable extension—in the 90-day neighborhood. The Komeito has only reluctantly supported the refueling operations. More importantly, for reasons that I’ll try to explain as part of a bigger Komeito story, it desperately wants to avoid a long Diet. Since the refueling operations are not popular with a majority/plurality of the electorate in the first place, some LDP figures have not been shying away from looking at alternatives that may meet the approval of the DPJ and thus may be able to avoid a Lower House override. So it is surprising to see notable dove Taku Yakamazaki—favorite target of tabloid allegations of sucking up to North Korea and China—standing firm behind the bill. Not so Taro Aso, Secretary-General of the LDP and war-mongering scourge to casual liberal observers of the West, who was spotted thinking out loud in a widely reported comment from a 5 August press briefing:

“If refueling can’t (be allowed) under any circumstances, we have to think something else, such as escorting Japanese transport ships.”

Never mind the international scorn that would befall Japan if JMSDF patrol boats putt-putt by escorting Japanese tankers and cargo ships while all the other participating naval forces are performing non-discriminatory areal operations; it is highly unlikely in the first place that JMSDF forces that can be spared from their normal national security operations would be able to cover anything more than a small fraction of the Japanese ships traversing the Indian Ocean. It would be both symbolically embarrassing and embarrassingly symbolic. Having said that, Mr. Aso’s idea is understandable as partly outreach to Komeito, partly a reflection of a genuine rapport with the junior coalition partner. But it is also a measure of the surprisingly eclectic approach that Mr. Aso takes with regard to hot-button issues on the supposed dove/hawk divide.

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In case you’re wondering, I still think that the LDP will be able to coax Komeito into supporting a supermajority revote. But I have little more than my hunch to back me up on this, and few ideas on how the issue will unfold.

How Do I Read the New Komeito Loss in the Upper House Election?

How do I read the New Komeito loss in the Upper House election? That's the latest assignment from my favorite Japan analyst. As per request, I am posting my homework here.

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Somewhat overshadowed by the coalition's loss of an Upper House majority, as well as the LDP's first ever loss of a plurality since the Great Conservative Merger of 1955, is the heavy setback that junior coalition partner New Komeito also suffered. There seems to have been some defections from the NK's Sokagakkai constituency, and the NK's ability to throw Sokagakkai support behind the LDP where it is not fielding its own candidates (all single- and two-seat districts as well as one three-seat district) has been called into question. In the aftermath of the debacle, the NK and/or the LDP, depending on whom you listen to, was rethinking the value of the coalition.

This is important if anything comes of it because, depending on the results of the next Lower House general election (coming no later than October 2009 and possibly as early as late spring 2008), the NK could hold the casting vote in deciding the new prime minister. However, from an election perspective, the LDP continues to make more sense as the NK coalition partner. Moreover, practical concerns make DPJ-NK cooperation in the next two Upper House elections difficult, if not impossible. Thus, barring a fundamental realignment of the Japanese political parties, the LDP-NK coalition will hold for the foreseeable future. Let me explain…

The coalition brings no obvious benefits in the proportional-seat election, where both parties work to keep their party faithful in line while bringing in as many unaligned and cross-party votes as possible. The NK may have suffered from guilt by association this time around, as polls leading up to the vote showed roughly one-tenth of NK supporters intending to cross over to the opposition, and the actual NK votes did drop from 8.62 million (15.4% of all votes cast) to 7.77 million (13.2%). (It won 8.19 million, or 15.1%, in 2001). The LDP by contrast, managed a much smaller drop, from 16.80 million (30.0%) to 16.54 million (28.1%). I believe that the NK has a core Sokagakkai constituency of around 8 million, and that a small percentage of this religious faithful as well as a very small fraction of non-Sokagakkai floaters are willing to move their votes around. But despite what must have been the drop off in floater and religious faithful vote for the NK, it managed to keep seven seats, down only one from 2004 (and 2001). So the downside for the NK has been limited.

The benefits accrue to the coalition in the local-seat election, where the seats are apportioned to the provinces according to the number of eligible voter residents with each province receiving a minimum of one seat. The value of the LDP-NK coalition for the LDP is in the support the NK gives to the LDP candidates where the NK is not fielding its own candidates. This is most evident in the single-seat or two-seat districts, where the NK has no realistic prospects of winning on its own. (The NK has in the past chosen not to field candidates in some three-seat districts.) The value to the NK is in the support the LDP can throw to the NK candidate in any three-seat district where the LDP fields only one candidate. The LDP does not have realistic prospects of winning two seats on its own in these three-seat districts because they are urban provinces, where the traditional LDP support base of farmers, public works-dependent construction firms, the local post office and others is less effective.

In the July election, one province had five seats, five had three, and twelve had two, while the rest (29) had one each. In the provinces where collaboration occurred (one-, two-, and three-seaters), both the LDP and NK received significantly more votes for the local election than they received for the (national) proportional election. The crossover effect is easier to discern for NK candidates. Since the NK has very limited appeal beyond its institutional Sokagakkai support base, I think that it is fair to assume that most of the additional votes for the local NK candidate came from LDP supporters.

NK help for the LDP candidate in the single- and two-seat elections is harder to discern because the difference between the proportional and local votes varied wildly. The more personal nature of the support for LDP candidates, as well as the resultant potential for defections from the LDP support base, undoubtedly contributed to this variance. However, there is enough of a gain to make me believe that the NK support did substantially help LDP candidates both successful and unsuccessful in receiving more votes than they would have received on their own. The coalition did work, if not to the total satisfaction of the two parties.

But what would the electoral prospects of the NK in a coalition with the DPJ? Not as good as the deal they have now. The DPJ has a much smaller support base than the LDP, and is consequently more reliant on the unaligned "floater" votes. In other words, the DPJ has less control over the number of votes it can throw to the NK. Moreover, there are practical concerns that virtually preclude collaboration in the 2010 and 2013 general elections.

In a perfect world, the NK would be able to keep its coalition benefits by fielding the second coalition candidate in the three-seat districts. But the DPJ will have two incumbents in two of the three-seat districts in the 2010 election in question, while both the DPJ and NK have one incumbent in the other. Chiba will step up from a two-seat to three-seat district. But the NK was not strong enough to field a candidate there in the July election, when the DPJ won two seats. As for the other three-seat district, Osaka, the single LDP and KN candidates will have their hands full in a four-way fight with the DPJ and JCP. In other words, there is little room for DPJ-NK coordination to come into play in the 2010 Upper House election in the all-important (to the NK) three-seat districts. The NK has nothing to gain from leaving the coalition even if the 2010 election were the only general election under consideration, and prospects look even worse in 2013, when the DPJ will be fielding two incumbents in four of the five (and one incumbent in Osaka, where it will likely again face a four-way single-candidate fight, leaving no room for collaboration).

On a substantive policy level, some people think that the DPJ is a more natural fit for the pacifist Buddhism that underlies the NK foreign and security policy. It is true that Ichiro Ozawa's stand against the renewal of the anti-terror law and his emphasis on the importance of the UN is much more than a mere tactical choice to position the DPJ in opposition to an unpopular coalition policy to support the US in Iraq (and, to a lesser extent, in Afghanistan), or to appease the still significant support from the traditionally pacifist, politically anti-American labor unions. However, Mr. Ozawa's shelf life could be fairly limited, if only because of his health problems, and there is reportedly substantial mistrust between Mr. Ozawa and the NK. Moreover, the younger, more libertarian generation of LDP Diet members, represented by people like the previous pro-US DPJ leader Seiji Maehara and current policy head Takeaki Matsumoto, prefer a much more muscular security policy. There is no reason to believe that, over the long-term, the NK will find more ideological comfort in collaboration with the DPJ.

Barring a fundamental realignment of the political parties, the LDP-NK coalition, now in its ninth year, shall continue.

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A quantitative analysis should yield a better understanding of the benefits of the coalition. More importantly, my conclusions are based solely on the analysis of the Upper House general elections. I do not expect my conclusions to be significantly altered by an analysis of the Lower House general elections, but someone will have to pay me to do that. I need to use less user-friendly databases for that, and the analysis itself promises to be more complex due to the more complicated nature of the Lower House electoral system.

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The NK suffered a big loss in the local-seat election, going in with five seats and escaping with only two. Three of the four NK incumbents standing for election in four of the five three-seat districts lost. (The NK did not field a candidate in Chiba, the fifth three-seat district.) In all three cases, the big winner was the DPJ, which took two seats in each of them, while the LDP managed to keep one apiece. The three-seat districts are all urban districts, where the LDP has not fared well of late. Here, the coalition fielded two candidates, one each from the NK and LDP (the exception being Chiba, where the LDP fielded two candidates and the NK none). But the DPJ won two seats in each of the three three-seat elections that it contested with two candidates. The coalition did a good job of vote allocation - the NK received considerably more votes in the three- and five-seat elections it contested than it did in the same prefectures for the proportional seat election and the LDP seemed to have benefited from NK support in districts where the NK did not field a candidate (though the benefit to the LDP is more difficult to gauge from publicly available data). But in each of the three cases, the JDP outpolled the LDP-NK coalition total by a wide margin, and in only one of these cases could even a perfect 50-50 split of the cumulative LDP-NK vote have lifted the NK candidate above the successful DPJ candidate with the fewer votes. Unfortunately for the coalition, the shift in voter sentiment swamped the positive effects of the vote sharing.