Shiga 2nd district was initially won by Masayoshi Takemura of New Party Harbinger (NPH), the former three-term governor of Shiga who had represented the five-member Shiga At-large district before the electoral reform since 1986 and was Chief Cabinet Secretary in the anti-LDP coalition Hosokawa Cabinet and Minister of Finance in the LDP-JSP-NPH Murayama Cabinet. In the 2000 Representatives election, he ran as an independent with Democratic Party support and lost to Liberal Democrat Akira Konishi. Konishi died in 2001, the resulting by-election was won by his younger brother Osamu. But in the general House of Representatives election of 2003, Democrat Issei Tajima narrowly beat Konishi who won a seat in the proportional vote. In the "postal election" of 2005, Tajima defended the seat as Konishi ran as independent postal privatization rebel and the LDP sent "assassin" candidate Yūji Fujii. Fujii won a proportional seat in 2005, but lost it in 2009 as Tajima won the district race by a large margin; in 2010, Fujii was elected mayor of Nagahama City. In the 2012 House of Representatives election, Ken'ichirō Ueno who had represented the 1st district for the Liberal Democrats between 2005 and 2009 moved to the 2nd district and beat Tajima.
In the 2002 reapportionment Shiga gained a seat and the southern portion of the 2nd district was transferred to the newly created Shiga 4th district. In the 2022 reapportionment, the 4th district was abolished, thus the current 2nd district has similar borders to when it was created in 1994. The smaller 2nd district had 264,168 eligible voters in 2012.[2]
^"令和4年9月1日現在選挙人名簿及び在外選挙人名簿登録者数" [Number of registrants on the electoral list and overseas electoral list as of September 1, 2022]. Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (in Japanese). 2023.
6.1
8.35