The end of LDP dominance and the rise of party-oriented politics in Japan

Journal of Japanese Studies

Volumn 38, Issue 2, 2012, Pages 353-376

  Reed, Steven R ^a   Scheiner, Ethan ^b   Thies, Michael F ^c  

^a CHUO UNIVERSITY   (Japan)

^b UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^c UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84864243200     PISSN: 00956848     EISSN: 15494721     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jjs.2012.0037     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. In 1976 and 1979, the LDP assembled lower house majorities only by adding independents after the elections. The LDP might very well have failed to win a majority in the 1980 election as well had it not been for the "sympathy vote" that followed Prime Minister Ōhira Masayoshi's death during the campaign. In the 1989 upper house election, the Japan Socialist Party won the most seats, costing the LDP its upper house majority. Had a lower house election been held at the same time-and not several months later as was the case-the LDP might have lost that too. In 1993, the LDP did lose its hold on government for nearly a year after a party split, a vote of no confidence, and an election in which dozens of seats went to new parties led by defectors from the LDP.
2. See Frances McCall Rosenbluth and Michael F. Thies, Japan Transformed: Political Change and Economic Restructuring (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 186, for a sampling of the media headlines.
3. Frances McCall Rosenbluth and Michael F. Thies, Japan Transformed: Political Change and Economic Restructuring (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 124.
4. Kent E. Calder, Crisis and Compensation: Public Policy and Political Stability in Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 59-60.
5. The so-called Anpo Crisis brought more than a million Japanese to the streets, still the biggest protest in postwar Japanese history. See Robert A. Scalapino and Junnosuke Masumi, Parties and Politics in Contemporary Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), chapter 5.
6. George R. Packard, III, Protest in Tokyo: The Security Treaty Crisis of 1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).
7. Socialist Murayama Tomiichi got the job of prime minister for the first 18 months, but the LDP dominated his cabinet, with 13 posts to the Japan Socialist Party's 6 (the New Party Harbinger held 2). In exchange for the top job, the LDP obliged Murayama to publicly renounce most of his party's traditional platform. Sven-Oliver Proksch, Jonathan B. Slapin, and Michael F. Thies, "Party System Dynamics in Post-war Japan: A Quantitative Content Analysis of Electoral Pledges, " Electoral Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2011), pp. 114-24.
8. Ronald J. Hrebenar, The Japanese Party System: From One-Party Rule to Coalition Government (Boulder: Westview Press, 1986).
9. Gary W. Cox and Michael F. Thies, "The Cost of Intraparty Competition: The Single, Non-Transferable Vote and Money Politics in Japan, " Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3 (1998), pp. 267-91.
10. Ethan Scheiner, Democracy Without Competition in Japan: Opposition Failure in a One-Party Dominant State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
11. In a "closed-list" system, the voter may only choose one party or another and cannot alter the rank-order of candidates within a party's list, which has been predetermined by the party. This contrasts with a "flexible-list" or "open-list" system, in which the voter may indicate preferences among candidates on a party's list, and those preferences affect the final ranking of candidates within lists. The new system originally had 500 seats overall, with 200 of those in the proportional representation tier. This was reduced to 480 (180 in proportional representation) before the 2000 general election.
12. Rosenbluth and Thies, Japan Transformed;
13. Shigeo Hirano, "Electoral Institutions, Hometowns, and Favored Minorities, " World Politics, Vol. 58, No. 1 (2006), pp. 51-82.
14. Since 1955, the leading opposition party had been the Japan Socialist Party (JSP), which was undergirded in large part by its role as a counterweight to the LDP's strong pro-U.S. stance during the cold war. With the end of the cold war, much of the JSP's raison d'être disappeared. Steven R. Reed and Kay Shimizu, "Avoiding a Two-Party System: The Liberal Democratic Party versus Duverger's Law, " in Steven R. Reed, Kay Shimizu, and Kenneth Mori McElwain, eds., Political Change in Japan: Electoral Behavior, Party Realignment, and the Koizumi Reforms (Stanford: Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, 2009), pp. 29-46.
15. Yukio Maeda, "Minshutō shijiritsu no seichō to antei, " in Uekami Takayoshi and Tsutsumi Hidetaka, eds., Minshutō no soshiki to seisaku: kettō kara seiken kōtai made (Tokyo: Tōyō Keizai Shinpōsha, 2011), pp. 159-90.
16. Maurice Duverger, Political Parties (London: Metheun, 1954).
17. Gary W. Cox, Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World's Electoral Systems (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
18. The New Frontier Party would have performed even better in 1996, but the eleventhhour formation of the DPJ split the anti-LDP vote and inflated the LDP's seat share.
19. In 2003, the small Liberal Party joined with the DPJ to form an even stronger challenge to the LDP. The Liberal Party formed from the wreckage of the New Frontier Party was led by Ozawa Ichirō (the leader of the 1993 LDP split and then of the NFP). It joined the LDP in coalition governments in 1998-2000. After dropping out of the governing coalition in 2000, the party spent three more years in opposition before finally folding itself into the DPJ.
20. Ko Maeda, "Factors behind the Historic Defeat of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party in 2009, " Asian Survey, Vol. 50, No. 5 (2010), pp. 888-907.
21. See, e.g., Gerald L. Curtis, "Japan, " in David Butler and Austin Ranney, eds., Electioneering: A Comparative Study of Continuity and Change (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 222-43.
22. Haruhiro Fukui and Shigeko N. Fukai, "Pork Barrel Politics, Networks, and Local Economic Development in Contemporary Japan, " Asian Survey, Vol. 36, No. 3 (1996), pp. 268-86.
23. Scheiner, Democracy without Competition.
24. Under the single nontransferable vote system in use until 1993, candidate-centered elections were vital for the LDP. The LDP fielded multiple candidates in each multiseat con stituency, and because each voter could vote for just one, something besides party had to come into play. See Mathew D. McCubbins and Frances M. Rosenbluth, "Party Provision for Personal Politics: Dividing the Vote in Japan, " in Peter F. Cowhey and Mathew D. McCubbins, eds., Structure and Policy in Japan and the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 35-55.
25. Cox and Thies, "The Cost of Intraparty Competition. " Money, pork, patronage, and candidates' personalities and personal support networks came to dominate elections. For an excellent discussion of kōenkai.
26. see Ellis S. Krauss and Robert J. Pekkanen, The Rise and Fall of Japan's LDP: Political Party Organizations as Historical Institutions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), chapters 2-3.
27. Steven R. Reed, "The Liberal Democratic Party: An Explanation of Its Successes and Failures, " in Alisa Gaunder, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Japanese Politics (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 14-23.
28. Scheiner, Democracy without Competition, chapter 3.
29. Curtis, Election Campaigning;
30. Gary W. Cox, Frances Rosenbluth, and Michael F. Thies, "Mobilization, Social Networks, and Turnout: Evidence from Japan, " World Politics, Vol. 50, No. 3 (1998), pp. 447-74.
31. Ozawa Ichirō, Nihon kaizō keikaku (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1993).
32. Public works spending peaked in the late 1990s, but over the next ten years the government cut such expenditures by roughly 40 per cent (more if measured as share of gross domestic product). See especially Table 1 of Gregory W. Noble, "The Decline of Particularism in Japanese Politics, " Journal of East Asian Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2 (2010), pp. 239-73.
33. Ross D. Schaap, "Institutions and Policy: Financial Regulatory Reform in Japan" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2002).
34. Patricia L. Maclachlan, "Storming the Castle: The Battle for Postal Reform in Japan, " Social Science Japan Journal, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2006), pp. 1-18.
35. Margarita Estévez-Abe, Takako Hikotani, and Toshio Nagahisa, "Japan's New Executive Leadership: How Electoral Rules Make Japanese Security Policy, " in Masaru Kohno and Frances Rosenbluth, eds., Japan and the World: Japan's Contemporary Geopolitical Challenges (New Haven: Council on East Asian Studies, Yale University, 2008), pp. 251-88.
36. Tomohito Shinoda, "Japan's Cabinet Secretariat and Its Emergence as Core Executive, " Asian Survey, Vol. 45, No. 5 (2005), pp. 800-821.
37. Yusaku Horiuchi and Jun Saito, "Removing Boundaries to Lose Connections: Electoral Consequences of Local Government Reform in Japan, " working paper (2008).
38. Linda Choi Hasunuma, "Restructuring Government: Party System Change and Decentralization in Japan" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2010).
39. Noble, "The Decline of Particularism, " p. 240.
40. Indeed, the political battle between competitive and backward sectors started years before the bubbles burst, but the prolonged recession brought matters to a head. See T. J. Pempel, Regime Shift: Comparative Dynamics of the Japanese Political Economy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
41. T. J. Pempel, "Between Pork and Productivity: The Collapse of the Liberal Democratic Party, " Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2 (2010), pp. 227-54.
42. Rosenbluth and Thies, Japan Transformed.
43. Jun Saito, "Infrastructure as the Magnet of Power: Explaining Why Japanese Legislators Left and Returned to the LDP, " Journal of East Asian Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3 (2009), pp. 467-93.
44. Saitō Jun, Jimintō chōki seiken no seijikeizaigaku (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 2010), chapter 6.
45. Patrick Köllner, "Upper House Elections in Japan and the Power of the 'Organized Vote,'" Japanese Journal of Political Science, Vol. 3, No 1 (2002), pp. 113-37.
46. Noble, "The Decline of Particularism, " p. 243.
47. Estévez-Abe, Hikotani, and Nagahisa, "Japan's New Executive Leadership. "
48. Shinoda, "Japan's Cabinet Secretariat. "
49. The story of postal reform is full of fascinating details that we must elide for present purposes. For a complete account, see Patricia L. Maclachlan, The People's Post Office: The History and Politics of the Japanese Postal System, 1871-2010 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011).
50. Under the old single nontransferable vote system, the LDP base of support in each district was divided among the party's multiple candidates. Under such conditions, an LDP leader might in theory expel rogue politicians, but running "assassins" against them would have been difficult. There would have been no telling who the "assassins" would pull votes from, so the loyal LDP incumbents in such a district would have objected to any extra nominations.
51. This trend continued even after Koizumi and was quite successful. Twenty-two of 26 candidates chosen through open recruitment won in 2005 and 13 of 18 won in the 2007 upper house election. "Shūgiin, Jimintō ga kōbo 'Katsuyō' san'insen zensen de hōshin, " Yomiuri shinbun, July 19, 2009.
52. Fortunately for Koizumi, the opposition DPJ had also opposed the postal reform, effectively throwing its lot in with the rebels, and the voters were persuaded by Koizumi's framing of the election as reform or no reform. The DPJ criticized the reform proposals for not going far enough, but this subtlety was drowned out by the media's fascination with rebels and assassins.
53. When rank-and-file party members were counted in 2006, the LDP found that it had lost members for eight years running. The decline was blamed on the departure of members who had joined not as individuals but as part of an interest group. As those interest groups soured on the LDP, such members fell away and became floating voters.
54. "Jimintō tōin 8-nen renzoku zokugen: zōhangumi jimoto de daidageki, " Yomiuri shinbun, February 18, 2006.
55. After the 2005 election, the LDP did seek to restore its relationship with the postmasters, hoping the postmasters would fear being on the outs with the ruling party. This approach had worked in the past with farmers' associations, which would occasionally organize boycotts of the LDP to protest some reduction in protectionism or subsidies but would always come back to the LDP eventually. See Maclachlan, The People's Post Office; "'Posuto Koizumi' no ashimoto (1) 'Kyūteki' zentoku ni rabu-kōru, " Yomiuri shinbun, March 16, 2006.
56. "'Posuto Koizumi' no ashimoto (2) Shūfuku? Danzetsu? Yureru zentoku, " Yomiuri shinbun, March 17, 2006.
57. Many prefectural agricultural cooperative associations and construction groups declared a "free vote, " allowing their members to support any party or candidate they wanted. Prefectural branches of the Japan Medical Association took positions ranging from support for the DPJ, to neutrality, to continued support of the LDP.
58. Scheiner, Democracy without Competition, chapter 10.
59. Aurelia George Mulgan, "Where Tradition Meets Change: Japan's Agricultural Politics in Transition, " Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 31, No. 2 (2005), pp. 261-98.
60. Aurelia George Mulgan, "Agriculture and Political Reform in Japan: The Koizumi Legacy, " Pacific Economic Papers, No. 360 (Canberra: Australia-Japan Research Centre, 2006).
61. It is important to point out that mentions of support for agriculture by urban candidates were generally positive.
62. Candidates in "mixed" districts-neither overwhelmingly rural nor urban-did not, on average, lose or gain votes.
63. For example, in 2000 and 2003, over 80 per cent of district incumbents from the LDP and DPJ were reelected.
64. Within each party, incumbents were still more likely to win than nonincumbents, but incumbency per se became less important than party affiliation.
65. A low-quality new candidate running against an incumbent had a less than six per cent chance of victory. See Scheiner, Democracy without Competition, p. 138.
66. At the same time, the new system did not eliminate the importance of individual candidacies: elections in single-member districts (SMDs) are, after all, contests between individuals, thus making the candidates themselves important. Individual candidates in SMDs still try to cultivate personal votes as insurance against negative partisan swings. Moreover, most candidates on most parties' proportional representation lists also run in SMDs, and their ability to win a proportional representation seat is often dependent on their individual success in their single-member district race. See Margaret McKean and Ethan Scheiner, "Japan's New Electoral System: La Plus Ça Change..., " Electoral Studies, Vol. 19, No. 4 (2000), pp. 447-77.
67. Steven R. Reed and Michael F. Thies, "The Consequences of Electoral Reform in Japan, " in Matthew Soberg Shugart and Martin P. Wattenberg, eds., Mixed-Member Electoral Systems: The Best of Both Worlds? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 380-403.
68. Indeed, in both 2005 and 2009, the top two candidates in nearly 85 per cent of all districts were from the LDP and DPJ. See Ethan Scheiner, "Evolution of Japan's Party System-Consolidation or Realignment?" paper presented at conference on "Political Change in Japan II: One Step Forward, One Step Back, " Stanford University, February 4-5, 2011.
69. In an analysis that we do not present here, we run the same models but include SMD incumbents as well and examine the relationship between SMD incumbency and the likelihood of victory. Even with SMD incumbents included, we see the same shift as presented in the appendix: candidate background gives way to party affiliation as the key force driving success. After having no discernible effect on electoral success prior to 2005, party affiliation became more important than even SMD incumbency as a predictor of who would win a given SMD starting in 2005.
70. For more on recent party-centered elections in Japan, see Ko Maeda, "Has the Electoral System Reform Made Japanese Elections Party-Centered?" in Reed, Shimizu, and McElwain, eds., Political Change in Japan, pp. 47-66.
71. Maeda, "Factors behind the Historic Defeat. "
72. This was illustrated most dramatically when Nonaka Hiromu, a retired former secretary-general of the LDP, resigned from the party. Nonaka heads the national umbrella organization for Agricultural Land Improvement Associations (nōchi kairyō jigyō), one of the most reliable of the LDP's traditional support groups. Nonaka resigned so that his agricultural organization could claim political neutrality. "Minshuseiken, Zendoren to wakai: Nonaka-shi 'seijiteki chūritsu' o sengen, " Asahi shinbun, October 21, 2011.
73. See Scheiner, "Evolution of Japan's Party System-Consolidation or Realignment?"