The Electoral System and Japan's Partial Transformation: Party System Consolidation Without Policy Realignment

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ethan Scheiner
Keyword(s):  
Policy Change ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Party System ◽  
Liberal Democratic Party ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Partial Transformation ◽  
Policy Options ◽  
Electoral Rules ◽  
Policy Positions ◽  
Liberal Democratic

Japan's electoral system, which emphasizes first-past-the-post, single-member district rules, has led the country's party system to become consolidated around the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). At the same time, Japan's electoral rules also made it likely that the two parties would not differ markedly in their policy positions, as well as hinder the emergence of new partisan alignments that could offer more clearly distinct policy options. Put differently, Japan's electoral rules have encouraged the development of what is essentially a two-party system, but one in which party alternation in power need not produce sharp policy change.

scholarly journals Japan Under the DPJ: The Paradox of Political Change Without Policy Change

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phillip Y. Lipscy ◽  
Ethan Scheiner
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Policy Change ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Liberal Democratic Party ◽  
Electoral Rules ◽  
Policy Coherence ◽  
Rural Regions ◽  
High Expectations ◽  
Policy Positions ◽  
Liberal Democratic

In 2009, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) brought an end to the long reign of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). However, despite high expectations, this politically transformative event has not unleashed significant policy change in Japan. We highlight five electoral factors that have acted as important constraints on policy change under DPJ rule. First, majoritarian electoral rules have led to a convergence in the policy positions of the two major political parties. Second, as the parties' policy positions have become more similar, voters have increasingly cast ballots based on “valence” (i.e., nonpolicy) evaluations. Third, large national vote swings have limited the tenure of young, inexperienced candidates who might otherwise serve as the instigators of reform. Fourth, Japan's electoral rules permit inconsistency across policy positions within parties and discourage greater policy coherence. Fifth, the continuing influence of rural regions has limited the scope of policy reform under the DPJ.

Testing the Causal Mechanisms in Additional Cases

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul D. Kenny
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Party System ◽  
Liberal Democratic Party ◽  
System Stability ◽  
Relative Autonomy ◽  
Causal Mechanisms ◽  
Liberal Democratic

Case studies of Indonesia and Japan illustrate that party-system stability in patronage democracies is deeply affected by the relative autonomy of political brokers. Over the course of a decade, a series of decentralizing reforms in Indonesia weakened patronage-based parties hold on power, with the 2014 election ultimately being a contest between two rival populists: Joko Widodo and Subianto Prabowo. Although Japan was a patronage democracy throughout the twentieth century, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) remained robust to outsider appeals even in the context of economic and corruption crises. However, reforms in the 1990s weakened the hold of central factional leaders over individual members of the LDP and their patronage machines. This was instrumental to populist Junichiro Koizumi’s winning of the presidency of the LDP and ultimately the prime ministership of Japan. This chapter also reexamines canonical cases of populism in Latin America.

Ending the LDP Hegemony: Party Cooperation in Japan. By Ray Christensen. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000. 228p. $52.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

2001 ◽  
Vol 95 (1) ◽  
pp. 231-232
Author(s):  
Kenji Hayao
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Party ◽  
Party System ◽  
Liberal Democratic Party ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Socialist Party ◽  
Coalition Government ◽  
Japanese Politics ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
2000 Election

The Japanese party system has been in flux in recent years. In 1993, two groups defected from the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and joined with the opposition to form a broadly based coalition government. A year later, the LDP regained power by creating a coalition government with its ideological opponent, the Japan Socialist Party (JSP). Both events shocked virtually everyone at the time. The LDP had been in power for so long-almost 40 years-that it seemed almost inconceivable that it could lose power. For just as long, the JSP had been the main opposition. By the 2000 election, a dozen parties had come and gone, the JSP's strength dropped to a very small fraction of what it was a decade earlier, and the LDP had to turn to various coalition partners to maintain its control of government. All this is quite puzzling to even close watchers of Japanese politics, because party politics, especially the role of opposition parties, has been a relatively understudied area. For those who want to make sense of how these events came to pass, Ray Christensen's Ending the LDP Hegemony will be very helpful.

scholarly journals Electoral incentives, policy compromise, and coalition durability: Japan's LDP–Komeito Government in a mixed electoral system

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam P. Liff ◽  
Ko Maeda
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Liberal Democratic Party ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Japanese Politics ◽  
Electoral Incentives ◽  
Coalition Politics ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Mixed Electoral System

AbstractPolitical parties’ behavior in coalition formation is commonly explained by their policy-, vote-, and office-seeking incentives. From these perspectives, the 20-year partnership of Japan's ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its pacifistic Komeito junior coalition partner is an anomalous case. The longevity, closeness, and nature of their unlikely partnership challenges core assumptions in existing theories of coalition politics. LDP–Komeito cooperation has sustained for two decades despite vastly different support bases and ideological differences on fundamental policy issues. LDP leaders also show no signs of abandoning the much smaller Komeito despite enjoying a single-party majority. We argue that the remarkable durability of this puzzling partnership results primarily from the two parties’ electoral incentives and what has effectively become codependence under Japan's mixed electoral system. Our analysis also demonstrates that being in a coalition can induce significant policy compromises, even from a much larger senior partner. Beyond theoretical implications, these phenomena yield important real-world consequences for Japanese politics: especially, a far less dominant LDP than the party's Diet seat total suggests, and Komeito's remarkable ability to punch significantly above its weight and constrain its far larger senior partner, even on the latter's major national security policy priorities.

Japanese Politics in Transition: A Theoretical Review

1993 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takashi Inoguchi
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Party ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Type System ◽  
Liberal Democratic Party ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Vice President ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Income Tax Law ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Party Dominance

THE END OF ONE-PARTY DOMINANCE BY THE LIBERAL Democratic Party of Japan came as abruptly as the fall of the Berlin wall four years before. It started with the debate on electoral system change, ostensibly as an attempt to curb corruption. The LDP has been plagued by a series of large-scale corruption scandals since the Recruit scandal of 1989. The latest concerned former vice-president Shin Kanemaru's alleged violation of the political money regulation law and the income tax law in 1992–93. The Prime Minister, Kiichi Miyazawa, accepting a fair degree of compromise with opposition parties, wanted to pass a bill to change the current electoral system. The LDP initially wanted to change from the system of choosing a few persons in each district by one vote to the Anglo-American type system of selecting one person in each district by one vote. The opposition wanted to change to the continental European system of proportional representation. A compromise was made by the LDP's proposal to combine the latter two systems. Then two dissenting groups emerged suddenly in the LDP. One took the exit option by forming new political parties. The other took the voice option by backing away from the Miyazawa compromise plan. Miyazawa was humiliated by his failure to have the bill enacted and a motion of no confidence was passed. He then called for a general election, which took place on 18 July 1993. The outcome did not give a majority to the LDP and subsequently a non-LDP coalition was formed to produce a non-LDP government for the first time since the foundation of the LDP in 1955

Electoral Reform and the Costs of Personal Support in Japan

2006 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew M. Carlson
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Party ◽  
Campaign Finance ◽  
Liberal Democratic Party ◽  
Electoral Rules ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Personal Support ◽  
The Core ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Support Organizations ◽  
Rule Change

How does the choice of electoral rules affect politicians' incentives to campaign on the basis of personalized support? This article examines to what extent the adoption of new electoral and campaign finance rules affects the incentive of politicians in Japan's Liberal Democratic Party to rely on personal support organizations calledkoenkai.The core of the analysis utilizes newly collected campaign finance data. The empirical analyses confirm a considerable weakening in the number of koenkai across systems as well as a decreased need for politicians to spend money in the proportional representation tier. These results highlight the importance of previous organizational legacies as well as the efforts of political actors to mitigate the effects of rule change on their election and reelection prospects.

Evaluating Political Reform in Japan: A Midterm Report

2002 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven R. Reed
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Party ◽  
Party System ◽  
Liberal Democratic Party ◽  
Political Reform ◽  
Coalition Government ◽  
Preliminary Evaluation ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Cost ◽  
First Time

In the 1993 general election the Liberal Democratic Party lost power for the first time since it was founded in 1955. The coalition government that followed enacted the most far-reaching political reforms Japan has experienced since the American Occupation. The country has now experienced two elections since these reforms so we can begin to analyze trends and dynamics. It is now possible to make a preliminary evaluation of the effects of these reforms. I evaluate the reforms under three headings: (1) reducing the cost of elections and levels of corruption; (2) replacing candidate-centered with party-centered campaigns; and (3) moving toward a two-party system which would produce alternation in power between the parties of the government and the parties of the opposition. In conclude that, with some notable exceptions, the reforms are working well, about as well as should have been expected.

The Cartel Party and Populist Opposition

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard S. Katz ◽  
Peter Mair
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Party ◽  
Party System ◽  
Liberal Democratic Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
Regulatory State ◽  
Party Government ◽  
Consensus Democracy ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Policy Failures ◽  
Recent Policy

Cartelization has given rise to opposition in the form of anti-party-system or populist parties. While this possibility was clear as early as the 1990s, in the last decade the growth of these parties has led to alarm in some quarters about the continued viability of liberal democratic party government. In contrast to accounts that attribute this rise to the recent policy failures of the political mainstream, this chapter suggests that its roots lie in internal contradictions in the expectations that the parties have raised in the process of cartelization. Rather than being solutions to these problems, models of “the regulatory state” or “consensus democracy” are strikingly similar to democracy under the cartel party model.

Party Fragmentation, the Proportional System and Democracy in Slovenia

2021 ◽  
pp. 147892992110594
Author(s):  
Danica Fink-Hafner ◽  
Meta Novak
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Party System ◽  
Recent Trend ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Electoral Rules ◽  
Parliamentary System ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Near Future

In Slovenia, political parties have been the key actors in opting for a proportional electoral system and constitutional choice of a parliamentary system, both of which are believed to help to develop a consensual type of democracy. However, a vicious circle involving a fragmented party system and a proportional electoral system has not only led to polarisation within the party system, but has also contributed to problems of democratic governability and legitimacy. The destabilisation of the party system since 2011 has not only caused a crisis of political legitimacy and accountability, but has also contributed to a recent trend of de-democratisation. At the moment, there does not appear to be a realistic alternative to the existing electoral rules in the near future, in spite of recurring calls by an anti-communist party (Slovenian Democratic Party) to introduce a majoritarian system.

The Legislative Record: The Japan National Diet in 2004

2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-330
Author(s):  
JUNKO HIROSE
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Party ◽  
Party System ◽  
Liberal Democratic Party ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
General Election ◽  
Major Party ◽  
Japanese Politics ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
House Election

The general election in November 2003 and the Upper House election in July 2004 indicate that the Japanese politics is going from a one party dominant toward a two major party system. The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) narrowly keeps a majority in both Houses by merging the New Conservative Party and by forming a coalition with New Komeito.

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