In 2021, Japan held an election for the lower house as well as an election for the president of the governing party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). And although in a parliamentary democracy such as Japan, the election to the lower house is meant to be the most important election determining the country’s direction, it was the party leadership election that proved most consequential, as party policy chief Fumio Kishida beat back a challenge from the popular ex-Foreign Minister Taro Kono to emerge as Prime Minister. The national elections that followed were forgone conclusions: the LDP won durable majorities in the lower house and then, a few months later, of the upper house; no party from the fragmented opposition presented much of a challenge. Indeed, every election since 2012 has yielded this same outcome, and at present, there are few indications that politics in the coming years might change at all. Voter turnout has sagged to about 50%, as citizens lose any sense of efficacy.
The LDP has been the most consistently successful political party among consolidated liberal democracies; since its creation in 1955, it has consistently been the primary government party, with exceptions between August 1993 and June 1994 and again between August 2009 and December 2012. Some parties like the Indian National Congress or Italy’s Christian Democracy were equally dominant pre-1990, while others like the German Christian Democrats or Israel’s Likud have been similarly dominant since 1990, but only the LDP has been dominant in both periods.
Such decades-long dominance is not meant to happen in democracy. Electorates generally tend to tire of governments just through the passage of time, while opposition parties reposition themselves after losses to make themselves more electable in the future—that is, party systems are supposed to be dynamic. Japan’s has not been. In the colourful words of Pempel (1990), who famously described such dominant-party systems as “uncommon democracies,” “a democracy predicated on the ability to ‘throw the rascals out’ is far less convincing when it exists only in the abstract than when it is backed up by periodic examples of rascals actually flying through the doors” (7). It is important to investigate why this has been the case, and what this tells us about the laws of party politics more broadly.
In the following 8 posts, I attempt to marshal the cumulative wisdom of the Japanese-politics and party-system literatures to understand why party politics evolved differently in Japan than in European democracies. It’s broadly useful to divide postwar Japanese politics into the period before the LDP’s first defeat in 1993 and the period after, as the two periods involved different electoral systems, different approaches to decision-making, a different constellation of opposition parties, and consequently different strategies from the LDP. For each period, there is a section describing the LDP’s strategies and adaptations, and also a section describing the state of the opposition and analyzing their inefficacies from multiple angles. Each section mixes descriptions of events, summaries of existing scholarly interpretations, and evaluations of their usefulness. Because the post-2012 period is much more sparsely covered in the literature, that section describes events and seeks to explain them using a mix of theories and polling and election data.
Overall, three major characteristics separate the Japanese system from most others:
The first concerns party system evolution. Japanese political party formation was an elite-led process that does not resemble the social cleavages that characterize European politics. This process defined the voter’s role as sending local tribunes to decision-making arenas at the centre, and defined the realm of acceptable competition around the conservative pole, to the exclusion of the Left. With the merger of conservative parties into the LDP, this single institution absorbed all existing representational capacity, with every other party starting from scratch. The myriad upheavals of the first post-war decades and the drafting of the constitution created a party system that was divided along modern vs traditional values, in essence “skipping” over the class cleavage in a way that few other democracies did. This sharply curtailed any opposition’s ability to establish itself as a mass party, and as a result the opposition would continue to be characterized by elite-led mobilization.
Secondly, the LDP government made the most of its first-mover advantage in securing government, making liberal use of particularistic spending to entice voters and groups to its side. This strategy allowed it conduct election campaigns on a terrain that it owns exclusively and avoid zero-sum programmatic debates that might expose internal fault lines. Only in a minority of established democracies is government spending so particularistic, with Italy and Austria being the main European cases.
Thirdly, the LDP was a very uniquely structured party—the “anti-Westminster” party (Krauss and Pekkanen 2011). It was not the only party where local areas had significant autonomy to determine their own candidates, but it was the only party where these autonomous local machines were the building blocks of the rest of the party. Factions were key foundational structures, giving MPs predictable, seniority-based advancement. This institutionalized decentralized framework allowed voters different choices without leaving the LDP, and allowed the party to renew itself and present a new face when it was facing a crisis. The division between the LDP and opposition was as much as anything else a division between office-seeking and policy-seeking impulses, and it was much easier to enforce compromise decisions in the former than the latter.
These three characteristics combine to describe the uniqueness of the Japanese case and explain how the unique political system followed. Japan’s electoral institutions have been peculiar, which have led many to suggest that Japan’s peculiar politics were downstream from them, but their effects have been secondary at most. The old LDP’s strategies would certainly not have worked in a First Past the Post system (or, indeed, in a presidential system), but there is little that the SNTV-MMD system produced that a personalized PR system would not also have produced. The stringent election rules that force parties to adopt network-centred strategies are likely to have been an obstacle for the opposition, but to an extent that is difficult to estimate.
The shift to a predominantly majoritarian system has forced both camps to reconfigure their internal decision-making processes; the process was somewhat easier for the LDP, who is primarily office-seeking and accustomed to policy compromise, than for the opposition, who have had to deal with multiple conflicting ideological strands and did not have the mechanisms to enforce binding decisions.
References
Carty, R. Kenneth. 2022. The Government Party: Political Dominance in Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192858481.001.0001.
Krauss, Ellis S., and Robert. Pekkanen. 2011. The Rise and Fall of Japan’s LDP : Political Party Organizations as Historical Institutions. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Pempel, T.J. 1990. “Introduction. Uncommon Democracies: The One-Party Dominant Regimes.” In Uncommon Democracies, edited by T.J. Pempel, 1–32. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501746161-003.
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