steven r. reed, ethan scheiner, and michael f. thies
The End of LDP Dominance and the Rise of Party-Oriented Politics in Japan
Abstract: The loss of power by the Liberal Democratic Party after more than
half a century of dominance was the most obvious outcome of Japan’s 2009
election, but together the 2005 and 2009 elections demonstrate signifi cant shifts
in both the foundations of party support and the importance of national swings
in support for one party or another. Since 2005, urban-rural differences in the
foundations of the leading parties have changed dramatically, and Japan has
moved from a system dominated by locally based, individual candidacies to-
ward a two-party system in which both party popularity and personal charac-
teristics infl uence electoral success or failure.
On August 30, 2009, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) won a majority
in Japan’s House of Representatives (the lower house) election and ended
more than half a century of domination by the Liberal Democratic Party
(LDP). The LDP had failed to win majorities before, in 1976, 1979, 1989,
and 1993.1 But after each stumble, it had remained by far Japan’s largest
party, with the same solid bases of support. In those earlier years, once
the temporary stimulus for an anti-LDP tide—most often a scandal—had
faded, the LDP regained much of its previous success. In 2009, however,
the DPJ won the general election by an overwhelming margin. The LDP
1. In 1976 and 1979, the LDP assembled lower house majorities only by adding indepen-
dents 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 Ohira
Masayoshi’s death during the campaign. In the 1989 upper house election, the Japan Social-
ist 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 confi dence, and an election in which dozens of seats went to
new parties led by defectors from the LDP.
354 Journal of Japanese Studies 38:2 (2012)
not only surrendered its majority but it fi nished a distant second to the new
majority DPJ. Clearly, this was big news.2
In this essay, we argue that the manner in which the 2009 electoral re-
versal was achieved was even more important than the alternation in power
itself. In order to understand the reasons for the LDP’s downfall, one must
start with the LDP’s greatest victory only four years earlier. The adminis-
tration of Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichiro, the changes that occurred
between the 2000 and 2005 elections, and the LDP’s 2005 election landslide
altered the fundamental dynamics of Japanese electoral politics and made
the 2009 DPJ triumph possible. The 2005 and 2009 election outcomes re-
sulted from changes in the very nature of Japanese electoral politics that are
likely to prove irreversible.
The DPJ fi rst appeared in 1996. From 1996 until 2005, a period encom-
passing three lower house and three upper house elections, the support
bases of the LDP and DPJ were essentially mirror images of one another.
The LDP was overwhelmingly strong in rural areas and far weaker in Ja-
pan’s cities, while the DPJ was the most popular party in urban Japan but
was scarcely able to win any seats in the countryside.
This pattern began to change in 2005. In the election that year, both
parties’ patterns of support “fl attened out”: the LDP won roughly the same
share of the vote in urban areas as it did in the countryside, and so did the
DPJ. After 2005, though, the LDP lost its newfound gains in urban districts,
but the DPJ continued to enjoy a balanced base of support across both cities
and the countryside, thus making it a national party. That the LDP won so
spectacularly in urban Japan in 2005 is an anomaly that can be explained,
and we do so below. But the more important change is that the DPJ has been
able to challenge and even best the LDP in rural Japan.
For decades, the LDP maintained its formidable rural base by nurtur-
ing strong, clientelistic bonds with numerous organized groups, especially
agriculture, and by pouring enormous amounts of pork-barrel spending
into rural towns and villages. By the 1990s, however, this strategy began to
face diminishing returns. Koizumi and his supporters determined that an
electoral strategy based on clientelism and personal-vote seeking was un-
sustainable and set out with a campaign slogan to “change the LDP, change
Japan.” The LDP cut back on particularistic spending. It axed construction
projects and agricultural subsidies, liberalized markets, and reduced trans-
fers to local governments. The party justifi ed these moves as necessary to
reboot the Japanese economy, but whatever the macroeconomic effects, it is
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.
Reed, Scheiner, and Thies: End of LDP Dominance 355
clear that the policy changes served to weaken the LDP’s ties to its longtime
clients, in favor of unorganized, urban voters.3
This change in LDP behavior was not lost on the DPJ, which seized
the opportunity to shift its strategic focus toward rural areas by promis-
ing to compensate those hurt by the Koizumi government’s spending cuts.
As a result, since the 2005 lower house election, the once urban-centered
DPJ has enjoyed a balanced base of support across the country, and the
party has become a genuine challenger to the LDP in every type of electoral
district.
A related and even more fundamental development was that the key to
winning lower house elections changed in 2005. Prior to 2005, victories in
most lower house contests were a result of the candidates’ personal attri-
butes, irrespective of the party the candidates belonged to. Locally popular
candidates were able to win even if they changed parties or ran without any
party affi liation at all. Beginning with the 2005 election, campaigns in Ja-
pan shifted from focusing principally on the personal attributes of individ-
ual candidates toward nationalized contests based on candidates’ partisan
affi liations and policy manifestos. It also appears that this shift in campaign
focus has borne fruit—we show that partisan swings now trump personal-
ism as the key to electoral success or failure. In this new environment, a
shift in the national mood against the ruling party is much more likely to
produce a relatively uniform vote swing to a single rival party and thus the
opportunity for government alternation with each election.
In short, the LDP’s loss of power after more than 50 years of dominance
was the most obvious outcome of the 2009 lower house election, but the
election appears to have meant even more than that. Viewed in combination
with the 2005 results, as well as the 2007 and 2010 House of Councillors
(the upper house) elections, the 2009 outcome demonstrates that there have
been signifi cant shifts in both the foundations of party support and the im-
portance of national swings in support of one party or another in Japanese
elections.
Fifty Years of LDP Dominance
The LDP was born in 1955 from a merger of rival parties. The new party
was a mix of often antagonistic individuals and contradictory policy posi-
tions, and many observers expected it to split before long.4 But power turned
out to be excellent glue; control over government kept the party together.
3. Ibid., p. 124.
4. Kent E. Calder, Crisis and Compensation: Public Policy and Political Stability in Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 59–60.
356 Journal of Japanese Studies 38:2 (2012)
Over the years, the LDP weathered a divisive battle with the opposition
over the U.S.-Japan alliance,5 pollution and social welfare crises, a factional
“war” over tax policy, and countless corruption scandals affl icting indi-
vidual LDP politicians. In 1993, the LDP faced its stiffest test when several
dozen lower house representatives defected to form new parties. The LDP
government lost a vote of no confi dence, and after new elections, the party
found itself in opposition. However, the anti-LDP coalition could not hold,
and within 11 months, the LDP was back in power as the overwhelmingly
largest party in its own coalition government.6 From that point forward,
the LDP consistently held a majority or near-majority of seats in the lower
house and regularly dominated coalition governments.
The LDP even proved able to withstand signifi cant change to one of the
principal institutions associated with its rule: the electoral system. Prior to
1994, the single nontransferable vote electoral system of Japan’s lower house
advantaged parties like the LDP that could target state resources to specifi c
groups or regions and run candidates with individual bases of support.7 In
1994, the anti-LDP coalition government instituted new rules to elect mem-
bers to the lower house. Out of 480 seats, the new system allocates 300 to
winner-take-all single-seat districts and distributes the rest using closed-list
proportional representation rules.8 Compared to the single nontransferable
vote system, the new rules devalue many of the tried-and-true methods of
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, and George R. Packard, III, Protest in Tokyo: The Security Treaty Crisis of 1960
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).
6. Socialist Murayama Tomiichi got the job of prime minister for the fi rst 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.
7. Ronald J. Hrebenar, The Japanese Party System: From One-Party Rule to Coalition Government (Boulder: Westview Press, 1986); 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; Ethan Scheiner, Democracy Without Competition in Japan: Opposition Failure in a One-Party Dominant State (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
8. 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 “fl exible-list” or “open-list” system, in which the voter may
indicate preferences among candidates on a party’s list, and those preferences affect the fi nal
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.
Reed, Scheiner, and Thies: End of LDP Dominance 357
campaigning used by the LDP and instead make it important for parties to
develop broader bases of support.9 Moreover, the new rules have reduced
pro-rural malapportionment—something that had helped the LDP because
of its strong rural base. Nevertheless, even after ten years and four elections
under the new rules, the LDP was still on top (see Table 1).
One reason for the LDP’s post-electoral-reform success was the delayed
emergence of a single credible alternative.10 This was not for lack of try-
ing. The signifi cant single-member district component of the new electoral
system favors the establishment of a unifi ed opposition: small parties have
strong incentives to merge into a larger, consolidated party.11 Within a year
of the 1994 electoral reform, parties made up of former LDP Diet members
combined with traditional opposition parties to form the New Frontier Party
(NFP). The NFP performed well in two elections (1995 upper house and
1996 lower house elections), but internal squabbles caused it to dissolve
by 1998. Just prior to the 1996 lower house election, a small number of
reformers who had defected from the LDP at some point between 1993 and
1996 joined moderates from the left, especially from the Socialist Party,
to form the Democratic Party of Japan.12 After the NFP collapsed, oppo-
sition forces consolidated again, this time into a new, larger DPJ.13 With
nearly every subsequent election, the DPJ gained more votes and seats.14
In the 2003 lower house election, the DPJ won a larger share of seats than
9. Rosenbluth and Thies, Japan Transformed; Shigeo Hirano, “Electoral Institutions,
Hometowns, and Favored Minorities,” World Politics, Vol. 58, No. 1 (2006), pp. 51–82.
10. 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-Pacifi c Research Center,
2009), pp. 29–46; Yukio Maeda, “Minshuto shijiritsu no seicho to antei,” in Uekami Ta-
kayoshi and Tsutsumi Hidetaka, eds., Minshuto no soshiki to seisaku: ketto kara seiken kotai made (Tokyo: Toyo Keizai Shinposha, 2011), pp. 159–90.
11. Maurice Duverger, Political Parties (London: Metheun, 1954); Gary W. Cox, Mak-ing Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World’s Electoral Systems (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1997).
12. The New Frontier Party would have performed even better in 1996, but the eleventh-
hour formation of the DPJ split the anti-LDP vote and infl ated the LDP’s seat share.
13. In 2003, the small Liberal Party joined with the DPJ to form an even stronger chal-
lenge to the LDP. The Liberal Party formed from the wreckage of the New Frontier Party
was led by Ozawa Ichiro (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 coali-
tion in 2000, the party spent three more years in opposition before fi nally folding itself into
the DPJ.
14. 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.
Tab
le 1
P
erce
nta
ge
of
Low
er H
ou
se V
ote
s (S
eats
) by P
arty
, 19
96
–2
00
9
199
62
00
02
00
32
00
52
00
9
PR
SM
DT
ota
l S
eats
PR
SM
DT
ota
l S
eats
PR
SM
DT
ota
l S
eats
PR
SM
DT
ota
l S
eats
PR
SM
DT
ota
l S
eats
LD
P32
.838
.647
.82
8.3
41.0
48.5
35.0
43.8
49.4
38
.247
.861
.72
6.7
38
.724
.8(3
5.0)
(56
.3)
(31.
1)(5
9.0)
(38
.3)
(56
.0)
(42
.8)
(73.
0)(3
0.6
)(2
1.3)
DP
J16
.110
.610
.42
5.2
27.
626
.537.
436
.736
.931
.036
.423
.542
.447
.464
.2(1
7.5
)(5
.7)
(26
.1)
(26
.7)
(40.0
)(3
5.0)
(33.9
)(1
7.3)
(48
.3)
(73.7
)
Kom
ei13
.02
.06.
514
.81.
57.
113
.31.
46.
511
.51.
14.
4(1
3.3
)(2
.3)
(13.9
)(3
.0)
(12
.8)
(2.7
)(1
1.7
)(0
.0)
JCP
13.1
12
.65.
211
.212
.14.
27.
88
.11.
97.
37.
31.
97.
04.2
1.9
(12
.0)
(0.7
)(1
1.1)
(0.0
)(5
.0)
(0.0
)(5
.0)
(0.0
)(5
.0)
(0.0
)
SD
P6
.42
.23.
09.
43.8
4.0
5.1
2.9
1.2
5.5
1.5
1.5
4.3
2.0
1.5
(5.5
)(1
.3)
(8.3
)(1
.3)
(2.8
)(0
.3)
(3.3
)(0
.3)
(2.2
)(1
.0)
NF
P2
8.0
28
.031
.2(3
0.0
)(3
2.0
)
Oth
er3.7
8.0
2.4
12
.913
.510
.50.0
7.0
3.5
4.7
5.6
5.0
8.1
6.6
3.3
(0.0
)(4
.0)
(10.0
)(1
0.6
)(0
.0)
(5.6
)(2
.2)
(6.7
)(2
.2)
(4.0
)
Not
es:
1. P
R =
pro
po
rtio
nal
rep
rese
nta
tio
n (
vo
tes
for
par
ty).
2. S
MD
= s
ing
le-m
emb
er d
istr
ict
(vo
tes
for
per
son)
.
3. P
oli
tica
l p
arti
es l
iste
d h
ere
are
Lib
eral
Dem
ocr
atic
Par
ty (
LD
P),
Dem
ocr
atic
Par
ty o
f Ja
pan
(D
PJ)
, K
om
eito
(K
omei
), J
apan
Co
mm
un
ist
Par
ty (
JCP
), S
o-
cial
Dem
ocr
atic
Par
ty (
SD
P),
an
d N
ew F
ronti
er P
arty
(N
FP
).
Reed, Scheiner, and Thies: End of LDP Dominance 359
any opposition party in the postwar period and actually won more propor-
tional representation votes than the LDP. And in 2009, the DPJ fi nally won
a majority and took control over government. The emergence of a credible
alternate governing party was not immediate, but each postreform election
moved the party system in that direction.
By the time the DPJ completed its rise to power, the LDP had enjoyed
single-party majorities in both houses for 34 years, kept a lower house ma-
jority and single-party control of government for 38 years, dominated co-
alition governments for another 15 years, and, all told, remained by far the
largest party in Japan for a whopping 54 years. What explains the LDP’s
dominance all those years, and why did it end so abruptly in 2009?
The Foundations of LDP Strength
It is natural to surmise that the LDP’s incumbency was buoyed by Ja-
pan’s rapid postwar economic growth and ended when the equity and as-
set bubbles burst in the early 1990s. However, the truth is that the party’s
overall vote share began to decline steadily as early as 1960. Luckily for the
LDP, the economy was not its only advantage. Along the way, the LDP also
learned how to maintain its majorities despite a secular decline in popular-
ity. Its two-pronged electoral strategy combined the courting of organized
interest groups through pork-barrel spending and regulatory favors with the
nurturing of individual candidates’ personal support networks. Neither of
these tactics is unique to Japan of course, but the LDP mastered both as well
and for as long as any party anywhere.
First, Japanese politics was highly clientelistic. As the governing party,
the LDP was able to use state resources to strike deals with interest groups
and local constituencies, and its candidates were able to use state resources
to build up their own locally based, personal clientelistic networks.15 As a
result, even many who might have preferred to support other parties because
of their policy positions had reason to support LDP candidates if doing so
meant gaining access to state resources. Indeed, there was even reason to
fear that not supporting the LDP might lead to government retribution.
Second, elections were candidate centered. Where politicians could at-
tract strong personal followings and develop networks of personal support
(koenkai), they could expect to do very well.16 The LDP’s control over the
15. See, e.g., Gerald L. Curtis, “Japan,” in David Butler and Austin Ranney, eds., Elec-tioneering: A Comparative Study of Continuity and Change (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992),
pp. 222–43; 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; Scheiner, Democracy without Competition.16. Under the single nontransferable vote system in use until 1993, candidate-centered
elections were vital for the LDP. The LDP fi elded multiple candidates in each multiseat con-
360 Journal of Japanese Studies 38:2 (2012)
government gave LDP candidates a resource advantage they could play up
in their appeals that highlighted the projects they delivered to the districts.
Control over governmental resources also induced local politicians to hitch
their wagons to the LDP: they could build and fuel their strong personal net-
works with government largesse, and then deliver those networks when they
themselves ran as LDP candidates for national offi ce.17 In this way, even
when the party as a whole was unpopular for one reason or another, LDP
candidates could win seats through their own individual bases of support.
Urban districts were competitive between the LDP and its leading chal-
lengers, but the LDP consistently dominated Japan’s rural districts. Clien-
telism and personalism help to explain why rural areas provided the LDP
with such rock-solid support for so long. As is well known, the LDP catered
to the agricultural sector with import barriers, subsidies, and artifi cially
high prices for agricultural products. In return, farmers provided the LDP
and its candidates with votes, money, and organizational backing. Rural ar-
eas relied on government spending for more than just agriculture, however.
Local tax revenues were always insuffi cient in rural areas, so local public
works and local services depended on a steady stream of subsidies from the
central government. Compared to urban voters, rural residents were espe-
cially likely to prefer candidates who provided patronage.18 It was important
for rural voters to become active members of the clientelistic networks of
LDP candidates and the LDP government, and tightly knit rural social net-
works in turn obliged LDP candidates to cultivate close personal ties to their
constituents in order to do well in elections.19
The Decline of Clientelism and the LDP’s Hold on the Countryside
In short, clientelism, personalism, and rural capture created a buffer
that made it possible for the LDP to maintain power even when the party
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 Per-
sonal 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; 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 koenkai, 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.
17. 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.
18. Scheiner, Democracy without Competition, chapter 3.
19. Curtis, Election Campaigning; 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.
Reed, Scheiner, and Thies: End of LDP Dominance 361
itself was temporarily unpopular. Ozawa Ichiro, the politician who insti-
gated the LDP’s 1993 split and was the driving force behind the anti-LDP
coalition that changed the lower house electoral system in 1994, understood
well the secrets to the LDP’s success, and he pushed the electoral system
reform in part to make elections more partisan and less personalistic.20 Cer-
tainly, the introduction of 200 seats to be fi lled by proportional representa-
tion, in which voters write only the name of a party on their ballot, should
have encouraged voters to think about parties over individual candidates’
personalities. But the shift from multimember to single-member districts
for the remaining 300 seats was just as important, for at least two reasons.
First, with only one seat at stake in each district, no party would run more
than one candidate, so a voter’s choice could now be based on party alone.
Second, single-member districts encourage the consolidation of the party
system into two parties, and, as discussed, the opposition gradually did pro-
duce a single anti-LDP force—the DPJ.
The electoral system change removed a set of incentives for the govern-
ment’s particularistic and clientelistic spending patterns, candidate-centered
politics, and the LDP’s emphasis on the countryside. And the LDP, once it
returned to power, did begin to reduce particularistic spending and undercut
many of its longstanding clientelistic relationships.21 The LDP deregulated
markets, from the fi nancial system to the postal system.22 It reorganized the
bureaucracy and strengthened the cabinet to shift policymaking from “bot-
tom up” to “top down.”23 It forced the consolidation of local towns and lo-
cal politics (shichoson gappei), sending a shockwave through its traditional
center-local clientelistic networks.24
As Gregory Noble highlights, however, there are many plausible ex-
21. 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 Particular-
ism in Japanese Politics,” Journal of East Asian Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2 (2010), pp. 239–73.
22. Ross D. Schaap, “Institutions and Policy: Financial Regulatory Reform in Japan”
(Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2002); Patricia L. Maclachlan, “Storm-
ing the Castle: The Battle for Postal Reform in Japan,” Social Science Japan Journal, Vol. 9,
No. 1 (2006), pp. 1–18.
23. Margarita Estévez-Abe, Takako Hikotani, and Toshio Nagahisa, “Japan’s New Ex-
ecutive 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;
Tomohito Shinoda, “Japan’s Cabinet Secretariat and Its Emergence as Core Executive,” Asian Survey, Vol. 45, No. 5 (2005), pp. 800–821.
24. Yusaku Horiuchi and Jun Saito, “Removing Boundaries to Lose Connections: Elec-
toral Consequences of Local Government Reform in Japan,” working paper (2008); Linda
Choi Hasunuma, “Restructuring Government: Party System Change and Decentralization in
Japan” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2010).
362 Journal of Japanese Studies 38:2 (2012)
planations beyond electoral system change for the Japanese government’s
reduction in particularistic spending beginning in the late 1990s.25 That
electoral incentives had changed for parties and for candidates surely mat-
tered, but since all of the possible causes occurred roughly simultaneously,
assigning the correct weight to each is complicated—and a question for
future research. Here, we merely enumerate the most likely contributors.
Probably the most obvious explanation relates to the economy. After
Japan’s equity and asset bubbles burst in the early 1990s, the weakening
economy and massive government debt reduced the LDP’s ability to spend
government resources to maintain its clientelistic networks. It became
harder to maintain support for both halves of a “dual economy” that was
divided between competitive industries and urban groups, especially con-
sumers, on one side, and weaker, rural groups and uncompetitive producers,
on the other. Tensions within the LDP grew between representatives of each
side: internationally competitive industries based in urban Japan opposed
the tax burden and risk of foreign retribution that accompanied continued
rural protection, and for years observers had expected the LDP to make a
break for one side or the other.26
There is also evidence that the old clientelistic ways were becoming less
effective in winning votes. As infrastructure projects piled up, the effective-
ness of new pork-barrel politics in winning votes began to decline, fi rst in
urban areas but soon extending into more rural areas.27 The effectiveness of
interest groups in delivering votes to the LDP also declined.28
Demographic shifts created greater demand for more programmatic
and less particularistic spending. Most notably, the increasing share of Ja-
pan’s population made up by the elderly—along with the economic decline
of rural areas—meant a greater demand for social welfare spending. To
some degree, these demographic trends also led many to push the govern-
ment for particularistic spending to support the weakened groups, but the
push for social welfare spending, along with an increasingly well-educated
and urban population, appeared to create even greater pressure for more
25. Noble, “The Decline of Particularism,” p. 240.
26. 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. Pem-
pel, Regime Shift: Comparative Dynamics of the Japanese Political Economy (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1998); 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;
Rosenbluth and Thies, Japan Transformed.27. Jun Saito, “Infrastructure as the Magnet of Power: Explaining Why Japanese Leg-
islators Left and Returned to the LDP,” Journal of East Asian Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3 (2009),
pp. 467–93; Saito Jun, Jiminto choki seiken no seijikeizaigaku (Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, 2010),
chapter 6.
28. 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.
Reed, Scheiner, and Thies: End of LDP Dominance 363
programmatic forms of spending.29 That the growing and volatile urban
population neither benefi ted from nor supported much of the particularistic
spending gave the government more reason to alter its expenditures.
In addition to the various motivations to cut particularism, it is im-
portant to note that party and government leaders gained greater capacity
to rein in particularistic spending during this time. Through campaign fi -
nance reforms (which coincided with electoral system reform), party lead-
ers gained greater control over individual candidates’ funding, thus giving
leaders leverage over politicians who might otherwise seek to impose their
spending priorities on the party. In addition, through administrative reforms
enacted in the mid-1990s, the prime minister and cabinet gained substantial
control over the policymaking process,30 which in turn created fewer oppor-
tunities for individual politicians to introduce spending plans that focused
on pork projects for their districts.
Attacking Clientelism as an Electoral Strategy: Koizumi as the Anti-LDP Leader of the LDP. Whatever the exact mix of reasons, it was the
administration of Prime Minister Koizumi (2001–6) that made the most
concerted and explicit effort to break from the LDP’s clientelistic ways.
Koizumi introduced major initiatives to alter the weaker sectors of the econ-
omy and undercut key pieces of the Japanese clientelistic structure. To be
sure, much of Koizumi’s effort in this area was focused on reviving Japan’s
economy. However, these moves were also part of Koizumi’s desire to alter
the LDP’s way of operating and were central to his effort to “change the
LDP, change Japan”—that is, to undercut the party’s traditional practices.
The most noticeable effort by LDP—and especially Koizumi—to un-
dercut the clientelistic system was in the area of postal reform. The party
and its small business clienteles had long benefi ted from the combination of
the country’s postal savings system and the Fiscal Investment and Loan Pro-
gram (FILP). Ordinary citizens were encouraged to deposit their savings in
the postal savings banks, and the government used the FILP to lend the de-
posits at below-market rates to small businesses, which were typically very
supportive of the LDP. Moreover, postmasters served as critical players in
many LDP politicians’ clientelistic networks. The national postmaster asso-
ciation directed each local postmaster to recruit members for LDP personal
support organizations and to fulfi ll a quota of votes for LDP candidates. In
exchange, LDP candidates would guarantee the regulatory advantages of
the postal savings system.31
29. Noble, “The Decline of Particularism,” p. 243.
30. Estévez-Abe, Hikotani, and Nagahisa, “Japan’s New Executive Leadership”; Shi-
noda, “Japan’s Cabinet Secretariat.”
31. 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 Offi ce: The
364 Journal of Japanese Studies 38:2 (2012)
As part of his “reform without sanctuary,” and in a bid to undercut
the old practices and support networks of his in-party opponents, Koizumi
sought to privatize and break up the postal savings system. When a number
of LDP members opposed his efforts, led by those who depended on the
local postmaster associations for their political survival, the reform bills
narrowly passed in the lower house and then failed in the upper house.
Under the old logic of politics, had a maverick like Koizumi ever ascended
to the top job (unlikely), had he been allowed to propose such controversial
legislation (more unlikely), and had he then seen his pet legislation publicly
defeated due to an internal rebellion (unheard of), the result would have
been his immediate resignation and the party’s quick abandonment of such
offensive ideas. Koizumi’s response was rather different and demonstrated
in full bloom the fundamental changes that had been wrought by the new
electoral system, the new party system, and the fraying of clientelism.
In response to the defeat of the postal reform bills, Koizumi drew a
line in the sand. He dissolved the Diet, called new elections in which he
refused to nominate “postal rebels,” nominated “assassins” who supported
postal reform to run against the “rebels,” and appealed to voters to treat the
election as a referendum on his leadership and reform agenda. Koizumi and
his forceful action were wildly popular in Japan’s cities. In the three lower
house elections of 1996, 2000, and 2003, the LDP had never won more than
37 out of the 100 most-urban single-seat districts. In 2005 it won 74. With
such success in areas of the country where traditionally it was weakest, it is
no wonder the LDP enjoyed its most dominating elections in decades.
The most important lesson of 2005, however, is not that the LDP won
in a walkover, but how it did so. First, many of Koizumi’s handpicked “as-
sassins” had no previous connection to the districts in which they competed
but were “parachuted in” to challenge the well-ensconced rebels.32 This rep-
resented a clear rejection of the traditional LDP reliance on candidates with
strong local koenkai. Around the country, Koizumi also introduced district
primaries and open recruitment (kobo), publicly advertising for anyone who
might wish to run for the LDP in a given district to send in a résumé, in order
to circumvent local elites and change the type of candidates nominated.33
History and Politics of the Japanese Postal System, 1871–2010 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Asia Center, 2011).
32. 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 diffi cult. 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.
33. 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
Reed, Scheiner, and Thies: End of LDP Dominance 365
Thus, in words and actions, Koizumi managed to nationalize the election
around a single idea (reform) and to convince voters that a vote for the LDP
nominee in their district was a vote for reform.34 The combination of the
party-based proportional representation tier, the two-party competition in
nearly every single-member district, and now a totemic issue defi ned in
partisan terms successfully redirected voters’ attention from the local to the
national, and the 2005 election completed the shift in the nature of electoral
politics.
The DPJ’s Inroads into the Countryside. Hidden by the LDP’s landslide
win in 2005 was the fact that it won fewer rural district seats than in the
three prior elections, and the party’s rural candidates even lost votes rela-
tive to 2003 despite the nationwide swing to the LDP. This decline in rural
support for the LDP in 2005 was the fi rst hint that the party’s stranglehold
on rural politics might be in jeopardy.
By design, Koizumi’s electoral tactics and his government’s anticlientel-
istic policy changes undercut the party’s traditional base. Many longtime
supporters and hubs of LDP clientelistic networks saw their agreements
with the LDP as having been abrogated. Thus, Koizumi’s successful court-
ship of urban voters came with a price: he traded relatively secure capture of
a highly organized but aging and declining core, largely in the countryside,
for the chance to court unorganized, younger, and less reliable fl oating vot-
ers, mostly in burgeoning cities.35 The tradeoff was most evident in the dis-
tricts of the postal rebels after the passage of Koizumi’s postal reform bills.
Most of the 110,000 postmasters left the party36 and switched allegiances,
mobilizing in favor of the DPJ (and the People’s New Party, a splinter party
led by the postal rebels).37 By the 2009 election, other organizations began
house election. “Shugiin, Jiminto ga kobo ‘Katsuyo’ san’insen zensen de hoshin,” Yomiuri shinbun, July 19, 2009.
34. 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.
35. When rank-and-fi le 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 fl oating voters.
36. “Jiminto toin 8-nen renzoku zokugen: zohangumi jimoto de daidageki,” Yomiuri shinbun, February 18, 2006.
37. After the 2005 election, the LDP did seek to restore its relationship with the post-
masters, hoping the postmasters would fear being on the outs with the ruling party. This ap-
proach 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 Offi ce; “‘Posuto Koi-
zumi’ no ashimoto (1) ‘Kyuteki’ zentoku ni rabu-koru,” Yomiuri shinbun, March 16, 2006;
366 Journal of Japanese Studies 38:2 (2012)
wavering as well.38 Clearly, the LDP’s organized support base was shakier
than ever before.
The DPJ was not a mere spectator as Koizumi tried to wean the LDP off
clientelism and rural dependence. While government policy was weakening
the LDP’s hold on its clientelistic foundations, the DPJ was attacking those
foundations. The DPJ’s absorption of the Liberal Party in 2003 brought
Ozawa Ichiro into its leadership circle. Using the personal connections he
had developed during his years in the LDP, Ozawa proved adept at under-
mining the LDP’s hold on the organized vote and nominating ambitious
challengers supported by the same organizations as the LDP incumbents.
The DPJ also explicitly changed its electoral appeals. In its early years,
it was very much an urban party. It emphasized political and economic
reform, railed against corrupt politics and clientelism, and endorsed greater
economic liberalization. However, after the 2003 election, the DPJ altered
its tactics, directly challenging the LDP in the countryside. The DPJ offered
new support to farmers and small businesses.39 Highlighting the decline
in Japan’s level of food self-suffi ciency, the DPJ promised to increase di-
rect subsidies to millions of farmers (and to a larger number than the LDP
promised to support). The timing of the DPJ’s moves was not a coincidence;
they occurred at the same time that the LDP was reducing spending on
farmers.
DPJ candidates overtly appealed to Japan’s farmers by promising to
compensate for the LDP’s cuts, but the DPJ did not promise to restore LDP-
style clientelism. Its appeals invoked income supports and welfare safety
nets to cushion the blow of market liberalizations. Koizumi’s reforms had
left rural voters and districts up for grabs, much like urban voters had al-
ways been, so the DPJ started bidding for them.
We can see the differences in the urban-rural emphases of the LDP and
DPJ in Figure 1. Prior to every election in Japan, each candidate is given the
opportunity to publish a personal campaign platform (senkyo koho). Fig-
ure 1 indicates for the 2003 and 2009 lower house elections the proportion
of LDP and DPJ candidates who mentioned specifi c proposals in the area
of agricultural policy. As the fi gure shows, in 2003 a considerable number
and “‘Posuto Koizumi’ no ashimoto (2) Shufuku? Danzetsu? Yureru zentoku,” Yomiuri shin-bun, March 17, 2006.
38. Many prefectural agricultural cooperative associations and construction groups de-
clared 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.
39. Scheiner, Democracy without Competition, chapter 10; 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; Aurelia George Mulgan, “Agriculture
and Political Reform in Japan: The Koizumi Legacy,” Pacifi c Economic Papers, No. 360
(Canberra: Australia–Japan Research Centre, 2006).
Reed, Scheiner, and Thies: End of LDP Dominance 367
of rural LDP politicians (65 per cent) mentioned agriculture, whereas only
45 per cent of rural DPJ politicians did so. However, over time, the DPJ
changed its appeals to reach out to rural voters. By 2009, 84 per cent of rural
DPJ politicians discussed agriculture, as compared to 79 per cent of rural
LDP politicians. Even urban politicians came to discuss agriculture in their
campaign platforms. In 2009, 45 per cent of all urban DPJ politicians made
specifi c reference to agricultural policy in their campaign platforms (along
with 45 per cent of urban LDP politicians).40 By this measure, it would ap-
pear that the parties had succeeded in nationalizing their campaigns.
In large part as a result of the LDP’s policy moves that undercut its
40. It is important to point out that mentions of support for agriculture by urban candi-
dates were generally positive.
LDP Rural LDP Urban DPJ Rural DPJ Urban
0.00
0.25
0.50
0.75
1.00
0.65
0.79
0.19
0.45 0.45
0.84
0.11
0.45
2003 2009 2003 2009 2003 2009 2003 2009
Figure 1. Proportion of Lower House Candidates Mentioning Agriculture in Their Campaign Platforms (by party, year, and level of urbanness), for Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ)
Note: We measure urbanness according to the level of population density in each prefecture. We categorize the 150 single-member districts with the lowest density scores as rural and the other 150 districts as urban. The population density is measured as the proportion of a district’s population that lives in what the Japanese government calls a “densely inhabited district” (DID), technically an area with more than 4,000 inhabitants per square kilometer.
368 Journal of Japanese Studies 38:2 (2012)
clientelistic and agricultural foundations, and the DPJ’s explicit appeals to
farmers, there was a signifi cant shift in the urban-rural patterns of support
for the two parties. Figure 2 illustrates the share of the party (proportional
representation) vote won, respectively, by the LDP and DPJ according to
the level of urbanness in each Japanese prefecture in each Diet election
from 2003 to 2010. As Figures 2(a) and 2(b) indicate, prior to 2005 the LDP
won the most votes in rural prefectures and grew increasingly unpopular in
more urban prefectures, while the opposite was true for the DPJ. However,
Figure 2(c) shows that in 2005 both parties’ vote bases became far more
balanced. Thanks to the cuts in particularistic spending and Koizumi’s ac-
tions, the LDP lost some support in the countryside and gained substantially
in cities—in effect shifting support from rural areas to urban to dominate
all areas of the country in the 2005 lower house election. Indeed, as we
noted earlier, relative to 2003 the LDP’s rural district candidates lost votes
in 2005, even controlling for the presence of postal “rebel” candidates. In
contrast, the LDP’s urban district candidates gained substantial numbers of
votes in 2005 over 2003 (analysis not shown).41
The DPJ’s base of support also became more balanced in 2005, but in
a way that did not immediately help the party. Wrong-footed by Koizumi,
the DPJ found itself on the losing side of the “reform” issue in 2005, and it
lost the support of urban voters. Nevertheless, both the DPJ as a party (see
Figure 2) and DPJ candidates held roughly steady in the countryside in
2005, thus leading the party to win roughly equal shares of the vote across
the country.
These shifts in voter support produced an overwhelming victory for
the LDP in 2005 but hurt the LDP in the longer term. Similarly, although
the DPJ won no additional seats in 2005, it laid the foundation for more
competitive elections in the long run. While the Koizumi-led LDP was ex-
traordinarily successful in the 2005 lower house election, Koizumi’s efforts
dramatically weakened the clientelistic networks that had been so valuable
to LDP candidates for decades. Of course, the LDP had even less of a foun-
dation in urban areas. The number of “fl oating” voters, tied to no particular
party, had been growing for years, and urban voters were particularly likely
to shift their support from election to election. The LDP’s urban success in
2005 was based principally on these fl oating voters’ support for Koizumi
and the idea of “reform” that he embodied. Once Koizumi left offi ce in
2006, the LDP could no longer claim to be a party of anything but the
status quo. The party squandered a chance to maintain its newfound ur-
ban support, especially after new Prime Minister Abe Shinzo allowed the
surviving incumbent postal “rebels” to return to the LDP. As we can see in
41. Candidates in “mixed” districts—neither overwhelmingly rural nor urban—did not,
on average, lose or gain votes.
Reed, Scheiner, and Thies: End of LDP Dominance 369
2003–4 Party Support: LDP, rural; DPJ, Urban
After 2004, DPJ no longer principally an urban party
(a) 2003 Lower House (b) 2004 Upper House
10
20
30
40
50
60
20
03
PR
Vo
te S
ha
re
20 40 60 80 100
Urbanness
LDP
LDP fit
DPJ
DPJ fit
10
20
30
40
50
60
20
04
PR
Vo
te S
ha
re
20 40 60 80 100
Urbanness
LDP
LDP fit
DPJ
DPJ fit
10
20
30
40
50
60
20
07
PR
Vo
te S
ha
re
20 40 60 80 100Urbanness
LDP
LDP fit
DPJ
DPJ fit1
02
03
04
05
06
0
20
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PR
Vo
te S
ha
re
20 40 60 80 100
Urbanness
LDP
LDP fit
DPJ
DPJ fit
10
20
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50
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20
09
PR
Vo
te S
ha
re
20 40 60 80 100
Urbanness
LDP
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DPJ
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10
20
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20
05
PR
Vo
te S
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re
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Urbanness
LDP
LDP fit
DPJ
DPJ fit
(c) 2005 Lower House (d) 2007 Upper House
(e) 2009 Lower House (f) 2010 Upper House
2009–10 Party Support: LDP, still mostly rural, DPJ, everywhere
Figure 2. Share of Proportional Representation (PR) Vote by Level of Urbanness across Japan’s 47 Prefectures, for Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ)Note: See note to Figure 1 for explanation of population density. The “fi t” lines in each fi gure show the linear trends that best fi t the relevant data points.
Figures 2(d), (e), and (f), in all elections after 2005, the LDP lost votes (rela-
tive to 2005) across the entire country, giving back all of its urban gains.
Even worse for the LDP was that it was no longer able to count on its
erstwhile rural strongholds. The combination of the Koizumi reforms and
the DPJ’s own efforts to appeal to rural voters led to an increasing number
of fl oating voters in the countryside as well, which helped the DPJ’s fortunes
370 Journal of Japanese Studies 38:2 (2012)
immensely. Not only did the DPJ retain the balanced vote support it saw in
2005, but after 2005 the DPJ won a substantial share of the vote across the
country. As Figures 2 (d), (e), and (f) show, the DPJ was the most popular
party in a majority of prefectures in the 2007 and 2010 upper house elec-
tions and the 2009 lower house election. In 2009 the DPJ won over 42 per
cent of the proportional representation vote and close to half of the votes
cast for candidates in single-member districts, which translated into more
than 64 per cent of all seats (see Table 1). The DPJ dominated the urban (86
out of 100 seats) and mixed (also 86 out of 100 seats) single-member dis-
tricts, but even more striking is that it ended the LDP’s stranglehold on the
countryside. As Figure 3 shows, the LDP won a mere 42 out of Japan’s 100
most rural single-member districts in 2009, whereas the DPJ took 49.
Elections Are Now about Parties, Not Individuals
For decades, success in Japanese lower house elections was driven by
the electoral strength of individual candidates. Incumbents from all parties
were especially likely to win reelection,42 a fact that naturally helped the
42. For example, in 2000 and 2003, over 80 per cent of district incumbents from the
Figure 3. Lower House Single-Member Districts Won, by Level of Urbanness, by Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ)Note: We measure urbanness according to the level of population density in each prefecture. We categorize the 100 single-member districts with the lowest scores as rural, the 100 with the highest scores as urban, and the other 100 as mixed. See note to Figure 1 for explanation of population density.
Reed, Scheiner, and Thies: End of LDP Dominance 371
LDP most, since it usually had more incumbents than all other parties com-
bined. Starting in the lower house election of 2005, however, incumbents
did less well if they were from the “wrong” party. That is, DPJ incumbents
fared poorly in 2005, and LDP incumbents did poorly in 2009.43
Incumbency was not the only individual attribute that helped promote
a candidate’s chances of victory. Candidate background also was the key to
understanding when even nonincumbents might win offi ce. “High- quality”
nonincumbents—defi ned as former upper house seat holders, former high-
level subnational politicians (i.e., city mayors and prefectural assembly
members and governors), former bureaucrats, TV news reporters (who at-
tracted a wide following), and candidates who inherited the seat from a
parent—were much more likely to do well than were “low-quality” candi-
dates who lacked such advantages. In the 2000 election, for example, other
things equal, a “high-quality” candidate running in an open single-member
district race for either big party had nearly a 60 per cent chance of winning,
compared with only a 30 per cent chance for a low-quality candidate.44 At
the same time that individual candidate quality was the key to success, party
affi liation appeared to be relatively unimportant. Controlling for “quality,”
candidates were just as likely to win a district seat whether they ran for the
LDP or DPJ. This all changed in 2005, when, for the fi rst time, partisan af-
fi liation mattered more than individual candidate quality.
As discussed above, Japan’s 1994 electoral system change was expected
to weaken the candidate-specifi c focus of campaigns. The old single non-
transferable vote system obliged the LDP to run multiple candidates against
one another and forced voters to consider something other than party char-
acteristics in order to decide which LDP candidate to choose. In contrast,
both closed-list proportional representation rules and single-member dis-
tricts should have increased the salience of party platforms and party lead-
ers. Now freed from intraparty competition, parties ought to be better able
to present a coherent party image and message, rather than simply ride the
popularity of their individual candidates.45 Accordingly, in 2003 the DPJ
produced a national policy manifesto that outlined the party’s plans should
43. Within each party, incumbents were still more likely to win than nonincumbents, but
incumbency per se became less important than party affi liation.
44. 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.
45. 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 in-dividuals, 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 suc-
cess 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; Steven R. Reed and Michael F. Thies, “The Consequences of Electoral Reform in
372 Journal of Japanese Studies 38:2 (2012)
it win offi ce, and the LDP immediately followed suit. Moreover, with the
decline in intraparty competition and weakened individual bases of sup-
port, along with the increasing importance of a coherent party image and
platform, the signifi cance of party leaders grew. Nationally popular leaders
can bring a wave of votes to all candidates of a party, whereas unpopular
leaders can harm the chances of all of a party’s candidates.
The heavy emphasis on single-member districts also helped promote
the growth of the DPJ as the principal challenger to the LDP. As the DPJ
grew, more and more voters thought of district elections as choices between
two leading party alternatives.46 An increasingly large number of “fl oating”
voters were willing to shift their votes from election to election, and they
swung based on party appeals, not candidate appeals. With the LDP’s cli-
entelistic bonds loosened and parties now nationalized, the likelihood of a
candidate winning a district race in the 2005 and 2009 lower house elections
was determined more by party label than by individual qualifi cations.
We analyze the determinants of electoral victory in single-member dis-
tricts for the four lower house elections in which the LDP and DPJ were the
main contenders: 2000, 2003, 2005, and 2009. Certainly, individual can-
didacies remained somewhat important in single-member district contests:
district incumbents were consistently more than 30 percentage points more
likely to win their district races than nonincumbents. However, there were
important shifts over time in the effects of candidate quality versus party af-
fi liation on candidates’ likelihood of success. For this reason, we set incum-
bents aside and focus our discussion here only on “newcomers” (i.e., those
who had never before held a lower house seat) for the LDP and DPJ.47
We present the estimates from the full quantitative analysis of the suc-
cess of these newcomers in the appendix, but Figure 4 conveys the gist
of the story. It shows four sets of bar graphs—one set for each election—
displaying the probabilities of victory (predicted by the multivariable quan-
titative analysis) for high- and low-quality newcomers, broken down by
party. In 2000 and 2003, individual candidate characteristics were all that
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.
46. 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 Sys-
tem—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.
47. 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 likeli-
hood of victory. Even with SMD incumbents included, we see the same shift as presented in
the appendix: candidate background gives way to party affi liation as the key force driving
success. After having no discernible effect on electoral success prior to 2005, party affi lia-
tion became more important than even SMD incumbency as a predictor of who would win a
given SMD starting in 2005.
Reed, Scheiner, and Thies: End of LDP Dominance 373
mattered—controlling for their career experience, DPJ candidates were just
as likely as those from the LDP to get elected in a single-member district.
If anything, controlling for career experience (level of “quality”), DPJ can-
didates were marginally more successful than LDP candidates, so the fact
that the LDP won many more seats in both elections is testament to the huge
advantage it enjoyed in terms of the career experience of its candidates.
Things changed dramatically in 2005. In 2005 and 2009, there was
no statistically discernible difference in success rates for high- versus low-
quality newcomers in those two elections (see the appendix). Figure 4 dem-
onstrates that in 2005, both LDP newcomers with signifi cant relevant career
experience (“high quality”) and LDP candidates with little such experience
(“low quality”) had a good chance of victory, whereas those running for the
DPJ had almost no chance. In contrast, in 2009 both high- and low-quality
LDP newcomers had almost no chance of victory, but DPJ candidates were
very likely to win, regardless of quality. In both elections, then, candidates’
party affi liation mattered more for their chances of victory than their indi-
vidual résumés.
Conclusion
Japan now has a competitive party system. The LDP, from the moment
of its establishment in 1955, dominated Japanese elections and government
for more than fi ve decades. In 2005 it had its most overwhelming victory
ever, but the party was unable to use that victory to reinforce its dominance
for long. In fact, we argue that the changes in Japanese politics that allowed
the LDP’s crushing victory in 2005 were the very same that reversed its
Figure 4. Probability of Winning a Seat in Lower House Elections by “High-Quality” (HQ) and “Low-Quality” (LQ) New Candidates from the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ)Note: Predicted probabilities are calculated from the regression coeffi cients listed in the ap-pendix. All variables not listed in this fi gure are held constant at their mean value.
374 Journal of Japanese Studies 38:2 (2012)
fortunes in 2009. Elections in Japan have become genuine contests and al-
ternation in power a reality. The DPJ bested the LDP in upper house election
in 2007, and in 2009 it became the fi rst party ever to outpoll the LDP in a
lower house election. In contrast to the LDP’s brief stumble in 1993, when
no single party defeated it, the 2009 LDP loss was clearly a DPJ victory.
The 2005 and 2009 elections demonstrate two important changes in
Japanese politics. First, parties’ balance of success across urban and rural
areas has changed signifi cantly. Prior to 2005, the LDP was an overwhelm-
ingly rural party that was weak in more urban areas, whereas the DPJ was
the opposite. The LDP did fabulously well in urban districts in 2005, but
it had to release its grip on rural districts to reach for that victory. Then in
2009, the LDP lost all that it had gained in the cities, while the DPJ swooped
in and won half of the rural seats. Following the 2009 election, the LDP
appeared to be nothing but a rural rump, and even in the countryside it was
badly damaged. It remains to be seen whether the LDP can fi nd a new way
to woo urban voters, or even whether it is inclined to try.
Despite its heavy loss in 2005, the DPJ did enjoy a more balanced base
of support across urban and rural areas, and, unlike the LDP, it has main-
tained this balance, fi nding roughly equal levels of party support across ru-
ral areas, cities, and the “mixed” districts in between. However, strikingly,
to become a fully national party, the DPJ has made substantial overtures to
the countryside. As the DPJ charts an approach to healing Japan’s economy
that involves tradeoffs between urban, competitive sectors and those that
are more rural and dependent on the government, it may fi nd itself in the
same position the LDP encountered in the past—with the diffi culty of bal-
ancing one side against the other.
Second, and an important distinction between the DPJ’s policy dilemma
today and the LDP’s in the past, is that the factors that drive electoral out-
comes appeared to change in 2005. Prior to 2005, success in lower house
elections was founded on the personal qualities and organized support
networks of individual candidates. Those personalistic and clientelistic an-
chors made things so diffi cult for reformers who wanted to appeal to urban,
fl oating voters with broad-based policy changes. However, over time the
LDP cut back on the distribution of clientelistic benefi ts that fueled its can-
didates’ individual electoral machines. Prime Minister Koizumi’s success
in framing the 2005 election as a referendum on his own leadership and
reform agenda led to greater attention than usual on the national party con-
text. As a result, in both 2005 and 2009 individual candidate traits came to
matter far less than before, and the key to candidates’ electoral success was
their partisan affi liation.48 With these changes, it was possible for the LDP
48. 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
Reed, Scheiner, and Thies: End of LDP Dominance 375
to have one of its most overwhelming successes in one election, only to be
crushed the next time around.
What should we expect next from Japanese politics? One thing we
should not expect is a return to single-party dominance, either by the LDP
or the DPJ. Alternation in power has given interest groups a clear incentive
to keep a foot in both camps so that they can have a voice in government no
matter who wins the next election.49 No government can keep all interest
groups happy at the same time, but during the period of LDP dominance,
even unhappy interest groups felt obliged to support the LDP in general in
order to maintain a voice in government. Now, with the DPJ as a credible
alternative, interest groups can choose to support whichever party offers
them the better policies.
Are we perhaps too hasty in inferring a trend after only a few years?
There are good reasons to believe the changes we identify will persist. The
shift in urban-rural vote support for the DPJ has been consistent across not
only the 2005 and 2009 lower house elections but the 2007 and 2010 upper
house elections as well. Moreover, with genuine district-level party compe-
tition in place now,50 a rise in two-party competition in rural Japan, and the
fact that clientelistic bonds between the LDP and many of its longtime sup-
porters have been cut, there is every reason to believe voters will focus more
on the differences between the two leading parties and less on the personal
characteristics of individual candidates.
The declining effectiveness of pork-barrel projects in winning votes is
not as well documented but there is no reason to expect that trend to reverse
either. There is no reason to expect candidates to stop trying to cultivate
a personal vote, but there is good reason to expect the recently observed
increase in party voting to continue despite such efforts. A strong personal
support network never hurts, but the days in which a strong koenkai guar-
anteed victory even without a party nomination are over in all but the most
rural of districts.
Chuo University; University of California, Davis;
and University of California, Los Angeles
McElwain, eds., Political Change in Japan, pp. 47–66; Maeda, “Factors behind the Historic
Defeat.”
49. 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 (nochi kairyo jigyo), 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 churitsu’ o sengen,” Asahi shinbun, October 21, 2011.
50. See Scheiner, “Evolution of Japan’s Party System—Consolidation or Realignment?”
376 Journal of Japanese Studies 38:2 (2012)
Appendix Probit Analysis of Whether Single-Member District Candidate Wins or Loses in Lower House Election
Independent variable 2000 2003 2005 2009
High quality 1.137*** 0.707** 0.566 0.497(4.34) (2.74) (1.63) (1.87)
1. Coordination failure is a measure of how well the observed candidate’s bloc (the ruling co-alition for the LDP and the leading opposition parties for the DPJ) was coordinated relative to the coordination of the opposing bloc. This variable is calculated by taking the number of candidates running under the banner of the candidate’s bloc and subtracting from it the number running for the opposing bloc. If coordination failure is leading to single-member district losses, the coeffi cient on coordination failure should be negative.
2. In 2000 there were four cases of an opponent inheriting the single-member district: all lost. There were no cases of an opponent inheriting a seat in 2009.
