Postwar Japanese politics overview
The 1955 LDP system:
A conservative Japanese parliamentary system was formed with the merger between the conservative Liberal and Democratic Parties in 1955, into the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Except for two major setback in 1993 and 2009, the LDP organized the cabinet and served as the chief power broker in Japan for over half a century. The nature of the Japanese electoral system did allow a certain degree of political plurality. Before the 1994 electoral reform, the Japanese practiced what is called single nontransferable vote multimember district electoral system, which often meant that in an electoral district, three to five representatives were to be elected to the Diet, and the winning candidates were the top three to five winners in electoral votes. On the other hand, each voter could only vote once, for one candidate. This process guaranteed that no matter how many candidates the majority party (e.g. the LDP) had, the smaller political parties would always have a chance to win a seat or two if enough voters cast ballots for their candidates.
Therefore, political plurality did exist in postwar Japan. But this system also meant the dominance of the LDP was hard to overthrow. As John Thayer states below:
Under the old electoral system, the voter had one ballot to cast in a district from which would emerge multiple winners. This system promoted multi-party politics since a candidate could become a winner with as little as 18% of the vote. Under this system, however, minor parties, had little chance of replacing the LDP as the ruling party, since only the LDP ran candidates in all electoral districts. (Thayer, 77)
Also, as Krauss and Pekkanen argue, under this system, the LDP could relatively easily maintain their power in the Diet even when they did not enjoy very popular support, so long as they had candidates in ALL the electoral districts (Krauss & Pekkanen, 7). The LDP control of the Diet worked well with the centralized state regulation of Japan's economy, often called "Japan Inc" because of the close cooperation between the state and big industries in Japan that patterned after the workings between management and teams of a big corporation. The LDP control of politics seemed to work out well for Japan:
–client relationships with local assembly politicians and served as “pipelines” to bring pork-barrel benefits to local voters, especially to conservative bastions in rural areas. The LDP also developed relationships with powerful support groups that generated votes for the party: postmasters (influential in rural communities), farmers, and construction workers.Competing LDP representatives in each district developed patron
The elite national bureaucracy implemented industrial policies that facilitated rapid economic growth after the 1960s and created affluence, employment, and surplus expenditures that could be distributed through these networks. With low crime and unemployment rates, and with ever-increasing collective and individual goodies sent down the political pipeline, the LDP seemed a good bet for many Japanese to entrust their government to.(Krauss & Pekkanen, 7)
With LDP dominance of politics, many legislative decisions were worked out outside the legislative process. The Japanese electoral system meant that the LDP focused more on individual candidates running in each electoral district, rather than party agenda as a whole. One can say that the party lacked a coherent agenda to begin with and it had to remain so in order to accommodate the many different situations in different electoral districts. Long term LDP control of the Diet and the multiple terms LDP members served in the Diet (members of the House of Councillors have six year terms and of the House of Representatives, four year terms) also allowed the LDP Diet members to form a Policy Affairs Research Council that stood outside the Diet, so that relevant LDP members could discuss policy matters and formulate policies outside the Diet before presenting policies in the Diet, primarily to opposition party members for compromise before they were passed into legislation. In other words, the LDP's comfortable ownership of the Diet enabled it to work in and out of it, focusing primarily on compromises with LDP factions and opposition parties. This led to a very decentralized Japanese politics. It worked so long as Japanese economy was booming. When Japan went into an economic recession in the 1990s (see explanation from next week's readings), the pork-barrel politics could no longer work properly. The LDP leadership in the Diet was challenged. And electoral reform started in 1994. In the new electoral system, 300 electoral districts were designated as single-candidate district, where the winner of the largest number of votes will take the district (similar to the US electoral system), and 11 larger, regional districts were designated as multi-party districts (http://www.answers.com/topic/list-of-districts-of-the-house-of-representatives-of-japan). The new system seemed to encourage smaller parties to form into larger ones so they could compete more effectively with the LDP. A new coalition party, the Shinshinto (New Frontier), was thus formed in December, 1994.
Under the new electoral system, the voter has two ballots--one of which he casts for a party, the other of which he casts for a candidate in a winner-take-all district. While the first ballot maintains a prominent role for political parties, the second ballot will encourage political parties to merge until two parties are broad enough to run candidates in every district. With two national parties contending for power, policy will become increasingly important. The heads of the two parties, one of whom will become the prime minister, will be the principal spokesmen for policy. (Thayer, 77)
The new system, however, still has drawbacks and may not lead to a two party system:
These were the premises justifying electoral reform, but previously neglected problems now are becoming apparent. First, the electoral districts under the new system have new boundaries and a candidate must receive twice the number of votes necessary to win in the old districts. It will take more than one election to organize the vote in a new district. Second, the opposition parties are having difficulty finding strong candidates to run in all 300 single winner districts. In the last election, only 70 candidates from the second largest party, 55 from the third largest party, and 51 from the fourth largest party were successful--and only a few of them came in first among the winners from a multi-winner district. The LDP, on the other hand, had 223 winners, most of whom occupied the top or second slot in a multi-winner district. The LDP, then, has more and stronger candidates. This bias will remain in the short-term, as proven winners will probably enjoy an advantage over new or previously defeated candidates. Yet, conditions have never been better for a realignment of the political parties. Near-term elections will probably result in the continuation of the LDP as the dominant party, but the new election law should gradually take effect in later elections. The parties within each electoral district will merge to produce the votes needed to challenge the LDP votes. (Thayer, 77-8)
As the 21st century unfolds, Japan continues to go through political turbulence. The new system has not yet generated a strong two party system. The newly ruling DPJ (Democratic Party of Japan) faces strong challenges as it struggles to determine its own identity and balances domestic and international policies. There have been an annual change of prime ministers since 2006. Politics has largely remained an affair of prominent political families. Here is just a glimpse of political dynasties, from a random sampling of 1950s prime ministers whose grandsons were also prime ministers:
· Yoshida Shigeru (1946-7, 1948-54) (maternal grandfather)—Taro Aso (2008-9)
· Ichiro Hatoyama (1954-56) (paternal grandfather)-Yukio Hatoyama (2009-now)
· Nobusuki Kishi (1957-60) (maternal grandfather)—Shinzo Abe (2006-7)
Bibliography:
Krauss, Ellis, & Robert J. Pekkanen.
"The Rise and Fall of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party," The Journal of Asian Studies, v.69, No. 1 (February) 2010: 5-15.Thayer, Nathanial. “The Japanese Prime Minister and His Cabinet,” SAIS Review, 16.2 (1996), 71-86.