Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party has controlled the country’s government for most of its existence since coming to power in 1955. Put simply, opposition parties in Japan have failed at an alarming rate for more than half a century. This chapter examines the changing patterns and causes of this opposition party failure over time. It highlights three distinct periods: (1) opposition as protest (1955–1989), (2) opposition as alternative government (1989–2012), and (3) opposition as irrelevance (2012–present). The chapter suggests that until midway through the second period, core structural conditions created massive disadvantages for the opposition, thus harming its ability to take down the LDP. However, significant changes altered these conditions and helped the opposition gain control of the government in 2009. Surprisingly, just a few years later, for reasons that were very different from before, the opposition returned to a state of near irrelevance.

This chapter provides an overview of the 2017 general election in Japan, and introduces the contents of the volume.

The 2017 general election played out in very similar ways to 2014. Turnout remained low, and the coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Kōmeitō retained its two-thirds majority. The big story of the election was a schism within the opposition and the formation of two new parties, the Party of Hope and the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDP), divided primarily on the issue of constitutional revision. We examine how these new parties fared in terms of votes and seats, and across districts of varying population density. Our analysis suggests that even perfect opposition coordination would not have defeated the governing coalition, which dominated across all regions. The best showing on the opposition side was by the CDP, but whether it can pose a credible threat to the LDP going forward is still uncertain.

Scholars commonly argue that in democratic societies, the size (or fragmentation) of party systems is a linear function of social heterogeneity, in interaction with political institutions such as the electoral system. This “interactive hypothesis” has generated a large body of research, mostly in support of its fundamental claims. Despite the prominence of this literature, there is also a growing body of research that casts doubt on the interactive hypothesis. Although societies exhibit a variety of different types of heterogeneity, from religious to socioeconomic diversity, which vary within countries by subnational region, political scientists typically characterize countries’ heterogeneity almost exclusively according to measures of national-level ethnic diversity. This chapter uses original census data to show just how misleading such a characterization can be. We conclude with the implications for theories that seek to relate heterogeneity to key aspects of democratic party systems.

Nearly all systematic empirical work on the relationship between social diversity and the number of parties asserts the interactive hypothesisSocial heterogeneity leads to party fragmentation under permissive electoral rules, but not under single-member district, first-past-the-post (FPTP) rules. In this article, we argue that previous work has been hindered by a reliance on national-level measures of variables and a linear model of the relationship between diversity and party fragmentation. This article provides the first analysis to test the interactive hypothesis appropriately by using district-level measures of both ethnic diversity and the effective number of parties in legislative FPTP elections and considering a curvilinear relationship between the variables. We find that there is a strong relationship between social diversity and the number of parties even under FPTP electoral rules, thus suggesting that restrictive rules are not as powerful a constraint on electoral behavior and outcomes as is usually supposed.

We present theoretical and empirical analyses of candidates' platforms in the 2003 and 2009 Japanese House of Representatives elections, in an effort to understand candidates' strategic decisions to emphasize policy debates and to highlight their character-based qualities. Our study highlights the significance of comparative electoral advantages that motivate differing strategies between candidates from different parties, between candidates competing in rural versus urban districts, and between candidates contesting the 2003 versus the 2009 elections. Our study contributes to the growing literature that jointly analyzes politicians' policy-based vote-seeking strategies versus electoral appeals based on valence-related attributes such as competence, integrity, and leadership ability, that may appeal to voters because they enhance winning candidates’ performance in office.

On December 14, 2014, Japanese voters turned out in record-low numbers (52.7% of eligible voters) to elect a new House of Representatives (HR). The result was an overwhelming victory by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its coalition partner Komeito.

Scholars commonly argue that in democratic societies, the size or fragmentation of party systems — as well as other important features of party systems, such as their nationalization or aggregation — is a function of social heterogeneity, in interaction with political institutions such as the electoral system. Although societies exhibit different types of heterogeneity, from their religious diversity to how socioeconomically equal they are, and although heterogeneity often varies at different political levels, from the national level to the electoral district, political scientists typically characterize countries’ heterogeneity almost exclusively according to measures of national level ethnic diversity. We draw attention to the importance of both different types of heterogeneity and the level at which social heterogeneity is measured. Using original census data for a number of advanced industrial and developing democracies, we show that characterizing heterogeneity solely according to nationwide ethnic diversity often paints a misleading portrait, particularly where it matters the most: at the level of the electoral district. We conclude briefly with the implications for theories that seek to relate social heterogeneity to key aspects of democratic party systems.

thor tries to justify this remarkable phenomenon. Since the Gulf War in 1990, which forced the Japanese to recognize the importance of contributing personnel as well as money to the international community, a couple of drafts were made for a constitutional amendment. The main issue at the time was to amend Article 9. As mentioned above, debates over the amendment of Article 9 date back to the ratifi cation of the current constitution, and the Gulf War marked a signifi cant turning point in the argument, with momentum building behind the idea of not only acknowledging the SDF but expanding its role as a peace-keeping force. Yet most Japanese constitutional scholars are against this movement and insist that Article 9 might lie beyond the scope of an amendment considering that the constitution’s preamble proclaims Japan’s pacifi sm. The author also concludes that, as the key concepts of the Japanese constitution have received wide support from the public, constitutional reform should be accomplished by means of interpretation rather than amendment. As mentioned, Matsui is considered one of the leading constitutional scholars in Japan today. His textbook Nihonkoku kenpō (Yūhikaku, 2007) has enjoyed huge popularity in the academic world, along with Hasebe Yasuo’s Kenpō (Shinseisha, 2011). This new book will surely help readers develop a systematic understanding of the legal meaning of the constitution. On the other hand, the question inevitably arises as to how well the book provides the “contextual analysis” alluded to in its title. As the author is mainly concerned with explaining the legal substance of the constitution as a written document, he judges the discrepancies between the constitution and actual political practice from a consistently critical perspective at the expense of an empirical analysis of the current reality of the constitution. This is typical of Japanese constitutional scholarship, and even Matsui fails to consider suffi ciently what a Japanese version of Walter Bagehot’s “effi cient constitution” might look like.

To address concerns over the applicability of the electoral system literature to new and developing democracies, we present a framework for understanding the interplay between electoral rules and social, economic, and political context. This framework emphasizes that context typically shapes what we call the “behavioral” linkage between electoral rules and outcomes; moreover, the longer the causal chain connecting electoral rules to outcomes, the greater the number of opportunities for context to exert an effect. We then situate recent literature within this framework. Scholarship from a wide range of authors indicates many different ways in which contextual factors ultimately shape the number of parties. However, perhaps the most important contribution of this literature is to indicate how context conditions the behavioral incentives initially generated by electoral rules, thus promoting or undermining political actors' propensity to behave strategically.

What determines whether interest groups choose to contact politicians or bureaucrats? Despite the importance of this question for policymaking, democracy, and some prominent principal-agent understandings of politics, it is relatively unexplored in the literature. We argue that government stability plays a major part in interest groups' decisions. That is, central to interest groups' decisions is their assessment of the likelihood that politicians currently in power will continue to be in the future. We deduce logical, but totally contrasting hypotheses, about how interest groups lobby under such conditions of uncertainty and then test these using a heteroskedastic probit model that we apply to a unique longitudinal survey of interest groups in Japan. We find that when it is unclear if the party controlling the government will maintain power in the future, interest groups are more likely to contact the bureaucracy. When it is believed that the party in power will retain control for a considerable period, interest groups are more inclined to contact politicians. In addition, during times of government uncertainty, interest groups that are supportive of the governing party (or parties) are more likely to contact politicians and those that are less supportive will be more likely to contact bureaucrats.

On 16 December 2012, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which had been swept from power in August 2009 after more than half a century of dominance, roared back with a landslide of its own. Entering the election with only 118 of 480 seats in the House of Representatives (HR), the lower house of the National Diet, the LDP emerged with a stomping majority of 294. Moreover, the LDP and its long-time coalition partner, Komeito, jointly surpassed the two-thirds threshold needed to override vetoes from the upper house, the House of Councillors (HC), where the coalition lacks a majority—at least until the 2013 HC election. The incumbent Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which had taken power with an even more impressive 308 seats in 2009, retained only 57 seats this time, just barely managing second place after three difficult years in government.

In Chapter 3, we set up a number of variables and expectations regarding disproportionality and the number of parties. In this chapter, we now take advantage of the simultaneous existence of PR and SMD rules in mixed-member systems across a range of established and new democracies to investigate the extent to which these expectations bear out in reality.

It is widely agreed that electoral rules matter. When polities adopt new rules to govern their elections, they usually have a specific effect in mind. At the most basic level, when electoral system engineers choose electoral rules, they do so with the understanding that first-past-the-post (FPTP) single-member district (SMD) systems tend to constrain the number of parties and perhaps even promote a competitive two-party system. When electoral rule designers want to encourage the presence of multiple parties – which, ideally, will provide clear, distinct representation to many different groups in society – they usually institute proportional representation (PR) rules, which allocate to parties a proportion of the total seats that matches their proportion of the total vote. It is also widely believed that electoral rules matter in numerous areas beyond simply the number of parties. Among the most important is the type of people who get elected to office – for example, it is presumed that a side benefit of closed-list PR rules is that they tend to help elect women to public office.

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.