Democracy without Competition in Japan: Opposition Failure in a One-Party Dominant State (review)

This is a significant and well-crafted book. The central problem that Ethan Scheiner addresses is why opposition parties in Japan since 1945 have succeeded so rarely in displacing the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its conservative predecessors from office, despite LDP unpopularity particularly during the "lost decade" of the 1990s. The principal (but not the only) causal factor that he identifies is the predominance of clientelism in the relationship between parliamentarians and voters, especially in rural areas.

This in itself is not, of course, a new insight, and Scheiner would not claim that it is. For instance, the second edition of Ike Nobutaka's pioneering work Japanese Politics, published in 1972 (first edition 1957), is subtitled Patron-Client Democracy. But the originality of Scheiner's analysis lies in the fact that he links clientelism with fiscal centralization, and with institutionalized protection for those who benefit the most from the clientelist system.

This combination is hardly a new phenomenon. Indeed, it was nicely set out in a campaign speech by Minister of Justice Kobayashi Takeji in January 1971. Kobayashi (who subsequently lost his cabinet post for his "indiscretion") described democracy as "a kind of leveling movement," whereby the central government diverts tax revenue from rich to poor areas. Every local area, he stated, must count on the central government. Thus the LDP, in charge of government, "will be willing to accommodate the wishes of mayors and governors if they are affiliated to our party," but not if they are affiliated with an opposition party.¹

Scheiner's research focuses mainly on the 1990s and early 2000s, where the failure of opposition parties to consolidate their position appears so surprising in view of poor governmental (and thus LDP) performance, especially in the key area where electorates normally judge parties in power, namely the economy. We may expect a party to remain in power while the economy is doing well, but why does the electorate not dismiss it when the economy is doing badly? The reason, Scheiner argues, is that politics in Japan greatly differs from politics in parliamentary systems where parties address electors with programmatic appeals, or presidential systems where the popularity or otherwise of a directly elected head of state is a key variable. In Japan, central government controls much of the funding of local governments and makes sure that local electorates understand that only by voting LDP will their local region benefit. In the long term, this has led to personality voting, with incumbent LDP parliamentarians having an entrenched advantage over their rivals from other parties. Moreover, parties out of power find it hard to recruit good electoral candidates because the LDP has, in a sense, sewn up the field.

The failure of opposition parties to break the LDP hegemony has prompted comparative studies in the past. The most comprehensive is Uncommon Democracies, edited by T. J. Pempel.² That book examined four cases where a single party has remained in power for an unusually long period: Sweden, Israel, Italy, and Japan. Scheiner makes similar comparisons, adding Brazil and Mexico, and mostly interestingly Austria, where for many years there was a two-party hegemony in a highly clientelist system. But today Japan stands out almost alone in the longevity stakes. Even Italy, which for many years appeared to be the model closest to that of Japan, saw its dominant party, the Democristiana, collapse and disappear in the early 1990s.

So why is Japan such a conspicuous outlier in this respect? Scheiner rejects cultural explanations, as well as explanations based on the electoral system. The latter are indeed difficult to regard as the key causal factor since the Lower House electoral system was radically changed in 1994, yet the opposition still failed to make substantial headway. With his focus on clientelism and central fiscal control, he...