Electoral Reform and National Security in Japan: From Pork to Foreign Policy by Amy Catalinac (review)

Writing in the latter years of the administration of Abe Shinzō, it is difficult to remember a time when national security issues were not at the forefront of the attention of policymakers, researchers, and journalists with an interest in Japan as well as the Japanese general public. Whether it be the government's decision to exercise its right to collective self-defense or concrete responses to perceived regional and global threats, issues of national security have largely defined Japanese political discourse and debates surrounding its role in the world over recent years. No longer do we talk so readily about Japan as a "reactive state" or a low-profile foreign policy based upon the Yoshida Doctrine; instead, we focus on an emerging Abe Doctrine and a "proactive contribution to peace." Yet, it is worth revisiting the process by which this transformation in both Japan's concrete international behavior and the discourse surrounding it came about. Amy Catalinac's book, based on her doctoral research at Harvard University but the focus of her curiosity from before this time, takes up the challenge of accounting for this significant development.

Most explanations tend to account for this change in political discourse by focusing on structural or external factors, such as the end of the cold war, or the rise of China and the threat of North Korea. Instead, Catalinac skillfully brings together two unlikely bedfellows to make her argument: the sometimes dry and technical world of electoral systems, and the higher stakes, more existential field of national security. Catalinac expounds her argument in much more nuanced detail than can be captured here but her argument runs (very roughly) as follows. For most of the postwar period, Japanese elections were conducted on the basis of voters casting a single nontransferable vote in multimember districts. This led the main political parties to field multiple candidates to maximize their success at the polls, resulting in intraparty competition and candidates having to distinguish themselves on the basis of what they could do for the locals. In other words, could they convince the electorate of their ability to bring home the pork? In contrast, for a politician to express an interest in foreign or security policies was regarded as electoral suicide. This state of affairs is nicely captured in the book by a vignette originally related by senior Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) politician Katō Kōichi to U.S. academic and journalist Steven Vogel in a 1983 interview. Katōquotes being asked by a member of his electorate: "Its [sic] fine that you're doing all this foreign policy stuff. But we need an airport in this area. Are you really doing something about this?" (p. 38).

However, in 1994, the coalition of non-LDP parties managed to achieve one thing during its brief time in power: electoral reform. As a result of this, multimember districts were abolished and replaced with a mixed-member majoritarian system that comprised single-member constituencies and proportional representation in regional districts. Thereafter, and in direct response to this electoral reform, Japanese politicians began to refocus their electoral strategies "from pork for the district" (p. 115) to "policies for the nation" (p. 125). For Catalinac, 1997 was the tipping point at which this change became embedded. In making this argument and outlining her hypotheses, she engages patiently with and deflects persuasively every alternative explanation and counterargument in turn. Over the course of eight chapters, including an introduction and a conclusion, and by focusing on a series of elections with a particular emphasis on candidates' election manifestos, Catalinac traces how politicians' interests and behavior changed as a result of the electoral reform and ultimately demonstrates how "Japan has become normal a country in which politicians are able to pay attention to national security, debate the merits of different security policies, and offer frank assessments of the seriousness of...