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Reviewed by:
  • Democratic Reform in Japan: Assessing the Impact
  • Lonny E. Carlile (bio)
Democratic Reform in Japan: Assessing the Impact. Edited by Sherry L. Martin and Gill Steel. Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder, 2008. xii, 253 pages. $58.50.

As stated very concisely in this volume's title, the unifying objective in this collection of chapter-length empirical studies is to "analyze whether the quality of Japanese democracy has changed, and if so for the better, as a result of electoral and administrative reforms instituted over the course of the past two decades" (p. 4). The centerpiece among these reforms was the electoral reform legislation passed in 1994 that altered the system for filling seats in the Diet from the existing "medium-sized" multimember district system (long identified as problematic by students of Japanese politics) to a "mixed member" one built around "winner-take-all" single-seat districts. The editors claim the studies in the volume were written with an eye toward contributing both to the more general literature on the question of "how democracies in general, and more specifically democracies that are imposed from the outside, evolve to achieve better democratic outcomes" and to the "large and growing body of work on the role of deepening the quality of democracy and (re)engaging citizens—attitudinally and behaviorally—in the democratic process" (p. 10). This they certainly do, but the studies are not superficial, comparative studies of the sort that are sometimes produced when a large number of contributors aim to address a discipline-derived theoretical concern. The contributors here are a mix of senior and junior specialists on Japanese politics who are deeply familiar with the specifics of the Japanese context: they use Japanese-language sources and, in some cases, engaged in direct participant observation. As such, the book is one that would satisfy Japan specialists interested in the topic.

The book is divided into two parts, the first focusing on phenomena at the national level and the second on local government-level studies. It is noteworthy that the final versions of the studies in the volume appear to have been completed in 2007 or early 2008. As a result, a number of chapters prominently feature developments under the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) government of Koizumi Jun'ichirō (prime minister from April 2001 to September 2006). The authors here frequently present these developments, [End Page 469] and in particular the very large LDP victory in the 2005 general election, as a kind of culmination of the reform process. The book's publication predates the massive victory of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in the August 2009 general election that replaced 54 years of almost uninterrupted LDP governance with a majority DPJ government. This distinctive timing of the book's publication makes for an interesting context in which to consider its content. Nowhere in the book does one get the sense that any of the authors saw the DPJ victory coming. At the same time, there are no bald predictions of continued LDP governance either, and for the most part the conclusions drawn in the studies hold up well in light of subsequent events.

An illustrative case in point is the essay on the LDP by Ellis Krauss and Robert Pekkanen. The authors argue that the LDP has adapted to the electoral and administrative reforms by becoming a more centralized, leader-centered party exemplified by the party under Koizumi in a manner consistent with the demands of electoral and governmental reforms. They attribute the LDP's 2005 electoral victory to this transformation of the party and the "large swings an electoral system with a single-member district portion can bring." But they also add that "the key question is [whether] … the changes that this election brought about and also represented … could be institutionalized and survive Koizumi's retirement" (p. 33). The authors themselves are equivocal, noting how old-school intraparty institutions such as factions, kōenkai, and zoku giin seem to have survived the storm of reform to the detriment of the authority of the party leaders, which the authors consider important.

Having said this, it should be emphasized that predicting future partisan outcomes is not their objective. Krauss and...

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