The Evolution of Japan’s Party System: Politics and Policy in an Era of Institutional Change ed. by Leonard J. Schoppa (review)

In the academic publishing world, where it typically takes a minimum of a year for one’s submitted work to appear in print, scholars who attempt to say something relevant about recent Japanese politics write at their own peril. Just when you think you have things figured out, a big shift alters the landscape. In the 2005 Lower House election, it appeared that Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) had reached a new level of dominance; the party won 296 (out of 480 total) seats to only 113 for the leading challenger. But in 2007 and 2009, the upstart Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) overcame years of nearly total opposition party failure and crushed the LDP in two significant elections. The Lower House election in 2009 was the first in which the LDP was not the top party, as the DPJ won 308 seats, compared to only 119 for the long-time ruling party. However, before you could blink, the LDP won the 2010 Upper House election and then crushed the DPJ in the 2012 Lower House race—taking 294 seats to only 57 for the DPJ, raising serious questions about the DPJ’s ability to survive. In this context, Leonard Schoppa’s edited volume, The Evolution of Japan’s Party System: Politics and Policy in an Era of Institutional Change, is not only an insightful work that examines a number of features of recent Japanese party politics and policymaking but also will continue to be relevant, no matter what direction Japanese politics moves in the future: the volume’s authors work within a conceptual framework that helps the reader make sense of the last two-plus decades of political upheaval in Japan.

The book focuses on explaining the post-1980s evolution of Japanese politics in the areas of political parties and public policy. Schoppa notes in the introduction that most work on Japanese politics tends to focus on only parties or policy (along with political economy). Part of the contribution of The Evolution of Japan’s Party System is that it examines the interaction between the two.

The volume’s central argument is that events of the early 1990s—most notably, the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy and the end of the cold war—ignited an “evolutionary process” that culminated in a new party system that was founded on new issues. Beginning in 1955, the LDP and Japan Socialist Party (JSP) had been able to dominate party politics by means of specific policy profiles. The LDP maintained a majority (or near majority) of all seats through its promotion of “convoy capitalism,” which promised to protect the interests of farmers, small business, and workers who valued lifetime employment and delivered low taxes and economic growth to big business. The JSP could not compete with the LDP for control of the government but, through its appeals to pacifism and support for labor, could consistently maintain its position as a moderately large number two party in this “1955 System.” Many referred to Japan as a “one-and-a-half-party system,” with a dominant LDP and a medium-sized but perpetually-in-opposition JSP. However, with the bursting of the Japanese economic bubble and general economic stagnation in the early 1990s, the LDP could no longer market itself as a credible champion of economic growth and protector of the weak. Furthermore, with the end of the cold war, the JSP’s emphasis on pacifism appeared less relevant.

A cleavage over neoliberalism emerged within society, pitting those who resented the advantages bestowed upon farmers and small business against those who supported the governmental favors given to such groups, and Schoppa argues that new strategies were needed for any party that wished to survive in this new environment. The changes...