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

This book cannot be faulted for lacking ambition. Drawing on a vast array of research in comparative politics, Japanese electoral politics, and international politics and security and applying a sophisticated quantitative methodology, Amy Catalinac develops an original and intellectually appealing theory linking election-district dynamics to security-policy outcomes. Based on well-established research on the impact of the single non-transferable vote in medium member districts (SNTV-MMD), she argues that this system of multimember districts created strong incentives for Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) candidates competing with same-party rivals to prefer pork over policy and especially to shun security policy as having no political upside. However, the introduction of the parallel single member districts (SMD) and proportional representation (mixed member majoritarian, MMD) electoral system for the lower house from 1996 radically changed the situation for LDP candidates, who, because they were no longer competing against each other and were running in districts with a plurality threshold for victory (instead of thresholds as low as 10 to 15 percent under SNTV-MMD), were now incentivized to favor policy over pork.

The author’s quantitative analysis of candidate election manifestos (senkyo kōhō) does indeed show that LDP politicians started discussing security more after the electoral system changed. The beginning of 1997 is identified as an important inflection point when candidate behavior and security policy suddenly changed.

Catalinac’s underlying causal theory appears highly plausible, and her analysis of election manifesto content, although containing some methodological issues, is largely solid and credible. It is therefore truly regrettable that these strengths are undermined by significantly exaggerated claims about the explanatory power that the book’s causal variable—local election-district dynamics—has concerning security policy and by the misreading or omission of evidence to suit the theory. The book also suffers from jarring contradictions between chapters 1 and 2, on the one hand, and 3 and 4, on the other.

Turning first to the exaggerated policy claims, in the introduction the reader is informed that LDP politicians were once “oblivious” (p. 1) to security, until “all of a sudden” in 1997 these same politicians “were rushing to create Diet Member leagues to tackle matters of national security, clamoring to make statements about security issues in newspapers and on television, and devising ways to make them part of their election campaigns” (p. 2). This dramatic transformation, according to Catalinac, was accomplished within “two months” (p. 18). Moreover, under the pre-1997 SNTV-MMD, for fear their base would find out they were neglecting pork, LDP politicians with a personal commitment to national security supposedly could not attend to national security even “in secret” (pp. 19, 23). Really?

Ignoring intervening variables such as the bureaucracy, the cabinet, and LDP faction leaders, the book draws a straight line from district election strategies to Japanese security policy, which is described as virtually non-existent before 1997. In support of her argument Catalinac cites Richard Samuels as claiming that there were only three changes in Japan’s security policy from 1955 to 1992 (p. 4). In fact Samuels identifies six changes in that period, including three during the Reagan administration alone (sea-lane defense, participation in the Space Defense Initiative, and initiation of defense technology exports to the United States), and no fewer than ten changes between 1955 and 1997, the magic year for this book.¹ Indeed, given that Samuels has a narrower definition of security, even this list is far too short by Catalinac’s standards. Other major security-policy changes, to name but a few, included the Three Non-Nuclear Principles; the Three Principles on Arms Exports, devised in 1967 and expanded in 1976; the imposition of the 1 percent limit on defense spending in 1976 and its removal in 1988; the National Defense Program Outline of 1976, Japan’s first postwar military doctrine; the 1977 Fukuda...