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The Underlying Roots of Opposition Failure in Japan: Clientelism + Centralization = Local Opposition Failure

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The Underlying Roots of Opposition Failure in Japan: Clientelism + Centralization = Local Opposition Failure THE UNDERLYING ROOTS OF OPPOSITION FAILURE IN JAPAN: CLIENTELISM + CENTRALIZATION = LOCAL OPPOSITION FAILURE Ethan Scheiner Stanford University 1 Introduction1 Opposition parties’ ability to challenge ruling regimes is an integral component of representative democracy. Democratic party theory suggests that in times of voter distress, credible alternatives will challenge the existing order. Yet, democracies exist where, even during such distress, opposition parties have difficulty selling themselves as credible challengers. What accounts for such failure? Party competition is a function of many factors: socio-economic structure, economic strength, parties’ capacity to adjust their issue positions, clientelism, incumbency power, and the quality of parties’ candidates, to name a few. The comparative literature emphasizes the first few items but I focus on the last, the role of individual candidacies, a factor given greater emphasis in the American politics literature. Especially where party-generated, fixed list, proportional representation (PR) electoral arrangements do not predominate, candidates are key to parties’ success. Many factors shape parties’ development of strong candidate pools, but parties’ strength at the local level is particularly important. As Jacobson (1990) demonstrates in the American congressional case, parties holding many local election seats can more easily find quality candidates for national legislative races and, in turn, are more likely to find success in such races (58-60). However, under certain conditions, parties will be limited in their capacity to develop strong candidate pools. In particular, I argue that in political systems that are centralized and founded on clientelist politics—systems where, in order to get their jobs done, local politicians must rely on the financial graces of the central government—a Catch-22 arises. In such systems, parties that are not strong at the national level will have great difficulty winning local office. Parties holding little strength at the local level will have a hard time getting their message out and find few strong candidates to run for national office. In turn, they will have difficulty winning national level seats. I use this framework to address the failure of 1 An earlier version of this paper was prepared for delivery at the 2000 Midwest Political Science Association and 2000 American Political Science Association annual meetings. The author gratefully acknowledges extremely helpful comments from John Aldrich, Shigeo Hirano, Yusaku Horiuchi, Shigeo Hirano, Melanie Hurley, Herbert Kitschelt, Steve Levitsky, Meg McKean, Bonnie Meguid, Scott Morgenstern, Tomoaki Nomi, Robert Pekkanen, David Soskice, Betsey Scheiner, Rob Weiner, Kuba Zielinski, and the WPS reviewer. Thanks to Kojima Aya, Ozawa Akira, Nakamichi Midori, and Tatsumi Mie for their assistance with the telephone interviews. Also, thanks to Meg McKean, Hironaka Yoshimichi, Kobayashi Yoshiaki, Shinada Suguru, Yanai Satoshi, Nakajima Kaze, Iigata Kôichi, Saitô Masamitsu and Niioka Tatsu, without whose introductions most of the interviews here would not have been possible. Great thanks to Susan Pharr for sharing the JEDS data set. Finally, thanks to the National Security Education Program, The Japan Foundation, Sanwa Bank, and Harvard’s Program on U.S.–Japan Relations for funding portions of this research. 2 the opposition to gain a foothold in Japan, where alternatives to the leading ruling party have been unable to gain much ground. In the postwar period, a number of cases of party competition failure have been apparent in the democratic world. However, as new party success has arisen in numerous countries, including formerly non-competitive party systems such as Italy and Mexico, a spotlight has shone even more brightly on what is perhaps the clearest case of failure: despite its democratic trappings, Japan’s government has been dominated by a single party, the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), throughout the bulk of the postwar period. The 1990s were seen as an opportunity to challenge the LDP. Voters were willing to support the new opposition of the era, and the strongest new party outpolled the LDP in the PR portion of the 1995 House of Councilors (HC) election and came close in the PR sections of the 1998 HC and 1996 and 2000 House of Representatives (HR) races, but the opposition has won few seats in candidate- oriented district races.2 As I indicate below, much of this weakness in district races is due to the opposition’s inability to find strong candidates. Unlike the LDP, which dominates most localities, few opposition politicians hold local office. Parties challenging the LDP, therefore, have only a shallow pool of quality candidates for national office. To explain much of the opposition’s failure in Japan, then, we must look to the local level. What accounts for the opposition’s failure in local elections? I argue that it is in large measure due to the combination of a clientelist political structure and local dependence on the central government for funding. The combination of clientelism and local dependence on the center creates strong incentives for (1) ambitious local politicians—who rely on the image of being able to pull in money and projects from the center—to ally with the LDP, the party controlling the national purse strings, and (2) voters to cast ballots in local elections for such candidates. The Japanese Context The LDP lost power in 1993. After the parliament (Diet) passed a no-confidence motion and new elections were held, a coalition of former opposition parties, former LDP members, and new 2 The HR is the dominant branch. The HC and HR are both mixed systems where voters cast two ballots, one for a party in PR, and one for a district-level candidate. 3 parties formed the first non-LDP government since the LDP was created in 1955. Yet, by the end of 1994, the LDP was the leading party in a coalition government, and today is once again Japan’s leading party, with no credible alternative in sight. Nevertheless, there is substantial voter anger. The quest for party alternation in power fueled much of the vote for new parties in 1993 (Kabashima 1994; Reed 1997). The deflated Japanese economic bubble has dramatically weakened support for the LDP. LDP corruption, and the Socialist Party’s willingness to abandon its traditional appeals and form a coalition government with its enemy, the LDP, have led to great mistrust of Japan’s primary postwar parties. The LDP and Socialists had, respectively, the support of nearly 45 and 25 percent of the electorate (i.e., not just those who voted) in 1958, but, by 1996, this support had dropped to approximately 20 and 2 percent, respectively. Yet, even as voter independence rose, no strong challenger has mobilized this discontent for more than brief periods. From the 1960s until the early 1990s, Japan maintained a fairly stable national party system, with, essentially, five parties. The LDP dominated the government and the opposition was made up of the Socialists, the Democratic Socialist Party, Kômeitô, and the Communists. However, what began as total LDP domination in the early years of the era gradually eroded as changing socio-demographics led to a decline in LDP support and influence in the cities. In 1993, sitting LDP incumbents split from the party to form two new parties: Shinsei and Sakigake. New party candidates were extremely successful in the 1993 HR election, and, with the non-Communist opposition, formed a non-LDP coalition government. The government’s most noted achievement was changing Japan’s electoral law from the long-derided Single Non-Transferable Vote in Multi-Member District system (SNTV/MMD) to one with 200 PR seats and 300 single member districts (SMDs). However, within a year coalition difficulties led the Socialists and Sakigake to join the LDP in a new government. The remaining members of the non-LDP coalition government formed the New Frontier Party (NFP). With 178 HR members, the party appeared well positioned to challenge the LDP, which held little more than 200. In the 1995 HC election, the NFP outpolled the LDP by 1.5 million votes in the PR section of the ballot and took home three more PR seats than the LDP. However, it won nine fewer 4 seats than the LDP in the candidate-centered races in the prefectural district component of the HC.3 Similarly, the NFP won nearly as many votes and seats as the LDP in PR balloting in the 1996 HR election, but did markedly worse than the LDP in the SMD component of the HR race, winning only ninety-six SMDs to the LDP’s 169. Party formation continued. Shortly before the 1996 election, moderate Socialist Party members joined with a small group of new party members to form the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). By 1998, internal bickering led the NFP to disband into an array of splinter parties, and the DPJ was seen as the primary opposition hope. In 1998 the party joined with a number of NFP splinters to form the centrist, new Democratic Party of Japan (still DPJ). In the 1998 HC election, the party delivered a blow to the LDP. However, despite winning only two fewer (out of fifty total) PR seats than the LDP, the LDP won over twice as many district seats. In the 2000 HR election, the DPJ finished only three percentage points behind the LDP in PR voting. Nonetheless, out of 300 SMDs, the DPJ could run candidates in only 242, and won just eighty, nowhere near the LDP’s 177. The DPJ increased its seat total, but still only won 127 (out of 480 total) seats to the LDP’s 233. Japanese Opposition Failure: The Impact of Low-Quality Candidacies What explains opposition success in PR races but failure in district ones? A variety of factors have been used to explain the opposition failure in Japan.
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