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Examining the Micro-level Foundations of Japan’s Two-party System Following Government Alternation

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Abstract

A consensus exists among political scientists and the media that a two party system has become firmly established in Japan, and power alternation following the 2009 House of Representatives election seemed to confirm this trend. In contrast, in this study I draw on both election and public opinion data to illustrate that Japan's two-party system rests on fragile micro foundations, particularly since the change of government, and may therefore not constitute a stable equilibrium. Specifically, the two-party system is sustained by the logic of competition in single member districts, but lacks strong backing among a large proportion of the public. Evidence in support of this argument include 1) decreasing vote shares for both the Liberal Democratic Party and the Democratic Party of Japan in the 2010 House of Councillors election, and 2) a weakening relationship between support for these two parties in monthly polls, in contrast to previous years when LDP and DPJ ratings mirrored one another. I discuss some potential implications of these developments, such as the growing prominence of regional parties and prospects for electoral rule changes.

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Notes

  1. This coalition comprised of the Japan Socialist Party (JSP), Japan Renewal Party (JRP), Komeito, Japan New Party (JNP), Democratic Socialist Party (DSP), New Party Sakigake, and Socialist Democratic Federation (SDF). (Listed in descending order of seats) These parties won a combined total of 243 seats (out of 511) to the LDP’s 223.

  2. 300 House of Representatives seats are allocated in SMDs, and 200 (later reduced to 180) seats are proportionally distributed in nine regional blocs.

  3. This does not imply that citizens are politically unsophisticated. For example, Kabashima and Reed [15] cite evidence from survey analysis that the electorate as a whole was able to make sense of rapidly shifting coalition arrangements.

  4. The DPJ more than doubled its House of Representatives seats from 115 to 308 in the 2009 election, while the LDP plummeted from 300 to 119. Nevertheless, despite its large majority, the DPJ formed a coalition with the much smaller Social Democratic Party of Japan (SDPJ; 7 seats) and the People's New Party (PNP; 4 seats). The SDPJ withdrew from the coalition in May 2010 due to disagreement over policies toward relocating U.S. military bases in Okinawa.

  5. The most recent redistricting to reflect population change took place in 2006, resulting in twenty-nine single-member, twelve 2-member, five 3-member, and one 5-member districts at each election. Under the previous round of redistricting, in effect between 2000-2006, there were twenty-seven single-member, fifteen 2-member, four 3-member, and one 4-member districts in each election. For details see the House of Councillors website: http://www.sangiin.go.jp/japanese/san60/s60_shiryou/senkyo.htm.

  6. Reed and Shimizu note that the LDP and DPJ “appear divided by an unbridgeable gulf” over both the role of the Self-Defense Forces in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and debates over public pension records ([37]:19-20), but the former topic has since declined in salience, and the latter is more a valence than a positional issue.

  7. Only one district, Tokyo, elects more than three upper house members. We do not include this case in Table 2 since a change in district magnitude from 4 to 5 in 2007 hinders longitudinal comparison.

  8. The DPJ committed this over-nomination error in 2010, fielding two candidates in ten of the twelve 2-member districts (whereas the LDP put up only one nominee). This strategy failed everywhere.

  9. Komeito did not nominate any candidate, and both the SDPJ and the newly founded Sunrise Party did so only in one out of twelve 2-member districts, while the JCP followed its traditional strategy of putting up a standard-bearer everywhere (including SMDs).

  10. Your Party was founded in August 2009 by a LDP defector, Watanabe Yoshimi, and campaigned on a platform of reducing powers of the bureaucracy and decentralization. It won 13.6% of the list vote (10.2% of district vote) in 2010, up from 4.3% in the 2009 lower house election.

  11. Figure 3 is based on monthly polls from NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster. Polls are conducted using random digit dialing, with average sample size slightly over 1000. Results are available on http://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/research/yoron/seijiishiki/list_seijiishiki1.html.

  12. The correlation between support for the DPJ and for the government as a whole (i.e., LDP plus Komeito) during the same period is even higher (-0.743).

  13. Support for the LDP and the new government as a whole (DPJ, SDPJ and PNP during September 2009-May 2010, DPJ and PNP thereafter) is also weakly correlated at -0.511.

  14. Similarly, Iida [12] posits that government alternation would be less likely if voters disappointed by the LDP government did not see a credible alternative in the DPJ.

  15. Correlations between the percentage of independents and support for Komeito, JCP, SDPJ, and Your Party since September 2009 are -0.122, -0.280, -0.376, and -0.124, respectively. One must exercise caution when interpreting these numbers due to lack of variation, since support for each of these parties almost never exceeded five percent.

  16. Using Duverger's classification, Japanese parties are mostly internally rather than externally created, which impedes strong party identification based on social cleavages.

  17. Official members pay higher dues and have a greater say in party activities and policy formulation. For details see the DPJ website: http://www.dpj.or.jp/info/volunteer.

  18. Annual reports available at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications website: http://www.soumu.go.jp/senkyo/seiji_s/data_seiji/index.html.

  19. One plausible reason is that the LDP continues to suffer from “incomplete adaptation to the new electoral environment because of its institutionalized party organization”, which caused the party’s defeat in the 2009 election ([19]:255).

  20. Other regional parties include those in Shiga (founded in 2006), Iwate (2010), Ehime (2010), and Saitama (2011) prefectures.

  21. This election was precipitated by a referendum in February 2011, in which voters overwhelmingly endorsed the mayor’s (and Tax Reduction Party founder) call for an early dissolution of the municipal assembly (Yomiuri Shimbun, February 7, 2011). The election took place under a multi-member single non-transferable vote (SNTV), with district magnitudes from two to seven.

  22. Many LDP politicians cultivated personal (rather than party-based) organizations know as koenkai as means of mobilizing voters during elections [1, 3, 19], particularly in rural areas. This partly explains why the DPJ remained uncompetitive in rural seats [44] until the late 2000s.

  23. Instead, the LDP candidate’s main opponent was a nominee from the Tax Reduction Party. This may presage patterns in future contests in areas where regional parties have a strong presence.

  24. The LDP received 33.4% to the DPJ’s 39.0% in the district tier, and 24.1% to the DPJ’s 31.6% in the PR tier. The DPJ naturally won more list seats (16 to 12), but the LDP benefited from districting bias to secure 39 district seats to the DPJ’s 28.

  25. For example, one MP argued that several geographically contiguous prefectures with small populations should be combined into one single-member district, while the upper house speaker went further to advocate abolition of the district tier altogether, creating nine PR blocs instead (Yomiuri Shimbun, March 1, 2011).

  26. From 2001 onward the PR component of House of Councillors elections is open-listed, but cumulatively only three candidates were elected through this provision in elections from 2001 to 2010.

  27. While governments do not require confidence of the House of Councillors, several cabinets resigned following severe losses in upper house polls (e.g., Uno in 1989, Hashimoto in 1998, Abe in 2007).

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Jou, W. Examining the Micro-level Foundations of Japan’s Two-party System Following Government Alternation. East Asia 29, 255–274 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12140-012-9174-3

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