Abstract
Social and regional inequality remained of secondary importance in the 2017 House of Representatives election, especially in comparison to national security and constitutional reform. Still, the election victory of the coalition between the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Kōmeitō was also due to its ability to shape the debate concerning Japan’s political-economic model of growth and inequality. Abenomics and regional revitalization were the dominating policies, which opposition parties criticized without having a real counter-model. A more detailed analysis shows, however, that Abenomics has not yet fulfilled its promise of shared growth, and that the governing coalition’s discursive control over the political-economic agenda has significantly weakened. This creates opportunities for opposition parties in the future.
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Notes
- 1.
For analysis of other dimensions of inequality, such as gender or immigration in the 2017 HR election, see Miura (this volume, p. 185) and Strausz (this volume, p. 203).
- 2.
In fact, the results of the 2017 election could roughly be regarded as being defined not by issues of inequality, but by the cleavage regarding security policy and constitutional revision between two main parties of the right (Liberal Democratic Party and Party of Hope ) and two main parties of the left (Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan and Japanese Communist Party). Of course, in a more detailed analysis, such a one-issue interpretation does not hold (see Scheiner et al., this volume, p. 29). Moreover, even the reelected coalition government of the LDP and Kōmeitō is marked by internal differences concerning security policy and constitutional revision.
- 3.
- 4.
The official election period is by law 12 days, but the law stipulates only that the election has to be held within 40 days of the dissolution of the HR. The incumbent government hence has the possibility of adapting the time period between dissolution and election according to its own preferences. In the seven HR elections since 2000, this time period between dissolution and election day has varied between 23 days (2000 HR election) and 40 days (2009 HR election). Therefore, we prefer to analyze the whole time period between dissolution and election, as its length is part of the campaign strategy. A fuller analysis would also cover television and social media, but the national daily newspapers are still central mass media publications and together a valid indicator for mainstream reporting on the election. Moreover, they are readily available through CrossAsia (crossasia.org), which allows a full-text search via their electronic databases.
- 5.
The selection of keywords was not only based on the 2017 elections, but also took into consideration a long-term comparison with all HR elections since 2000.
- 6.
For comparison, the number of articles in each election was weighted according to the length of the period between HR dissolution and election day.
- 7.
Commentators have pointed out that the Party of Hope as the main party of the neoliberal coalition might not have been too successful in their quest to distance themselves from a cold-hearted neoliberalism. In particular, the statement of Yuriko Koike to “eliminate” (haijo) some former members of the Democratic Party after the merger was seen as a serious mistake in times when social inequality is an important issue and many voters feel not fully included in Japan’s society. The negative reverberation of Koike’s comment also shows how strongly Japan has changed since Koizumi . During the 2005 HR election, when he kicked out all LDP parliamentarians who had voted against his post reform and ran so-called “assassin candidates” against them in their constituencies, he was praised as the strong leader and ruthless reformer that Japan needed. However, in times of gap society, Koike (who had been one of Koizumi’s assassins in 2005) was criticized as heartless and arrogant owing to her statement.
- 8.
These results somehow contradict those of Hijino (2016), which used only one newspaper (Asahi) and the shorter time span of the official election period, but included a larger number of terms.
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Chiavacci, D. (2018). Inequality and the 2017 Election: Decreasing Dominance of Abenomics and Regional Revitalization. In: Pekkanen, R., Reed, S., Scheiner, E., Smith, D. (eds) Japan Decides 2017. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76475-7_13
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