Failed Democratization in Prewar Japan

Breakdown of a Hybrid Regime

Harukata Takenaka

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780804790741
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Failed Democratization in Prewar Japan presents a compelling case study on change in political regimes through its exploration of Japan's transition to democracy. Within a broad-ranging examination of Japan's "semi-democratic" political system from 1918 to 1932, when political parties tended to dominate the government, the book analyzes in detail why this system collapsed in 1932 and discusses the implications of the failure.

By reference to comparable cases—prewar Argentina, prewar Germany, postwar Brazil, and 1980s Thailand—Harukata Takenaka reveals that the factors responsible for the breakdown of the Taisho democracy in Japan replicated those that precipitated the collapse of democracy in Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere in Asia.

While most literature on these transitions focuses on successful cases, Takenaka explores democratic failure to answer questions about how and why political parties and their leaders can behave in ways that undermine the democratic institutions that serve as the basis for their formal authority.

CHAPTER 1

Analytical Foundations

The breakdown of the semi-democratic regime in prewar Japan was gradual, reflecting the progressive change in the relationship between party government and the military. In other words, the breakdown was a process: democratic forces, that is, political parties and party politicians supporting the regime, step by step gave way to nondemocratic forces—the military—which opposed the regime, thereby bringing about a shift in the balance of power from party government to the military. This was the result of changes in three areas: political institutions, regime legitimacy, and semi-loyalty.

The Breakdown of Semi-Democratic Regimes: Existing Approaches

There are three approaches to explaining the breakdown of semi-democratic regimes. The first, the conditional approach, argues that such regimes break down when necessary and sufficient conditions for further democratization do not exist. The literature on democratization offers several factors as conditions for democratization; one may argue that the semi-democratic regime is destined to collapse when a country lacks these conditions. The second, the structural approach, views the breakdown of semi-democratic regimes as a result of change in the social structure. However, when these two approaches are hard-pressed to provide an adequate explanation of the collapse of semi-democratic regimes, it becomes necessary to turn to the third approach. It considers the breakdown as a phenomenon of regime change in general, but as a phenomenon in its own right. In recent years, as research on hybrid regimes has advanced, some scholars have examined conditions that affect the development of one type of hybrid regime, competitive authoritarianism.¹ Yet, few studies have attempted to explain the breakdown of semi-democratic regimes. To undertake this task, it is therefore necessary to construct a new analytical framework. In this section, I consider whether one can explain the breakdown of semi-democratic regimes using the two existing approaches, that is, the conditional approach and the structural approach.

THE CONDITIONAL APPROACH

In general, the literature on democratization discusses whether particular conditions are necessary for a democratic regime to emerge. Here I examine if findings on the relationship between democratization, the level of economic development, and political culture can explain the breakdown of semi-democratic regimes.

Economic Conditions One might argue that a low level of economic development provides sufficient grounds for a semi-democratic regime to collapse.

This contention is based on arguments that connect the development of democratic regimes to their level of economic development. Seymour Martin Lipset, who first proposed this relationship, argued that “the more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy.”² He divides the countries he studies into two groups: European and English-speaking nations, and Latin American nations, and further divides each group into more and less democratic countries. To test his assertion about this symbiotic relationship, Lipset uses four indices of economic development—wealth, industrialization, education, and urbanization—and compares the averages of each set of indices among the more and less democratic countries within each group. The results support his proposition, showing that “the average wealth, degree of industrialization and urbanization, and level of education is much higher for the more democratic countries.”³

Robert Dahl claims that the relationship between the degree of economic development and democracy has already been settled. He declares that:

The higher the socioeconomic level of a country, the more likely that its regime is an inclusive or near-polyarchy [democracy].

If a regime is a polyarchy [democracy], it is more likely to exist in a country at a relatively high level of socioeconomic development than at a lower level.⁴

Dahl also refers to the “thresholds” above or below which chances for democracy increase or decrease. He shows that in countries where the GNP per capita is over about $700–800 in 1957 U.S. dollars, democracy is likely to emerge, whereas in countries where the GNP per capita is below about $100–200, democracy is unlikely to develop. He does not think that there is a “simple and one-directional” causal relationship between the level of economic development and the development of democracy. There are, however, many deviant cases such as the former Soviet Union, where industrialization did not lead to democracy, and the United States, where democracy developed before industrialization.⁵ Samuel Huntington, whose work is more recent than that of Dahl, also mentions thresholds as related to prospects for democratization. He sets the upper threshold at $3,000 GNP per capita and the lower threshold at $1,000 in 1976 U.S. dollars, calling the range between $1,000 and $3,000 the “transition zone.”⁶ That is, many countries that fell in this range in the mid-1970s experienced democratization by 1989.⁷

Larry Diamond performs his own quantitative analysis to show a strong correlation between the level of economic development and democracy. He also gives an extensive overview of the research on the subject to date, and reaches the following conclusion:

It is important to emphasize here the extraordinary consistency with which the central premise of Lipset’s thesis has stood up through all manner of tests. Although different studies and research designs yield different angles of inference and interpretation, they virtually all demonstrate a consistent and strong positive relationship between the level of economic development and democracy.⁸

Despite these findings, it is difficult to rely on previous research on the relationship between economic development and development of democratic regimes to explain the collapse of semi-democratic regimes. While Lipset, Dahl, and Diamond all agree that such a relationship exists, and agree that greater economic development contributes to sustaining and developing democracies, none claims that greater economic development is a necessary and sufficient condition for democratic development. Thus, it is difficult to ascribe the development or nondevelopment of democratic regimes solely to the level of their economic development.

The breakdown of a semi-democratic regime and the development of a semi-democratic regime into a democratic one are two different phenomena. One could argue that a semi-democratic regime does not develop into a democratic regime because it has not yet reached a certain level of economic development. However, semi-democratic regimes can endure with few or no changes in the level of their economic development. This fact prevents us from using this theory to explain why the semi-democratic regime collapses.

Political Culture Many scholars have attached particular importance to the role of political culture. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba define political culture as “attitudes toward the political system and its various parts, and attitudes toward the role of the self in the system.”⁹ Almond and Verba argue that a certain political culture, in particular the one developed in Great Britain and the United States, which they call “civic culture,” is favorable to the development of stable democracy. They define civic culture as “a pluralistic culture based on communication and persuasion, a culture of consensus and diversity, a culture that permitted change but moderated it.”¹⁰

Almond and Verba classify political culture into three general types: the parochial, the subject, and the participant. They base these classifications on the attitudes individuals take toward the political system in general, the policy formulation process (“input aspect”), and the actual policies formulated (“output aspect”), as well as how individuals conceive of themselves as political actors. In the parochial political culture, individuals have no expectations about the political system, are indifferent to both the input and output aspects of the political system, and do not conceive of themselves as active participants in politics. In this case, individuals’ political orientations are not distinguished from their religious and social orientations. In the subject political culture, individuals are oriented toward the political system in general and to output aspects of the political system. However, they are indifferent to input aspects of the political system and do not consider themselves to be active participants in the political process. In the participant political culture, individuals are oriented toward the political system in general, as well as to both the input and output aspects of the political system. Not surprisingly, they are also active participants in politics.

Almond and Verba consider civic culture to be a mixture of the three political cultures articulated above. In civic culture, “individuals become participants in the political process, but they do not give up their orientations as subjects or as parochials.”¹¹ Such mixed orientations contribute to the development of stable democracy because they mitigate tensions caused by the contradictory objectives that leaders in a democratic regime have to fulfill. While leaders in a democratic regime must be responsive to the members of the regime, they have to be powerful enough to implement policy effectively. Thus, political leaders face a dilemma: when they become too responsive to the members of the political system, they cannot effectively rule. On the other hand, when they use too much power to govern effectively, they lose responsiveness to the members of the system. The mixed orientations of the members of the political system under civic culture resolve this dilemma. As active participants in the political process, individuals encourage leaders to be responsive to their demands and expectations. However, their orientations as subjects and parochials modify their participation, preventing politics from becoming polarized and unstable and enabling the political leaders to govern and make political decisions. In short, each individual’s behavior as a “potential active citizen” forces leaders to be responsive while also allowing them to rule. In this way, civic culture promotes stable democracy.

Larry Diamond also emphasizes the importance of political culture. He argues that “moderation, cooperation, bargaining, and accommodation” among the leaders, which is indispensable for developing and maintaining democracy, can be maintained in the long run only if a political culture supporting these behaviors is cultivated among the leaders as well as the masses.¹²

Though political culture may be important in developing and maintaining democracy, two fundamental questions arise: Is a political culture favorable to democracy likely to emerge anywhere in the world? And if so, how does such a political culture emerge? Lucian Pye gives a negative response to the first question. He does not believe that the political cultures in the world will eventually converge into one favorable to democracy, a type of regime that has appeared so far mainly in the West.

Pye believes there are irreconcilable differences between the political cultures of the West and Asia.¹³ He contrasts Asian and Western political culture and explains the implications of these differences for democracy. While Western political culture emphasizes individualism, pluralism, and active participation to influence actual policy outcomes, Asian political culture favors the collectivity, makes no room for pluralism, and views participation as a means to give individuals a sense of a belonging, rather than concrete political rewards. He argues that such a political culture makes the prospects grim for democratic development in Asia.

Given that Japan has sustained a democratic regime since the Second World War, and that South Korea and Taiwan have democratized, it is impossible to accept Pye’s claim that democracy cannot develop in Asia.¹⁴ Even if we accept a theory that democracy does not develop where some particular political culture exists, the collapse of the semi-democratic regime remains hard to explain. Although one could argue that a semi-democratic regime does not democratize further because of a particular political culture, once such a regime has developed to a certain point, it is impossible to ascribe its breakdown to political culture. Given that political culture is unlikely to change in a short time, it is logically inconsistent to argue that a semi-democratic regime that has developed under a particular political culture (which may be unfavorable for the development of democracy) collapses because of this same political culture.

In short, it is impossible to ascribe the breakdown of semi-democratic regimes to either their level of economic development or their particular political culture. The reasons for the collapse of a semi-democratic regime and its advancement are two different issues. Various arguments on democratization deal with the necessary conditions or contributing factors for a democratic regime to develop, but one cannot reverse these arguments to explain the breakdown of semi-democratic regimes.

A semi-democratic regime that collapses must be seen as a regime that has failed, and not as one that has not fully developed into a democracy. The following section considers the extent to which such collapses may be explained by applying a general theory of regime change with a focus on structural change.

THE STRUCTURAL APPROACH

In his seminal research on regime change, Samuel Huntington examines the relationship between changes in the structure of the economy and society caused by modernization and political order and argues that modernization often leads to political instability, which in turn invites military intervention.¹⁵

According to Huntington, modernization breaks down traditional customs and increases people’s aspirations. However, as the pace of economic development lags and fails to meet people’s changing aspirations, social frustration spreads. This frustration can be ameliorated in two ways: through opportunities for social and economic mobility or through the development of political institutions to accommodate it. In modernizing countries, social and economic mobility is generally limited except for the flow of the population from rural to urban areas, and so political institutions remain the only way to solve social frustration. Thus “social frustration leads to demands on the government and the expansion of political participation to enforce these demands.”¹⁶ Interestingly, in many modernizing countries where political institutions have not been sufficiently developed to convey these demands to the government, expanded political participation often leads to political instability. Whether a country remains politically stable or not depends o...