The Rise and Fall of Japan's LDP

Political Party Organizations as Historical Institutions

Ellis S. Krauss, Robert J. Pekkanen

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780801459733
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Parties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

After holding power continuously from its inception in 1955 (with the exception of a ten-month hiatus in 1993–1994), Japan's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lost control of the national government decisively in September 2009. Despite its defeat, the LDP remains the most successful political party in a democracy in the post–World War II period. In The Rise and Fall of Japan's LDP, Ellis S. Krauss and Robert J. Pekkanen shed light on the puzzle of the LDP's long dominance and abrupt defeat. Several questions about institutional change in party politics are at the core of their investigation: What incentives do different electoral systems provide? How do politicians adapt to new incentives? How much does structure determine behavior, and how much opportunity does structure give politicians to influence outcomes? How adaptable are established political organizations?

The electoral system Japan established in 1955 resulted in a half-century of "one-party democracy." But as Krauss and Pekkanen detail, sweeping political reforms in 1994 changed voting rules and other key elements of the electoral system. Both the LDP and its adversaries had to adapt to a new system that gave citizens two votes: one for a party and one for a candidate. Under the leadership of the charismatic Koizumi Junichiro, the LDP managed to maintain its majority in the Japanese Diet, but his successors lost popular support as opposing parties learned how to operate in the new electoral environment. Drawing on the insights of historical institutionalism, Krauss and Pekkanen explain how Japanese politics functioned before and after the 1994 reform and why the persistence of party institutions (factions, PARC, koenkai) and the transformed role of party leadership contributed both to the LDP's success at remaining in power for fifteen years after the reforms and to its eventual downfall. In an epilogue, the authors assess the LDP's prospects in the near and medium term.

Chapter 1

The Liberal Democratic Party in Time

The Liberal Democratic Party’s organizational structure, whose basic units are individual kōenkai, zoku, and factions, is decentralized and flexible, and it is not the orderly centralization which can be seen in the so-called organized parties of Western Europe.

Seizaburō Satō and Tetsuhisa Matsuzaki (1986, 3)

Indeed, the institutions that define the political party are unique, and as it happens they are unique in ways that make an institutional account especially useful.

John H. Aldrich (1995, 19)

If the LDP does adopt new electoral rules, readers will have a chance to test the claims so many observers have made about Japanese politics: to examine the resulting changes in the LDP’s internal organization, in its electoral strategy, in its relations with bureaucrats and judges, and in its basic policies. It is an opportunity not to be missed.

Mark J. Ramseyer and Frances McCall Rosenbluth (1993, 201)

How do we best explain how political parties develop and organize themselves? In other words, why do political parties develop the way they do? Why do their organizational structures persist or change over time? These are the central questions this book seeks to answer for one of the most successful political parties in the democratic world, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) of Japan. Formed in 1955 from the merger of two smaller conservative parties, until 2009 it had continuously held the reins of government, either singly or as the dominant party in a coalition, with the exception of ten months in 1993–1994. Then, in 2009, it overwhelmingly lost an election and fell from power. Considering that the organization and development of political parties should be at the heart of any study of democratic institutions and politics, systematic empirical studies focusing on these issues outside the United States have been surprisingly lacking, especially in parliamentary democracies. This book focuses on the development of the distinguishing institutions of the LDP, and asks why and how they came into being and were maintained, and with what consequences.

Writing on party development in the United States, John Aldrich argues that “political outcomes—here political parties—result from actors seeking to realize their goals, choosing from within and possibly shaping a given set of institutional arrangements, and so choosing within a given historical context” (1995, 6). This has not been the way the LDP has been considered; rather, the most favored recent approach involves looking for an explanation in the kinds of electoral systems existing before and after electoral reform in 1994. As a result, several adherents of the electoral explanation predicted that the organizational form of the LDP in pursuing its goals would be fundamentally altered by electoral reform. Yet for a decade and a half after that reform, the LDP continued to win key elections—scoring its greatest success at the polls in 2005—and hold power before finally succumbing. Electoral system explanations by themselves are ill-equipped to explain this particular pattern of the surprising success of a party and then its equally surprising abrupt failure.

In this book, we offer an alternative explanation as to why and how the LDP developed the way it did and as to why its pre- and postelectoral reform organization formed and persisted, and with what consequences. We show that the LDP was, in Aldrich’s language, a result of key actors seeking to realize their goals by shaping a given set of institutional arrangements within a given historical context. As a result, we also demonstrate why the predictions of those who believed the electoral system alone would transform the form and processes of the LDP were wrong—the unique institutional forms developed under the old electoral system continued even after Japan experienced electoral reform in 1994, although in slightly altered form. We find that, although electoral systems did play a role, they did so only in conjunction with other important factors. The conflict and rivalry within the LDP, both among its leaders and between these leaders and the LDP backbencher representatives, were probably just as (or more) important in shaping the development of the party.

This book, then, is about how the LDP became the party that it was at the time of the 1994 electoral reform, how it became the party that it was after that reform, and why. We treat the main units of the LDP organization as institutions; political parties should be treated as institutions because they are durable patterned organizations composed of established rules and relationships (Aldrich 1995). Therefore, we tell this story through an analysis of the most important LDP institutional components for carrying out the actions for which political parties are formed—vote-seeking, office-seeking, and policy-seeking (Strøm 1990, 569–98; Müller and Strøm 1999)—and for managing the collective action, social choice, and ambition problems of political parties (Aldrich 1995). These three party institutions—the party in the electorate, party in the legislature, and party as organization—also parallel both V. O. Key’s (1964) three faces of political parties: the party on the ground, party in office, and party as central office (see also Katz and Mair 1994, 4). It also parallels the mix of legislators’ goals posited by Barbara Sinclair (1995, 17): reelection, good public policy, and influence.

First, we examine kōenkai, the candidate-support organizations in the electoral districts; these are technically not part of the party but are the main way in which LDP candidates usually mobilize votes. Second, we look at LDP factions, the key, deeply structured groups of the major party leaders and their loyal followers that determined for many years not just who became a party leader and the prime minister but also the posts that every representative was given in the party, the parliament (the National Diet), and the government, including the cabinet. Third, we analyze the development of the Policy Affairs Research Council (Seimu Chōsakai; PARC), the highly organizationally developed, extra-legislative party institution that formulated the party legislative policies that were usually, more or less, adopted into law by the Diet. Finally, no book on a political party would be complete without also a look at the party leadership, especially the party president, who, because of the LDP majority in the Diet, in practice became the prime minister. (The only exceptions were when the LDP was out of power in 1993–1994 and when, for two years subsequently, the LDP returned to power and kept most cabinet seats but not that of prime minister, which went to Tomiichi Murayama, a Socialist.) Examining party leadership in the LDP is especially appropriate because its influence and power, or lack thereof, were inextricably involved in the development of our other three party institutions and because it has, arguably, changed the most of all the party institutions over the past quarter century. The examination of the development of these four party institutions before and after electoral reform forms the core of the book.

Studying these institutions provides us with the rare opportunity to conduct a great natural experiment to observe how a major political party adjusts (or does not adjust) to an important change in the electoral system. Although in the pages that follow we come to different and alternative answers to why these LDP institutions developed, and therefore why they did not disappear or change as much as predicted, we do agree completely with the challenge that Ramseyer and Rosenbluth (1993, 201) laid out (see the beginning of the chapter) just as the new electoral system was being adopted. Conducting a study of the LDP prior to and subsequent to the electoral reform of 1994, focusing primarily on its internal organization and electoral strategies and on how these changed or did not change as a result of this great institutional change, is indeed “an opportunity not to be missed.”

Most especially, we seek to answer several interrelated questions: How and why did the LDP develop before the reform under the single nontransferable vote (SNTV)? How did it adapt after the reform to the new mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) system? Did the prior organizational development of the party affect how and to what extent it adapted to the new electoral environment? What other changes contributed to revisions to the party organization and behavior? Why did its major institutional structures not disappear, as some predicted? And, finally, why was the LDP able to stay in power for so long despite the predictions of its demise with reform, and then suddenly, at the height of its postreform strength, did it lose power?

Why Study the Liberal Democratic Party?

There are several reasons for studying the development and organization of the LDP in depth. First, we cannot understand the politics and policymaking of postwar Japan, the world’s second largest economy and one of the largest liberal democracies, without understanding the LDP. The LDP has been at the core of Japanese politics, pre- and postreform, ever since its formation.

Second, the LDP was probably the most successful political party in the democratic world simply in terms of its number of years in power. Other political parties have had long periods in power, such as those in Italy, Sweden, and Israel (Pempel 1990), but none but the LDP was still in power by 2009 or had had as long a period as a governing party. It ruled from 1955 continuously until 2009, fifty-four years, with only a ten-month break when it lost power to a coalition of opposition parties, some of which were composed of former LDP Diet members who had split from the party.

Only one other political party in any democracy even approaches this record—the Social Democratic Party (SAP) of Sweden. It has been in power a total of approximately sixty-five years, since 1932. The SAP, however, was out of power for approximately six years between 1976 and 1982, between 1991 and 1993, and then again in 1996. Its longest consecutive time in power was the forty-four years, from 1932 to 1976. This was almost matched by the LDP time in power from its formation until 1993, but the LDP term took place entirely in the postwar period. Further, during its time in power the SAP was rarely a majority government; instead, it almost always shared power in a coalition government. In contrast, the LDP shared power only by occasionally providing one or two cabinet portfolios during its many years governing.

Several explanations for the success of the LDP have been advanced, ranging from the Cold War and postwar polarized political culture, through the weakness and division of its opposition parties, to the SNTV electoral system. Yet even after all these variables had changed—the Cold War had ended, the 1994 electoral reform had occurred, and a more unified main opposition party had developed after the electoral reform—the LDP managed to cling to power. And rarely have the explanations put forward accounted for the organizational strengths of the party instead of just the environmental conditions or the weaknesses its rivals. Surely, the LDP party organization, how it carries out the main purposes of a political party, and how it adjusted to changes in its environment, had something to do with its remarkable record. It is important for comparative political scientists to understand how one successful political party in a parliamentary democracy was organized and why, and thus how the LDP qua party accomplished its governing dominance.

This question becomes even more noteworthy given the surprising LDP defeat in the 2009 election. After having won one of its greatest electoral victories ever in 2005, the LDP was roundly defeated by and ceded power to the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in the August 30, 2009, general election. Did the same institutions that helped the LDP succeed under both the old and the new electoral systems now also contribute to its sudden downfall?

The LDP organizational structure is particularly interesting because in Westminster-style parties, backbenchers delegate the decisions about mobilizing votes, allocating offices, and making policy to their party leaders (while holding them accountable for the outcomes) (Strøm, Müller, and Bergman 2006 [2003]), and thus top-down cabinet government becomes the norm. In some parties, however, this delegation is more limited and backbenchers or competing leaders retain the responsibility for these party functions.

In contrast, the LDP has been a prime and extreme example of a decentralized¹ “un-Westminster” party (George Mulgan 2003) with an elaborate and large decentralized structure, perhaps the largest in the industrialized democratic world and existing below the top party leadership, to perform these functions (Nonaka 2008, 113–17). This is the case despite its having formal institutions—parliamentary and cabinet forms of government—similar to those in the much more centralized democracies. Part of these Japanese institutional parliamentary structure, however, is different from Westminster systems in that there is a contradiction between cabinet government and “parliamentary supremacy” in the Japanese system that gives parliament more influence on policy than in the Westminster-style systems in the United Kingdom or New Zealand (Kawato 2006, 2005).

These partial institutional differences in the parliamentary system, nonetheless, cannot fully explain why the Japanese system of policymaking and the LDP as a governing party became so extremely decentralized, to the point of being the polar opposite of a centralized Westminster parliamentary party. Many analysts assume that such decentralized party functions are the result of LDP leaders’ “allowing” backbenchers to have these functions as a rational response to the SNTV electoral system that was in effect from 1947 to 1993. This explanation is inadequate, however, because it does not explain exactly how these functions became decentralized and never demonstrate that the decentralization was a response to the electoral system and not, instead, to other variables.

These were the initial concerns that motivated this book. As we attempted to find the solutions to these puzzles, we made two important discoveries, one theoretical and one empirical. Theoretically, we noticed that analysts had made several wrong, or partially wrong, or unfulfilled, predictions about what would happen to the LDP organization after the 1994 electoral reform and wondered why. Analysts predicted that many of the LDP institutional components—kōenkai, factions, and PARC—would disappear because their origins lay in a rational and intentional response by the party to its SNTV electoral environment. For example, Haruhiro Fukui and Shigeko Fukai argue that the kōenkai “are likely to undergo a significant change, since they are devices geared primarily to electoral competition among candidates of the same party. Under the new system in which only one seat is available in each district and no party is likely to run more than one candidate in a district, the rationale for the electoral line as we know it will be lost” (1996, 284). They go on to say, “With only one official candidate in a district, a party’s local branch will be in a position to devote all its resources to that candidate’s campaign, thus potentially making the koenkai unnecessary and even irrelevant” (1996, 284–85). They offer the caveat that this outcome depends on the party’s devoting sufficient resources to the local branch, but in fact the electoral reform allows contributions directly to the local branch and not only to the national party organization.

Predictions of institutional disappearance also included the entrenched personal leadership factions of the party. Ramseyer and Rosenbluth (1993, 59) explicitly argue that factions existed in the LDP due to the need for vote division in the SNTV electoral system: “the electoral system alone is sufficient to explain the survival of LDP factions.”² Masaru Kohno (1992, 385, 391), only a bit less certain of the determining qualities of the electoral system, argues that “factions persist because they meet the electoral incentives of rational LDP candidates,” even if there were also “secondary incentives” in the form of their function in aiding promotion to party and government positions.

And when it came to PARC...