The Liberal Democratic Party: Its adaptability and predominance in Japanese politics for 60 years
| DOI | 10.1177/2057891118783270 |
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| Author | Michio Umeda |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Research articles |
Asian Journal of Comparative Politics
2019, Vol. 4(1) 8–22
The Liberal Democratic
ª The Author(s) 2018
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Party: Its adaptability and
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DOI: 10.1177/2057891118783270
predominance in Japanese
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politics for 60 years
Michio Umeda
Faculty of Law and Letters, Ehime University, Japan
Abstract
This article discusses the origin and continuity of the predominance of the Liberal Democratic
Party (LDP) in Japanese politics since the party’s formation in 1955. The LDP experienced two
crises in its history, the first owing to the transformation of Japanese society by rapid economic
development during the 1960–1970s, and the second due to the electoral reform in 1994 and the
challenge from the Democratic Party of Japan thereafter. I argue that the LDP’s continuous success
is attributable to its adaptability to new environments: the party overcame the first crisis by shifting
the policy focus, reorganizing its support base and the party organization to achieve intraparty
consensus. It coped with the second crisis by forming a coalition with the Clean Government Party
and reforming the party’s presidential election and the ministerial post-allocation system. The
article concludes with a summary and a brief discussion regarding the future of the LDP.
Keywords
comparative politics, Japanese politics, Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, political party
Introduction
The Liberal Democratic Party (Jiyu-Minshu To, LDP) has been predominant in Japanese politics
since its formation in 1955. The LDP has led the government for more than 90 percent of its
lifetime, except for two short breaks in 1993–1994 and 2009–2012. During most of this period, the
party held the largest number of seats in the legislature, as well as the prime ministerial position.
By winning the latest general election of the House of Representatives (HR) held in October 2017,
the party and its current leader, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, produced five consecutive victories in
Corresponding author:
Michio Umeda, Faculty of Law and Letters, Ehime University, 3 Bunkyo-cho, Matsuyama, Ehime 790-8577, Japan.
Email: umeda.michio.du@ehime-u.ac.jp
Umeda
9
national elections since Abe was first reelected as party leader in 2012. Abe is currently the third-
longest-serving prime minister in post-war Japan, if one includes his first and short time in office
between 2006 and 2007.
This is a great puzzle not only for the Japanese but also for many scholars outside of Japan. In
contrast to the dominant parties in authoritarian regimes, the LDP has continued to win elections
regarded as free and fair according to international standards.1 There have been predominant
parties in the post-war period not only in Japan but also in other developed democracies, such
as the Christian Democrats (DC) in Italy, the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SAP) in Sweden,
and the Labor Party in Israel. In addition, the Democratic Party in the US maintained a majority in
the House of Representatives from 1954 to 1994. However, these parties all slowly lost dominance
except for the LDP.
The LDP also experienced a few serious crises that could have terminated its predominance in
Japanese politics. The party twice fell out of power—first due to a party breakup in 1993 and
then because of a huge electoral loss in 2009. Moreover, the party barely retained a majority in
the HR after general elections in the late 1970s and early 1980s via ex post nominating a few
independents and/or forming a coalition with a small party. Nevertheless, the LDP somehow
managed to survive these crises through a combination of luck and their opponents’ strategic
mistakes.
There has been discussion regarding the origin of the LDP’s predominance (e.g. Calder, 1988;
Ishikawa and Hirose, 1989; Kabashima, 2004: Kitaoka, 2008; Kraus and Pekkanen, 2011; Masumi,
1985; Sato and Matsuzaki, 1986). The ideological conflict between the USA and the USSR during
the Cold War era surely influenced Japanese domestic politics. The business and bureaucratic
elite—in addition to the US government—came together to compete against the leftists and the
USSR. Some early studies attributed the success of the LDP to the backwardness of Japanese
political culture. Other works have blamed the electoral system and malapportionment of voting
districts in favor of the rural-based LDP. The LDP also utilizes huge government spending to
cement its support base in rural areas and among interest groups.
Although all of these factors have played some role in maintaining LDP dominance, they are not
sufficient to explain the continuous success of the LDP for more than 60 years. There is no single
strategy that fit well to all the period from the 1950s to the 2010s. This is especially true for
political parties in Japan that experienced the dramatic social transformation of the post-war period
as well as considerable political and electoral reforms in the 1990s. Thus, this article focuses on the
adaptability of the LDP to new environments through top-down and bottom-up initiatives.2
Kitschelt (1994) argues that the party’s strategic flexibility is shaped by membership entrench-
ment and leadership autonomy. For example, mass parties have structural properties such as mass
membership and specialized bureaucratic staff who are efficient at mobilizing voters along stable
social cleavages such as social class and ethnic or religious groups. On the other hand, these
organizations limit the influx of new demands into the party “from below” and also restrict the
party’s sensitivity to civil society and public opinion (Kitschelt, 1994: 212).
The LDP is organized in exactly the opposite way of these entrenched types. It can be
categorized as a cadre party (Duverger, 1954). This is a club of factions and individual politi-
cians who establish their own electoral and organizational base while holding a small number of
official party memberships and a few specialized party bureaucrats. The party structure, once
argued as outdated (e.g. Iyasu, 1984), gave the party flexibility to react to new social demands,
although this feature also prevented it from having a strong leadership and coherent policy
platform—at least until recently.
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Asian Journal of Comparative Politics 4(1)
This article is organized as follows: It starts with the origin of the LDP’s predominance and the
electoral system during the period of multi-member district/single non-transferable voting (MMD/
SNTV). The article next discusses the first serious crisis that the LDP experienced—the economic
development and transformation of Japanese society in the 1960s and 1970s. I argue that the LDP
adapted to the crisis by shifting the policy focus as well as reorganizing the candidate support base
and party organization to achieve intraparty consensus. Nevertheless, these strategies came at a
price—chronic corruption scandals and rampant pork barrel politics. The dissatisfaction among
voters and some politicians led to political and electoral reform in the 1990s. The reform com-
pletely changed the rules of the game in Japanese politics—rules on which the LDP were depen-
dent. Moreover, under the new electoral system, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) became a
serious challenger to LDP dominance during the 2000s. This caused the second crisis to the LDP.
This time, the LDP adapted to a new environment by forming a coalition with the urban-based
Clean Government Party (Komeito, CGP). They also reformed the way the party president was
elected and the ministerial-post-allocation system. The article concludes with a summary and a
brief discussion regarding the future of the LDP.
The origin of LDP predominance and the MMD/SNTV electoral system
The LDP was formed in 1955 by the merger of two conservative parties: the Liberal Party and the
Democratic Party of Japan.3 This union was in response to the unification of the moderate and
extreme wings of the Japanese Socialist Party (JSP) in the same year—the largest leftist party in
post-war Japan, which had been divided for a few years. The conservative camp, feeling a threat
from the more unified leftist camp, united their political forces to assure their dominance in
Japanese politics in the Cold War environment (Ishikawa, 1984, 1995).
In hindsight, their unions marked the end of the party realignment following the Second World
War and the (re-)liberalization of Japanese politics. The LDP is the 51st party to emerge in post-
war Japan, and members of more than 40 of the 50 other parties participated in the LDP (Calder,
1988). In the nearly 40 years that followed, the Japanese party system mainly consisted of the
ruling conservative LDP and the leftist JSP locked in confrontation over issues such as the Cold
War, re-armament, and economic systems. This status quo later became known as “the 1955
system” (Masumi, 1985, 1988).
Nevertheless, in the beginning, few people—including the LDP leaders themselves—believed
that the party could endure for a long time, much less as a ruling party, due to personal hostility and
differences in political orientation among party leaders. Bukichi Miki, one of the five acting
presidents of the LDP in 1955, mentioned that “it would be nice if the party lasts for ten years”
(Calder, 1988: 59).
When the LDP emerged in 1955, Japan was still a relatively agrarian society and still recovering
from the war’s devastation.4 Two-fifths of the total workforce was employed in the primary sector,
mainly in farming (Masumi, 1985: 6). Japanese farmers,...
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