Social Science Japan Journal Advance Access originally published online on September 19, 2006
Social Science Japan Journal 2006 9(2):243-257; doi:10.1093/ssjj/jyl026
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Social Science Japan Journal 9:243-257 (2006)
© 2006 Oxford University Press
Survey Article |
The Liberal Democratic Party at 50: Sources of Dominance and Changes in the Koizumi Era
Patrick KÖLLNER is head of the Research Programme on Legitimacy and Efficiency of Political Systems at the GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies and a senior research fellow at the GIGA Institute of Asian Affairs in Hamburg, Germany. He has published on Japanese politics in numerous journals. His most recent publications include a book on the organization of Japanese political parties (Institute of Asian Affairs, 2006) and a co-edited volume on factionalism in political parties (Campus, 2006). For more information, see http://staff.giga-hamburg.de/koellner. He can be reached at GIGA Institute of Asian Affairs, Rothenbaumebaussee 32, 20148 Hamburg, Germany or by email at koellner{at}giga-hamburg.de.
More than 50 years after its founding, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is still going strong. It has become the dominant party within a democratic setting. How did the LDP manage to cling to its dominant position for such a long time? And to what extent has the LDP changed colours under the leadership of Koizumi Jun’ichir
? This survey article attempts to answer these questions by focussing on the three dimensions of LDP dominance: electoral, parliamentary, and executive dominance. It argues that clientelist politics explain a good deal of the success of the LDP in the past. Such an orientation however became decreasingly effective and sustainable in a political environment that has changed significantly since the early 1990s. In the Koizumi era, the LDP managed to rise again to the challenges posed to its dominance by appealing directly to voters, by optimizing electoral cooperation, and by making efforts to centralize policymaking. Whether these more recent approaches to maintaining LDP dominance can be sustained, however, remains an open question.