AND BEYOND
Bradley Richardson
TABLE—RESULTSOF JAPAN’S POSTWAR ELECTIONS
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and some movements themselves consolidated by 1955. From that point until 1989–93, one conservative party—the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)—dominated elections at all levels and in most settings. Because of the relative stability of party alignments and a deep ideological and Cold War foreign-policy rift between the conservative LDP and Japan’s opposition parties, the period after 1955 came to be called the “1955 system.”
The second postwar exception to stable electoral alignments and clearcut conservative dominance came after the mid-1970s, in Japan’s largest cities. Electoral changes in Japan’s growing urban areas resulted in the reduction of the LDP’s parliamentary representation to less than a majority, down from nearly two-thirds of the Diet seats in 1955–67.1 Despite losses in large urban districts and a later issue-driven setback in the 1989 House of Councillors election, the LDP’s domination continued with only relatively minor adjustments until mid-1993, when more than 50 members of parliament (MPs) left the LDP to form two new conservative parties. After that event—the beginning of a third era of instability and conservative shrinkage—Japan was ruled for a while by non-LDP governments and later controlled by an LDP-Socialist coalition. But, starting in 1996, the LDP has once again had a near majority in the lower house of parliament (the House of Representatives).
The LDP is again Japan’s dominant party, although cooperation with other parties is necessary to pass legislation, especially in the upper house (the House of Councillors).2
We can conceptualize the postwar evolution of the Japanese party system in terms of five distinct periods:
1) 1946–55: Conservative dominance accompanied by frequent changes in party composition and names within the conservative movement and a split in the Socialist movement, culminating in 1955 with the formation of the LDP and the joining of the left and right wings of the Socialist movement to form the Japan Socialist Party, or JSP (multiparty becoming essentially a three-party system in 1955).
2) 1955–93: The 1955 system characterized by conservative hegemony under the LDP, including, however, a secular decline in conservative strength; accompanying suburban development around large cities, and the appearance of two new significant minor parties, the Democratic Socialists and the Clean Government Party (Komeito); for a while growing success on the part of the Socialists (now Social Democratic Party of Japan, or SDPJ) also contributed to conservative decline (five-party system).
3) 1993–94: Defections of LDP parliamentarians to form the Harbinger Party (Sakigake) and Renewal Party (Shinseito) or to join the Japan New Party (Nihon Shinto), led by Morihiro Hosokawa, Conservative prefectural governor and later prime minister (seven-party system).
4) 1994–96: Merger in December 1994 of the Japan New Party,
Democratic Socialists, Clean Government (national element only), and Renewal parties to form the New Frontier Party (Shinshinto), following formation by the same parties of a Reform coalition in May 1994 and a second coalition of the same name in September of that year (four-party system).
5) 1996–present: Formation of the Democratic Party of Japan (Nihon Minshuto) in September 1996 from elements of the SDPJ and Harbinger Party; establishment of the Liberal Party (identified in some sources as the New Liberal Party) in January 1998 with strong Renewal Party representation; and the reemergence of the Clean Government Party as a national party (seven-party system).
The Table on p.144 indicates the vote shares of the main parties in selected elections during the postwar era. From this it can clearly be seen that only three political movements have been participants in all postwar elections—the conservatives (LDP after 1955), the Communists, and the Socialists (Social Democrats after 1994). The LDP’s dominance of Japanese politics, despite fluctuations in its vote, is also visible. The JSP/SDPJ’s fortunes have also varied, first growing apace with urbanization in the 1960s but later declining as other urban-based opposition parties presented themselves. The Communist Party has been present throughout the postwar era as a minor party and has gained some strength over time.
I have chosen to emphasize the LDP’s organizational characteristics as the basis for identifying a Japanese party type because of the long dominance of Japanese politics by the LDP—and the even longer dominance by conservative movements in general. The LDP’s long-time role as the largest party also influenced some of its organizational characteristics, and for this reason I will pay some attention to the organization of the JSP/SDPJ where it is different from that of the LDP.
How Parties Are Studied
Historically, research on political parties has been dominated by comparative political sociology.3 American parties research and historical institutionalism also offer concepts relevant to the development of party typologies. Quite a bit of early research on political parties focused on their structural properties, especially relationships between party elites and lower echelons or followers,4 or the nature of formal party organs and mass elements.5 The status of party structures inside parliamentary parties was also considered.6 Allocations of power and authority in particular parties were often inferred from these structural interpretations.
Sometimes the emphasis on structure was extended to address the degree of internal organization or interlevel articulation.7 Often parties were treated as unitary political actors, an assumption that carries over even into today’s party literature. Parties’ internal policy making and
recruitment processes were not examined in detail, and party change was frequently seen as the result of external environmental forces. Basic party format was also said to reflect party goals, ranging from simply winning elections to broader concerns of “cultural integration,” without reference to how those goals were chosen.
Applying a structural model like those just described would leave out much of what is important about Japanese parties. Japan’s largest parties have always been heavily factionalized, even though factions have no role in formal party organization charts. Personal networks are also pervasively important, while a variety of other informal groups populated party organs or linked different party levels and units. Once the informal nature of Japanese parties is appreciated, it is clear that party structure is more complicated than previously thought: Formal party organization is pretty much centralized on paper, but informal relationships make the party stratarchical or decentralized at many points.8 Japanese parties, and especially the LDP, are largely bottom-up organizations, based on candidate constituency organizations and upward interest articulation via a variety of social and organizational networks.
Political sociology’s emphasis on structure and organization can also lead to the neglect of internal party processes and their implications for the distribution of intraparty power. Japan’s party politics are often believed to be consensual, clandestine, and manipulated by elites from the top. This view is far from reality. Looking at political processes inside parties shows that the LDP and other parties are actually conflict systems as well as organizational frameworks. Affairs within the dominant LDP and other parties were (and are) conflictual and in most instances transparent, whether decision making concerns leader recruitment, candidate selection, policy choices, or parliamentary strategy. Herbert Kitschelt’s argument that contests between plural elites set basic party strategies in some kinds of Western European parties is a good starting point for portraying this important characteristic of Japanese parties, but I find that Japanese parties display much more conflict involving many more kinds of groups than even his pioneering work suggested.9
In addition to the prevalence of intraparty conflict, Japan’s large parties also provide examples of institutionalized groups, norms, procedures, and patterned expectations, which serve at most times to dampen or help resolve conflict or to promote party integrity in some way. Indeed, quite a bit of Japan’s alleged political consensualism reflects the prevalence of multiple channels and processes dedicated to conflict management.
The message of this chapter is four-fold: First, Japanese parties are more than unitary formal organizations; they also include many important informal groups and personal networks that display different characteristics than the formal organs. Following Maurice Duverger’s
emphasis on mass-level party organization as the defining characteristic of party types, the importance of informal groups and social networks that operate inside or parallel to formal party organs leads me to call the LDP a “mass personalized-network party.” Second, there are multiple party hierarchies, and influence is multidirectional. The party’s structure is more stratarchical than hierarchical. Third, parties are political systems with enormous amounts of internal conflict, and the scope and nature of this conflict affects parties’ structural characteristics and power distribution in important ways. Finally, parties develop many traits as institutions, but institutions in this instance are more contingent upon other forces than the new institutionalist literature would assume. The Liberal Democrats are an example of “conditional institutionalization”—
intraparty affairs demonstrated many institutionalized characteristics until the party’s underlying coalitional arrangements began to fray in the late 1980s and 1990s as the result of accusations of leader corruption.
From this experience we learn the importance of Angelo Panebianco’s observation that parties are ultimately coalitions, not solely organizations or institutions.10 When coalitions fail, institutions also collapse. Party institutions in quiet times shape behavior, but they are contingent upon coalition health—they are not inevitable determinants of behavior under all conditions. Japanese parties are a hybrid of formal and informal structural characteristics, combined with power distributions reflective of internal political processes, and the parties’
very organizational integrity is conditional.
Formal and Informal Organization
The Liberal Democratic Party was created in 1955 by the merger of the then-existing Liberal and Democratic Parties. Its formation followed a decade in which the Japanese conservative movement fragmented and recombined, and party names frequently changed. The LDP self-consciously modeled itself after the British Conservative Party and other European parties that had strong central institutions and permanent national and local organizations.
The formal organization of the LDP provides for five clusters of formal organization: leadership positions, strategy councils, parliamentary and intraparty representative bodies, and several other organizational units.
These clusters made the overall party arrangements not dissimilar to the organizational characteristics of West European parties of “cultural integration.”11 Leadership is vested in a party executive composed of a president, a vice-president (not always appointed), and an executive council. There is also a secretary-general, who assists the party president in the administration of party affairs and who traditionally has been the party president’s spokesman and a major figure in the formation of legislative and electoral strategies. There are also party caucuses and
legislative strategy committees in both houses of the national parliament, which act as liaisons and sounding boards in the often complex relationship between party leaders and rank-and-file parliamentarians.
In addition, the LDP holds an annual representative conference that brings together top officials and members of parliament, plus persons selected by the party’s prefectural organizations. The LDP has several other national organs dedicated to functions such as internal finance and election management. Reflecting the LDP’s long domination of national government, there is also a major intraparty forum for policy formulation, the Policy Affairs Research Council (PARC). The PARC in turn has its own highly developed internal organization, including a deliberative council, divisions (which are parallel to government ministries and Diet committees), investigative councils, and various other internal policy bodies concerned with ongoing issues of political importance either to LDP clientele or to the parliamentary give-and-take between parties. The PARC has been likened many times to an intraparty legislature, especially since some of its organizational components function much like American congressional committees by holding hearings or by lobbying other PARC sections on behalf of favored policies.12
In spite of an elaborate formal organization, the LDP has displayed more clearly than perhaps any other party in the industrialized world the importance of informal organization to the operation of formal institutions. Factions were the most important of the informal groups in the LDP. During the LDP’s long period in power, factions collectively chose party and government leaders and supported candidates in elections. Local party factions and politicians’ groupings also existed and periodically challenged central party influence over gubernatorial and parliamentary candidate selection. In addition, informal policy groups and clusters of politicians with similar interests played important roles in party policy making, while informal consultational processes at times replaced and often complemented formal procedures. Finally, most candidates in elections at all levels had informal political machines.
Until 1993, LDP factions were the most visible of the party’s several kinds of internal informal groups.13 For a while after the 1993 debacle, the factions retreated to the status of “study groups,” only to reemerge again after 1994 to regain at least some of their earlier prominence.14 Although varying in size in the 1980s from 14 members to as many as 136, the LDP factions were generally similar in character. Factions within the LDP have always been groups of followers of a particular politician.
Before the formation of the Liberal Democratic Party in 1955, the most prominent conservative leaders, Shigeru Yoshida and Ichiro Hatoyama, each had personal followings. There were also some other leader-centered groups in the pre-1955 parties. Soon after the formation of the LDP, factions appeared among followers and proteges of Yoshida and
Hatoyama. This was the beginning of several faction lineages that have dominated LDP internal politics to the present. There were typically five to eight identifiable factions within the party, and sometimes other minor groups as well.
In the 1950s, factions reflected personal loyalties between party heavyweights and their followers. Because factions were identified by the name of their leader, the belief persisted that internal relationships followed a traditional patron-client model.15 But the pure patron-client relationship—to the degree it had existed—was replaced over time by an organizational framework in which the faction leader was more a manager than a patron. It is necessary therefore to look beyond personal loyalties to determine the reason for factions’ existence and cohesiveness.
In spite of some apparent changes over time in internal relationships, factions were always held together by the self-interest of members and leaders. Factions provided services for their members, and the members in turn were supporters of the factions. Faction leaders used their factions’
memberships to launch coalition-building efforts to win top positions in the party and the government. The size of a faction, measured in number of members, was a bargaining resource to gain positions. Factions were the voting blocs from which party leadership coalitions were assembled.16
Thus, as with other kinds of political structures (including coalitions of all kinds), factions were based on an exchange of political resources between ordinary faction members and a faction’s leader.17 For LDP factions, the basic quid pro quo was the provision of access to party and government positions and funding support for members in exchange for members’ support for faction leaders in contests for party leadership.
Factions reduced the uncertainty of members’ political lives by making careers more predictable. Over time, this intrafaction exchange of resources became at least as important to faction solidarity and continuity as personal loyalties and feelings, or even various specific inducements by leaders to promote solidarity—although these also contributed to faction maintenance.
Furthermore, factions provided a variety of services and resources to their members above and beyond stable career expectations. Faction leaders and their lieutenants made campaign speeches in members’ home constituencies and provided funds to help members with campaign expenses. Factions also represented incumbent members and newly sponsored candidates in the intraparty negotiations over which candidates would receive a party’s official endorsement. Even after the establishment of a proportional representation system in upper-house elections in 1982—which theoretically might have enhanced the role of the party’s formal organization—candidate positions on the party lists were said to be determined by factional interests. Finally, faction leaders provided members with regular money allowances, which helped them
maintain a constituency organization between elections and host constituents when they visited Tokyo. Faction leaders also provided their followers with New Year’s gifts of money, known as o-mochi dai, and gifts at the summer chugen season (a Buddhist time of remembrance).
They also helped their members represent the interests of their electoral constituencies through personal introductions to ministry officials and help with influencing PARC committees and party leaders. Indeed, even after the factions suffered a decline in status after the LDP’s 1993 implosion, Japanese newspapers reported that some junior Diet members still thought that factions were important to their ability to effectively process petitions from constituents.18
Nelson Polsby has described the American Congress as “institution-alized” because of its durability, autonomy (that is, boundaries), and internal complexity.19 Clearly the LDP factions have met the test of institutional durability in several ways. Most of the LDP factions formed in the 1950s were subsequently passed on to new leaders when a faction leader retired from politics or died. The stability of factions—until the LDP’s loss of power in July 1993—and their more recent reemergence have also reflected the importance of their functions, such as the role of factions in personnel assignments described earlier. The continuity of factions also reflects the strong personal commitment of members to their factions. Like the lifetime employees of major firms, faction members seldom switched allegiance to a different intraparty group—
demonstrating that boundaries have clearly existed as well.
Factions also meet the criterion of internal complexity. Over time, each faction has developed many of the organizational characteristics of a Japanese-style political party, including a hierarchy of formal offices (chair, vice-chair, secretary-general) and policy and election committees.
Some factions even had a secretariat. Often there were also intrafactional groups of junior, middle-ranking, and senior members (seniority being based on number of times elected to the Diet), plus an informal intrafaction group of retired (or very senior) members. This last kind of group resembled the party’s Supreme Consultative Council, which was made up of former prime ministers and House of Councillors presidents.
Most factions also had informal power structures, for example, the “seven magistrates” of the Takeshita faction and the “court nobles” of the Miyazawa faction.
The LDP factions also engaged in many activities and rituals that further contributed to both their durability and their organizational complexity. Meetings of officers and members were held often, in some instances every week. “Study” meetings and dinners for members of different internal groups were also held regularly. Summer retreats in mountain resorts provided another opportunity for faction members to get together. In some factions new members were reportedly given special training much like new company employees under the lifetime
employment system. Each faction also had newsletters and other forms of internal communication.
Procedural norms that developed over time also contributed to the institutionalized character of LDP factions and to the resolution of intrafaction disputes. A rigidly defined rule of seniority was used to select faction members for cabinet and party positions. By establishing exactly what kind of position a person would get after being elected a certain number of times, it helped prevent conflict among intensely ambitious people. Faction members could be sure that they would receive certain kinds of appointments as they advanced in seniority, and faction leaders parceled out appointments in a predictable way. If a faction’s seniority rule was sometimes violated—when a junior member was promoted ahead of turn or when a senior politician entered a faction laterally—the ensuing uproar served to underline the importance of this norm.
Candidate Election Organizations
Electoral machines are the second of the LDP’s most important informal party groups. These machines, or support associations (koenkai) in their most recent manifestation, typically have been found in older, small-business–dominated urban districts, in small cities and towns, and in the countryside during much of the time since the end of World War II.20 A typical candidate’s machine is a coalition of local social and political elites.21 In rural areas, the usual coalition has included town-assembly members, heads of farm or fishery cooperatives, and officers of other local groups, like voluntary firefighters. Hamlet (now district) heads might also be included. Sometimes the electoral organizations of prefectural and local assembly members have been used by parliamentary candidates to augment their own organizational strength. In some cases, a Diet member’s machine might even piggyback on a prefectural assembly member’s electoral coalition. Urban secondary organizations, especially local small retailers’ associations, have also been part of candidate electoral networks, much as secondary groups have been linked with party organizations in other countries.
Under the multimember-district election system prevailing until 1994, a candidate’s electoral machine normally focused on one geographical part of a constituency and consisted at the most of a couple hundred local leaders, though larger groups were sometimes seen. In one exceptional case, former prime minister Kakuei Tanaka’s famous Etsuzankai organization in Niigata prefecture comprised 315 affiliated municipal assemblymen, 26 mayors, and 11 prefectural assemblymen.
Candidates’ local machines support a variety of activities to maintain voter loyalty. National politicians appear regularly at local school athletic days, shrine festivals, and meetings of local interest groups to