In 2009, the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) of Japan, which had successfully formed governments either alone or as the largest partner in a coalition government for all but a single year since 1955, suffered a devastating electoral defeat when the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) won nearly two-thirds of the seats available in the House of Representatives. The landslide DPJ victory was seen by many commentators and academics as the culmination of a decade-long trend toward two-party politics, driven in large part by party and voter adaptation to the electoral reforms of the 1990s, which introduced single-member districts as the means for electing a majority of members of parliament. The three books reviewed in this essay were written primarily in the two years following the 2009 DPJ victory, and each attempts, in quite distinct ways, to update our accounts of electoral and party politics and policymaking in Japan to account for the changes in Japanese politics in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Schoppa suggests in his introductory chapter to The Evolution of Japan's Party System that scholarship all too frequently is focused narrowly on either public policy or party politics (p. 7) and that bringing these together is a distinctive contribution of this volume. In fact, this dual focus can be seen as a contribution of all three volumes, from quite distinct approaches. The volume edited by Schoppa provides a thematic overview of key topics in party politics and policymaking in Japan over the last twenty years. Shinoda's book provides a chronologically organized narrative of contemporary Japanese politics and policymaking, with a particular emphasis on political leadership in the twenty-first century. Kobayashi's volume presents quantitative analyses of the link between elections, representation, and policy outcomes in Japan. While very different in their approaches, the volumes complement each other nicely and provide an intriguing portrait of the fluid and challenging nature of recent Japanese politics.
Schoppa's The Evolution of Japan's Party System brings together a group of some of the sharpest scholars (although mostly based in the United States) specializing in Japanese electoral politics and policymaking together to examine the evolution of Japanese party politics through the lens of understanding the evolution of party and electoral competition (chapters by Schoppa, Steven Reed, Robert Weiner, and Sherry Martin) as well as the relationship between party politics and policymaking in three prominent areas: postal privatization (Patricia Maclachlan), government financial institutions (Maria Toyoda), and labor policy (Mari Miura). Schoppa presents an apt evolutionary analogy in the volume's introduction and in his chapter on path dependence and party system evolution, and this is further elaborated in the co-authored concluding chapter (with Aiji Tanaka), but for scholars who are not immersed in related debates in the political science literature, it may seem either trivial or inviting of problematic associations. Given the problematic appropriation of evolutionary theory by social theorists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there is often a general wariness toward evolutionary theorizing in much of the social sciences. However, here the authors merely wish to highlight how political actors are imperfectly adapting to a changing environment, sometimes consciously and strategically, sometimes unconsciously, and sometimes through a version of “natural selection” as changing environments may empower certain political actors and disempower others. As Schoppa and Tanaka write in the conclusion, it is as if dancers are attempting to adapt to a sudden change in music, and given the changes in the 1990s “we should not be surprised to see the dancers (the parties) struggling to adapt to new rhythms” (p. 205).
For Schoppa and the other contributors to this volume, political actors are neither purely driven by social norms and past behavior, nor are they perfect rational actors who accurately calculate the optimal decision given their information about the current environment. This book has moved beyond the vociferous debates over the use of rational choice in the study of Japanese politics that we saw in the 1990s by staking out a clear middle ground in which political actors can be both strategic and fallible, and norms, history, and culture matter but are not deterministic. For most scholars this is an appealing middle ground, and it seems to me the approach here is representative of the mainstream of scholarship on Japanese politics.
Two chapters stand out for providing scholarship that would be difficult to find elsewhere in English. Weiner's chapter on the evolution of the DPJ is one of the comparatively few scholarly contributions in English on the historical development of the DPJ. It dispels key myths about the party, and, despite the DPJ's dramatic loss in the 2012 election, it holds up surprisingly well. Indeed, Weiner's arguments that the DPJ is not truly an urban party (the party was nearly swept in the urban districts in 2012), and that despite its 2009 victory the party remains relatively weak in terms of personnel recruitment certainly ring true. Furthermore, he highlights how divisions within the party are not primarily ideological, and, indeed, the defections and splintering of 2012 were not driven by a progressive-conservative ideological cleavage. While Weiner did not predict the dramatic defeat of the DPJ in 2012, his analysis of the DPJ's development and the challenges it faced proved fairly prescient.
Of the policymaking chapters, Toyoda's chapter on the reform of financial institutions stands out most, in part because Maclachlan and Miura have since published book-length works that elaborate in far more detail many of the arguments they make here. Toyoda eloquently articulates the importance of Japan's Fiscal Investment and Loan Program in funding key government financial institutions and highlights the importance of political leadership by Nakasone, Hashimoto, and Koizumi (and institutional reforms that enhanced the capacity for top-down leadership) in dramatically altering and ultimately undermining the ability of the government to direct capital to form the basis for loans to key sectors. Toyoda argues that many of the reforms enacted to these programs are ultimately irreversible.
Toyoda's chapter may strike some readers as the chapter least tied to the central focus of a volume on the evolution of Japan's party system, but in stepping back from Toyoda's chapter to the larger book, her chapter clearly buttresses two important points about party politics that help tie the book together. First, the economic policies that had been a key political strategy in party competition in the past are no longer likely to be as effective in the current political environment. Second, “reform” is both politically costly and electorally necessary, although the electoral benefits arising from reform seem short-lived in recent years.
While Schoppa's edited volume was published before the 2012 election and historic DPJ defeat, Contemporary Japanese Politics, by Tomohito Shinoda, was published after the election. The bulk of the book comprises a chronological account of contemporary Japanese politics, starting with an excellent chapter on the evolution of postwar politics under the LDP through the late 1980s. This is followed by a chapter focused on the politics of reform in the 1990s (through the Obuchi administration), and a chapter that focuses on politics under the Koizumi administration, with a particular focus on top-down political leadership, fiscal policy, postal reform, and foreign policy. The fourth chapter steps back to consider changes in electoral politics in the 1990s and 2000s, providing an assessment of the consequences of electoral reform and a narrative of the changes in electoral politics concluding with the 2009 DPJ victory. This is followed by chapters on the Hatoyama and Kan governments and a final chapter and epilogue that discuss the Noda government (2011–12), the December 2012 election, and the start of the (second) Abe government.
Whereas Schoppa's book is perhaps best seen as a thematic volume of primary interest to scholars, Shinoda's book is also well suited for teaching and use as a text for courses on Japanese politics. The narrative is well written and provides a mainstream academic account of the evolution of contemporary Japanese politics. Shinoda offers an informal “veto players” approach to understanding Japanese politics, providing a narrative that nicely balances an account of changing structural factors with sensitivity to the agency of actors. While he sees the institutional changes of the 1990s as necessary conditions for allowing changes in policymaking and leadership, he suggests that they merely enabled the possibility of top-down policymaking and strong leadership. His account of how the successes of the Koizumi administration contrasted with those of the nearly half-dozen short-lived successors, from both the LDP and DPJ, buttresses this argument nicely.
While Shinoda's volume is certainly not an account of contemporary Japanese politics broadly conceived—it is quite traditional in its focus on elite politics—it is an admirable account of contemporary Japanese politics in those areas. The only concern one might have in assigning it as a text is that time already leads one to question the balance of space devoted to the various topics and questions. To be fair, this is a common problem for narrative analyses that seek to bring readers through to the present day. However, the devotion of two full chapters to the Hatoyama and Kan administrations leaves the volume with comparatively short shrift being given to Prime Minister Aso and also the post-Koizumi LDP prime ministers. That is unfortunate, but the strength of the volume makes points such as these primarily quibbles. One hopes that the book is successful enough to merit a second, revised edition, one that reapportions the focus and discussion of post-Koizumi Japanese politics.
Whereas Shinoda's volume presents a mainstream narrative account of policymaking, party politics, and political leadership in Japan, Kobayashi's Malfunctioning Democracy in Japan builds on numerous quantitative analyses to further a more challenging normative agenda. Kobayashi argues that Japanese democracy, despite reforms in the 1990s, remains broken, and after a wide-ranging set of chapters that empirically assess the nature of and links between voter decision-making, party platforms, and policy outcomes, he concludes with a plan for electoral reforms to resuscitate Japanese democracy. Kobayashi is a senior statesman in the study of Japanese politics, and the book is worthy of a careful read.
The quantity and rapid-fire nature of the wide-ranging quantitative analyses make the empirical work difficult to summarize briefly. Key highlights of the book are analyses that show the lack of a relationship between party platforms and government spending (chapter 2), analyses showing the nature of political influence over local subsidies (chapter 5), and analysis showing the limited nature of both issue voting and retrospective voting in the 2005 and 2009 elections (chapter 10). Ultimately, Kobayashi's analyses lead him to characterize the Japanese political system as one in which politicians are neither representative of nor held accountable to citizens, and as such political outcomes fail to reflect the will of the people. This is a sentiment widely shared in Japan, and a broader concern in many countries around the world.
Kobayashi's book is both ambitious and frustrating, the latter part possibly due to constraints in publishing. The book is not well suited to a general audience, given its focus on discussion of statistical models. And yet, the book does not include the actual statistical results for readers who are comfortable with quantitative social science to examine. Scholars who are interested in evaluating particular results must simply rely on brief descriptions of the statistical models in the main text. Some of the statistical results are presented graphically, a few of which are quite enlightening (e.g., figure 7.1), although others are much less appealing as choices for graphic presentation of data (e.g., the series of pie charts in chapter 4).
The style of presentation of statistical results leaves the book in a position in which it is unlikely to satisfy any likely audience. Readers who are not comfortable with quantitative social science likely will be turned off by the detailed discussion of statistical models, while those who are comfortable likely will be dissatisfied by the lack of detailed presentation of the data and results, which would allow greater discussion and analysis of the link between the analyses and the interpretation of the results.
The empirical claims being made in this book are important and worthy of greater attention. Similarly Kobayashi's proposals for resuscitating Japanese democracy deserve far greater scrutiny and debate, particularly as his own discussion of key elements lacks a comparative analysis of the effects of similar institutions in other contexts, and he occasionally fails to discuss key potential downsides of the institutional reforms proposed. Ultimately, of the three books reviewed here, Kobayashi's stands out as the one that is potentially most important and yet also the most vexing. Perhaps we should view it as the most successful from P. T. Barnum's perspective: Kobayashi's book most certainly left me wanting more.
Despite their different approaches, these three books highlight several key commonalities about recent Japanese politics. First, public policy in Japan, as in most countries, is strongly (but not exclusively) influenced by the electoral and other interests of politicians and parties, which have been changing in Japan in recent decades. Even as Japan moved towards greater two-party competition in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and some scholars highlighted that the Japanese political system was becoming more “Westminster-like,” none of the three volumes suggest that the relationship between voters, political elites, and policy outcomes in Japan approaches an ideal or typical responsible party system. In many ways, all three volumes suggest that voters, politicians, and parties in Japan are all muddling along—dissatisfied with the status quo but not agreeing on a clear vision of where to go.
Crucially, these three volumes all highlight that important changes in Japanese politics have occurred, even though today the Liberal Democratic Party is in power, as it was twenty years ago, forty years ago, and sixty years ago. While, as Kobayashi notes, Japanese politics may not have improved in many ways since the reforms of the 1990s, they have most definitely changed. And these three volumes provide an excellent starting point for those interested in understanding contemporary Japanese politics and how it has evolved recently.
