The resilience of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is the most remarkable feature of the Japanese political system. The party sustained majorities in both houses of the Diet and ruled the cabinet alone from its founding in 1955 until 1989. It was one of the few ruling parties in the industrialized democracies to survive the oil crises of the 1970s, and it somehow managed to escape the voters' wrath over innumerable corruption scandals. The party's image in public opinion surveys became so negative in the middle to late 1970s that political scientist Ichiro Miyake coined the term “negative partisans” to describe the many voters who backed the LDP in elections despite professing negative images of the party.

The LDP lost its majority in the upper house in 1989 and in the lower house in 1993, when the party split. A coalition of its former adherents and opposition parliamentarians then organized a government that reformed the electoral system, which had grossly overrepresented rural districts favoring the LDP. The recession that started in the early 1990s undermined the LDP's reputation for economic prowess, and pundits heralded the dawn of a new era in Japanese politics. But within less than a year, the LDP had recovered to lead a coalition government of its own, and it has continued to rule in coalition with one or two small parties ever since. Ethan Scheiner's new book seeks to explain how the LDP managed to pull this off.

Scheiner's contention that clientelism underlies the LDP's success comes as no surprise. The prowess of LDP politicians at buying the support of farmers, the self-employed, construction workers, small and big business, and other constituencies has been well documented over the years by Nathaniel Thayer, Ronald Hrebenar, Jacob Schlesinger, and many others. Scheiner's contribution is to place clientelism in a broader institutional context to explain why it has had a more profound and lasting impact on party competition in Japan than it has in other political systems where clientelism has also flourished. To accomplish this he uses the comparative method, examining Japan alongside Italy, Austria, Sweden, Mexico, and, more selectively, other political systems as well. In this respect, his work follows in the footsteps of T. J. Pempel's edited volume, Uncommon Democracies (1990).

Scheiner argues that it is the combination of clientelism, fiscal centralization, and institutional protections for the LDP's clients that has made it so difficult for the opposition parties to mount a sustainable challenge. Borrowing from Herbert Kitschelt, Scheiner uses clientelism to refer to “benefits that are awarded to people who supported the party and withheld from those who are found, on the basis of some kind of monitoring, not to have supported it” (p. 15). Fiscal centralization exists where the budgets of subnational governments depend heavily upon financial transfers from the central government. The main institutional protection for the LDP's clients is the prevalence of single-member districts in the new, post-1993 electoral system.

Due to clientelism and fiscal centralization, local officeholders must rely upon connections to the national ruling party to win benefits for their districts. This makes it difficult for non-LDP politicians to build a local power base in the rural districts that depend most heavily upon public works and other government expenditures. Voting behavior in Japan tends to be candidate-centered rather than issue-centered, and since many of the most attractive candidates for national office are those experienced in local politics, the opposition parties have a hard time recruiting effective candidates to run for parliament in rural districts. Although rural districts are not as overrepresented in the new electoral system as they were previously, one-third of today's single-member districts are in rural areas, and the LDP wins an overwhelming majority of those seats. Even if the opposition should win some 60 percent of nonrural seats, it would still control only about 40 percent of all seats in the lower house.

In sum, clientelism, fiscal centralization, and the preponderance of single-member districts in the new electoral system have conspired to create “two parallel party systems” in Japan since 1993, a rural party system in which the LDP predominates and an urban party system in which there is greater party competition. Opposition parties have been unable to win favor with the rural electorate, and this is the key to the LDP's continued success. This is an original conclusion, since the impact of the rural electorate attracted much more attention before the 1994 electoral reform than it has since.

Scheiner's analysis might benefit from a rethinking of some key concepts. His strict definition of clientelism makes it hard to determine if clientelistic or programmatic policies have mattered more to the LDP's longevity. For instance, the protection of farmers from foreign competition and their remarkably favorable treatment under the income and property tax laws do not qualify as “clientelism” because the benefits of these measures are general and not limited to the LDP's supporters. Given the LDP's widespread backing among farmers, however, to label these policies programmatic rather than clientelistic seems to be a distinction without a difference. A broader definition of “clientelism” seems to be in order.

The book identifies the phenomenon to be explained as “one-party dominance,” but the arrangements that Scheiner places under this rubric include the LDP's solitary rule before 1989, its rule with changing coalition partners since 1994, the postwar rule of Sweden's Social Democratic Party and Italy's Christian Democrats with one or several coalition partners, the dominance of Mexico's PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) in both its authoritarian and democratic phases, and the dominance of two parties in postwar Austria. The rationale for choosing these particular cases for comparison demands a more thorough explanation based on a more rigorous typology of party systems.

Scheiner discusses the competitiveness of the opposition parties only in terms of their ability to form a non-LDP government. This leads him to understate the changes that have occurred since 1989. In his view, “the opposition was unable to make serious inroads” into the LDP's power in the 1990s (p. 53). But this was the decade in which the opposition parties formed a government for the first time in more than 35 years (however briefly), revised the electoral system (however ineffectually), and eroded the LDP's electoral base enough so that it is now unable to pass laws without the support of other parties. Since the LDP's coalition partners may now claim a share of the state's resources for themselves, does clientelism in the 1990s and early 2000s not serve their interests as well as those of the LDP? By defining “competitiveness” solely in terms of alternations in power, the author neglects or downplays these dynamics.

These issues aside, this book makes an important contribution to our understanding of Japan's contemporary party system. To some, it might appear that the LDP's side payments to its favored constituents have declined since 1993. The government has sharply reduced its costly purchase of the rice crop, it has repealed the Large Retail Store Law protecting small businesses and the self-employed, and in the early 2000s it has reduced its public works budget, which had attracted severe criticism. Scheiner demonstrates that the residual use of clientelistic policies (broadly understood) in the context of fiscal centralization and the new electoral system still suffice to make the LDP Japan's most powerful political party. The more things change, the more they remain the same. Scheiner makes effective use of statistics and qualitative interviews to document his points, and a brief book review cannot do justice to the richness of his comparisons (Chapter 4 in particular is an excellent piece of comparative analysis). It will be intriguing to see how his analysis works out in light of the reforms introduced by current Prime Minister Jun'ichiro Koizumi, whom Scheiner identifies as an opponent of clientelistic politics.