Chapter 1 described the puzzling turnaround in attention to national security among conservative Japanese politicians in 1997. This chapter argues that the best explanation for this turnaround is a shift in their electoral strategies, brought about by electoral reform to the House of Representatives (HOR) in 1994. The first election under the new system was held in October 1996, just three months before these conservative politicians plucked the abduction and other security issues from relative obscurity to champion in the Diet and elsewhere. The explanation presented draws upon studies of Japan's electoral reform, which find that it altered politicians’ relationships with voters, supporters, interest groups, central government bureaucrats, and the party leadership (e.g. Christensen 1998; Cox, Rosenbluth, and Thies 1999; Horiuchi and Saito 2003; Krauss and Pekkanen 2004; Carlson 2006; Hirano 2006; Krauss, Pekkanen, and Nyblade 2006; Krauss and Naoi 2009; Horiuchi and Saito 2010), and studies of the policy impacts of electoral systems, which find that certain policies are more or less likely when a country adopts or is adopting a particular electoral system (e.g. Bernhard and Leblang 1999; Persson and Tabellini 2000; Lizzeri and Persico 2001; Rosenbluth and Thies 2001; Milesi-Ferretti, Perotti, and Rostagno 2002; Rogowski and Kayser 2002; Golden 2003; Rosenbluth and Schaap 2003; Iversen and Soskice 2006; Chang 2008; Estevez-Abe 2008; Rosenbluth and Thies 2010; Rickard 2010, 2012a,b; Weinberg 2012). In both of these literatures, the mechanism through which electoral systems are thought to have their effects is electoral strategy: politicians are thought to adopt different electoral strategies under different electoral systems, and it is their adoption of these different strategies that encourages them to form different relationships with other political actors and choose different policy outcomes.

The chapter proceeds as follows. First, it uses two rules, the electoral system and constitutional structure, to explain why the electoral strategies adopted by conservative Japanese politicians prior to electoral reform would have made it extraordinarily difficult for them to pay attention to broad policy issues such as national security.