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Political Parties and Representation: The Case of Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

T. J. Pempel
T. J. Pempel*
Affiliation:
University of Colorado, Boulder
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Extract

Japan, the non-Western world's first country to introduce and continue a parliamentary system of government, and one of the most stable democracies in the industrialized world today, provides an excellent case for the study of political parties and representation.

—It was the first non-Western country to introduce a parliament in 1890 and mass male suffrage in 1925.

—Political parties and popular elections were an important basis for governance in the period prior to World War II, and have been the sole basis for the selection of Japan's governments since then, making Japan one of the few non-Western examples of electoral representation.

—Japan today, despite free elections and a competitive multiparty system, has had an unbroken string of governments formed exclusively by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party since that party's formation in 1955, making Japan the best example of uninterrupted conservative rule among the advanced industrialized democracies.

—There are enough similarities and differences in Japan's electoral and party systems to make it an informative, but not totally anomalous, comparative case study for those generally interested in these phenomena.

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , March 1992 , pp. 13 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1992

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References

Curtis, Gerald L. 1971. Election Campaigning Japanese Style. New York: Columbia University Press. A participant observer's guide to a single election campaign for the House of Representatives.Google Scholar
Curtis, Gerald L. 1988. The Japanese Way of Politics. New York: Columbia University Press. A fine and readable recent survey of party and electoral politics that focuses on the Liberal Democrats, but deals with all parties.Google Scholar
Krauss, Ellis J. 1984. “Conflict in the Diet: Toward Conflict Management in Parliamentary Politics,” in Krauss, Ellis et al. (eds.) Conflict in Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 243–293. An examination of the intra-parliamentary politics of the period in which LDP control was most shaky and where compromise between government and opposition was most frequent.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pempel, T. J. 1986. “Uneasy Towards Autonomy: Parliament and Parliamentarians in Japan,” in Suleiman, Ezra (ed.) Parliaments and Parliamentarians in Democratic Politics. New York: Holmes and Meier, pp. 106–153. A comparative overview of the changing role of Japan's parliamentarians and parliament that contains numerous quantitative indicators on parliamentarians and their actions and attitudes.Google Scholar
Scalapino, Robert A. 1968. “Elections and Political Modernization in Prewar Japan,” in Ward, Robert E. (ed.) Political Development in Modern Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 249–291. A good overview of the prewar system including electoral data.Google Scholar