Democracy Without Competition in Japan: Opposition Failure in a
One-Party Dominant State. By Ethan Scheiner. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006. 286p. $70.00 cloth, $27.99 paper.
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.