ABSTRACT
For three and a half decades, from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s, Japan enjoyed a double blessing: phenomenal economic growth and equally phenomenal political stability. To many observers, the two blessings were in fact causally connected: the economic miracle was, to an important extent, both a cause and a consequence of the political stability.1 The political stability was in turn due substantially to permanent rule by a single party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which ensured continuity and consistency in economic policy making and implementation. In other words, a domestic regime of hegemonic rule provided the Japanese for three and a half decades with generous amounts of key public goods such as political stability, personal safety and, above all, prosperity.
