ABSTRACT
From its establishment in 1955 to the split of the Ozawa faction in 1993, the Liberal Democratic Party (L.D.P.) has always been the Japanese government’s ruling party by itself.1 The L.D.P. has been called a predominant party.2 However, there is a consensus among researchers that the L.D.P. is not a single party but a coalition of different factions.3 Each faction in the L.D.P. has its own office, its own accounts system, and its own councillors as if it were a party. Ishikawa said4 that Japanese politics should be analyzed from the viewpoint of the L.D.P. as a coalition of different factions. This is appropriate, in part because the size of the L.D.P. factions is almost the same as the size of the opposition parties. (See Tables 38 to 40.)
In the Lower House elections under the old system, almost all constituencies chose between three to five legislators, which means that the L.D.P. usually had more than one candidate in each district. Under the single non-transferable voting (S.N.T.V.) rule the L.D.P. candidates compete for the same conservative voters,5 hence it was very difficult for the party to support all the L.D.P. candidates. Therefore usually each L.D.P. candidate ran for the election only with the support of his or her own faction. It was not unusual for a new conservative candidate to run as an independent, not as an L.D.P. candidate, and after the election to join the L.D.P. The leader of the faction supported candidates who made his faction larger and provided a better chance of the leader winning the contest for the L.D.P. governor (party leader) or the prime ministership. L.D.P. governments may have been coalition governments under the multi-member districts with the single nontransferable voting or a “semi-proportional representation” system.6
