ABSTRACT
The politics of Japan is often regarded, particularly in Western media, as obscure and radically difficult to understand, presenting conceptual difficulties far greater than those of political systems closer to home. A young BBC journalist once told me that whenever some aspect of Japanese politics came up, the news room entered a mode of collective panic, and journalists would search frantically for a conceptual peg on which to hang a coherent argument about the limited facts at their disposal. In my experience these pegs would often turn out to be clichés of dubious value, such as that “Japan is a consensus society,” or that “politics in Japan is governed by questions of face.” In contrast, many political scientists, taking their cue from economics, tend to shun
explanations dependent on essentialist reasoning, or what are assumed to be “cultural” characteristics of a given population. It is intriguing to compare two works in English on the Japanese political system, published 18 years apart: J. Mark Ramseyer and Frances McCall Rosenbluth, Japan’s Political Marketplace (Ramseyer and Rosenbluth 1993), and Ellis S. Krauss and Robert J. Pekkanen, The Rise and Fall of Japan’s LDP (Krauss and Pekkanen 2011). The two books develop contrasting-even diametrically opposed-arguments concerning the dynamics of Japanese party politics. Ramseyer and Rosenbluth rest their analysis on a “principal-agent” variant of
rational choice theory, and maintain that reforming the Lower House electoral system from a single non-transferable vote in multi-member districts to a mixed system based predominantly on single-member districts, would inevitably lead to a drastic upheaval in the way parties behaved, so that factions (habatsu), personal support machines (ko-enkai), the powerful Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) Policy Affairs Research Council (seimu cho-sakai), and other elements, would rapidly decline once the particular set of incentives embodied in the old electoral system were removed. Krauss and Pekkanen, by contrast, able to reflect on several years of experience
under the new electoral system, and using historical institutionalism, argue on the basis of detailed research that the effects of the electoral reform in 1994 were far less drastic, and far slower to appear, than had been predicted by Ramseyer and Rosenbluth, even though at the same time they were curiously deferential to the writers of the earlier book (Stockwin 2012). A comparison of the two books, therefore, reveals a major theoretical and empirical
gulf between them, so that we find here a major controversy in the English-language literature on Japanese politics. Yet on one issue it is impossible to insert a sheet of tracing paper between their respective arguments.
