ABSTRACT
Back in the 1990s, as the geopolitical and socio-economic environment changed dramatically, some Japanese politicians began to think that it was time for Japan to overhaul its decision-making process (see Ozawa 1993 for instance). There was also a lot of political apathy among voters, who considered conservative politicians to be too corrupt (Pharr 2000). In 1993, Ichirō Ozawa, one of the senior leaders of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), split the party and successfully replaced the LDP government with a multi-party coalition government that only excluded the LDP and the Japan Communist Party (Curtis 1999). The Electoral Reform in 1994, legislated by the non-LDP government, was the first major reform to be followed by many others (Renwick 2010). It introduced a strong element of majoritarian politics by adopting the first-past-the-post electoral rule – like in the United Kingdom and the United States – for its Lower House (shugiin) elections. Generally speaking, the rules were changed to move Japan in the direction of the Westminster-style democracy (Estévez-Abe 2006). That is to say, the ruling party’s accountability was strengthened, and, institutionally speaking, political power gradually became more concentrated in the hands of party leaders – especially, in the hands of the Prime Minister (Takenaka 2006). Ozawa, one of the key architects of the New Japan, hoped to establish a two-party system that would let voters choose a specific blue print for the future (Ozawa 1993).
