ABSTRACT
Ibaraki is a conservative stronghold at all levels of government and has been so throughout the post-war period. The Liberal Democratic Party dominates politics in the prefecture to the extent that Ibaraki has been dubbed a ‘Conservative Kingdom’. Ibaraki went into the 1996 election with the main competition being between the LDP and the NFP. The HC election in 1998 seemed to indicate some changes to the political balance in Ibaraki. The DPJ victory in the 1998 Upper House election gave the anti-LDP parties some hope that they might make significant progress in the 2000 election to the Lower House. There were visible trends toward bipolarity at the district level, in the sense that the main challenge to the LDP was the NFP in 1996, running in six out of seven districts, and the DPJ in 2000, running in five districts. However, as under the MMD, the challenge to the LDP was very limited.
