Electoral Reform and National Security in Japan
From Pork to Foreign Policy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 15099995 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kyohei Yamada (0000-0003-0800-069X, Rikkyo University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 303-306 |
| Publication date | 2017-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Science Japan Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1369-1465 • E-ISSN: 1468-2680 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/ssjj/jyx014 |
| OpenAlex | W2736216625 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 5 |
Why had Japanese politicians in the ruling conservative party paid little attention to national security policy in much of the postwar period, and why did their level of attention suddenly surge since the mid-1990s? The key to explain this puzzling shift, according to Catalinac, is the change in the electoral incentive of the politicians, driven by the change in the electoral rules for the Lower House. The author analyzes candidate-level campaign manifestos in order to demonstrate that rhetorical appeals of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) politicians quickly shifted after the introduction of the new electoral rules in 1994. Politicians after this electoral reform discuss broader policy issues, such as national security, more than they had done under the previous electoral rule. In the rest of this review, I provide a summary of the book, provide some suggestions for future works, and discuss the book’s contributions. After describing the puzzle and laying out the research question in Chapter 1, the author provides her argument in Chapter 2. Under the single non-transferrable vote (SNTV) rule used in the Japanese Lower House from 1947 to 1993, politicians from a majority-seeking party had to compete against each other in the same district. This gave politicians in the ruling LDP strong incentives to provide ‘private goods’ (p. 34), which the author refers to as pork, and at the same time made it difficult for them to campaign on policy. This is so because if LDP politicians in the same district all take the same position on broad policy issues, voters would have difficulty choosing which candidate(s) to vote for in the election. If they differentiated among themselves by ideology or took radically different positions on, say, defense, it would have been challenging for the party to maintain its unity and retain a parliamentary majority. Thus, each LDP candidate promised to provide particularistic benefits to certain geographic areas in the district and/or specific groups of voters and avoided campaigning on broad policy issues like national security.
Argument (complex analysis) · Democracy · Economics · Foreign policy · General election · Incentive · Law and economics · Market economy · National security · Order (exchange) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Rhetorical question · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Law · Political Influence and Corporate Strategies · Public Administration · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,67 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2023 (4) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |