Organizer: Robert Weiner, Cornell University

Chair and Discussant: Mari Miura, Sophia University

In recent years, Japan’s political parties have reached an "intermediate" developmental stage. The Japanese party system has yet to approach anything near the rock-solid stability of the "1955 System," but neither is it shot through with the unpredictability and fluidity that lingered after the shocks of the mid-1990s. There have been three rounds of elections under the new electoral system, and no major party realignments since 1998; but the impending 2005 election suggests that realignment is not quite over. The party system is best viewed now as undergoing evolution: significant but constrained developmental change.

This panel’s papers discuss this evolutionary process at three levels: individual-party rank-and-file (Robert Weiner), individual-party leadership (Alisa Gaunder and Lissa Terrel), and party-system-wide (Nobuhiro Hiwatari). Weiner discusses how small district-by-district changes in electoral competition patterns have combined to yield a significant shift in the ideological and geographical profile of the Democratic Party of Japan. Gaunder and Terrel show how both progressive and conservative parties have evolved – but differently – in the opportunities and influence they afford female leaders. Finally, Hiwatari argues that Japan’s evolution toward a two-party system is not simply an artifact of electoral system change, but rather a more subtle process linked to both declining ideological polarization and growing executive power. Mari Miura will discuss the papers.

A Decade of DPJ Evolution: Ideology and Geography

Robert Weiner, Cornell University

The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has undergone significant change in its first decade. Former Socialists have ceded dominance to conservatives and to "new breed" politicians with unconventional pre-Diet career paths. This evolution in the DPJ's intra-party balance of power is in part, of course, the result of mergers with other parties. But it also reflects variation in electoral fitness among the party's ideological tendencies, as well as variation in the electoral environments each of them has tended to face. At the same time, the party has evolved geographically. It is not simply "urban" -- rather, it now finds its main niche in particularly suburban, "yamanote" districts, and at the same time maintains often-overlooked strongholds in heavy-industrial areas. I examine both the independent and interdependent aspects of these two evolutionary paths.

Alisa Gaunder, Southwestern University

Do political parties pose different constraints on female politicians and their ability to influence the party’s policy agenda? We explore this question by developing a case studies of Doi Takako, the first female head of a political party; Fukushima Mizuho, the current head of the Socialist Democratic party; and Moriyama Mayumi, the former Justice Minister in the Koizumi Cabinet. These case studies illustrate that female politicians face different constraints in the post-1994 system and that their abilities to overcome these constraints are related to the particular party organization within which they work. Our general conclusion, however, is that despite party constraints, individual agency by female politicians does allow women in the Diet to influence policy.

Nobuhiro Hiwatari, Tokyo University / Harvard U.S.-Japan Program

Japan adopted a majoritarian mixed-member electoral system in 1994. Although theory predicts that the effective number of candidates at the district level will converge to two under such a system, it cannot explain the emergence of a two party system at the national level. I argue that changes in the policymaking structure caused by the narrowing of ideological differences served as the bridge between a predominant party system and a two-party system in Japan. The narrowing of ideological differences among party politicians enabled them to agree on strengthening the power of the prime minister, as expected by delegation theory of the Huber-Shipan genre, which moved policymaking outside of the LDP and enhanced the importance of party leaders. The Japanese case stresses the importance of policymaking structure in the transition of party systems, which has hitherto been neglected in the electoral systems literature.