Electoral Studies 20 (2001) 581–602
www.elsevier.com/locate/electstud
Party factions and the politics of coalition:
Japanese politics under the “system of 1955”
Jean-Marie Bouissou
Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, 56 rue Jacob, 75006 Paris, France
Abstract
The Liberal Democratic Party continuously held an absolute majority in the Japanese Lower
House, under the Gojyûgonen taisei (System of 1955), from its founding in 1955 until its breakup and temporary fall from power in 1993. Until 1989, it also had a majority in the Upper House.
Unlike the Italian DC, the Japanese dominant party never formally entered into coalition with
another party — except for a single minor occurrence1. Despite this continuity at one level, 15
different prime ministers presided over 48 Japanese cabinets formed between 1955 and 1993,
whose average duration was 9.4 months. The re-allotment of all cabinet portfolios and party posts
took place every year with a metronomic regularity and these realignments were fully-fledged
exercises in coalition-building even though only one party was involved. This cabinet instability
has provided evidence for the view that the LDP surrendered both policy- and decision-making
power to the bureaucracy. But, since the LDP clung to the practice of yearly cabinet reshuffles
rather than remedying this by simply changing the party constitution, the consequent weakening
of the executive power cannot have been seen as having imposed a heavy cost. And, since the
LDP held onto power for such a long time, it is obvious that this cost was successfully managed.
The purpose of this paper is to treat the one-party Gojyûgonen taisei system as an important case
study for coalition theory, relaxing the assumption of the LDP as an unitary actor and considering
the party as a political system in its own right.  2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. The politics of coalition within the LDP
1.1. Competing actors: the habatsu
As early as 1955, the newspapers began classifying LDP Diet members into habatsu,
or factions. These were small to middle-sized groups of between 10 to 25 members
E-mail address: [email protected] (J.-M. Bouissou).
The New Liberal Club, a minuscule conservative splinter group, was awarded a portfolio in three
cabinets in 1983-1985. It then reunited with the LDP.
1
0261-3794/01/$ - see front matter  2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 2 6 1 - 3 7 9 4 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 5 0 - 0
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and were essentially the personal followings of politicians of prime ministerial calibre.
During this early period, the LDP was in the process of amalgamating some 500 preand post-war legislators from four political parties. Factional membership was thus
volatile, but the pioneering work of Michael Leiserson provides reliable data for this
period (Leiserson, 1968, p. 777). Between 1960 and 1972, the first generation of faction
leaders retired or died. Confusing realignments ensued. Nevertheless, habatsu gradually
became so institutionalized that Satô and Matsuzaki, in their epoch-making book, chose
1963 as starting point for tabulating faction membership (Satô and Matsuzaki, 1986,
p. 243). Since then, data on the factional affiliation of all LDP Diet members are
coherent and systematic. From 1972 to 1980, the fierce battle between Tanaka Kakuei
and Fukuda Takeo for the control of the party — the “Kaku–Fuku war” — marked a
turning point for the habatsu. They expanded in size, until Tanaka-ha temporarily
reached 139 members in 1986. They also turned into self-sustaining machines, guided
by their own corporate logic rather than by the will of their leaders. The smallest
factions disappeared and their number shrunk from 13 in 1970 to nine in 1972 and
five in 1980. The number of lawmakers without factional affiliation shrunk to insignificance — to 16 out of 289 LDP members of the Lower House in 1992.
According to the dominant view the habatsu perform only two functions, political
recruitment and the allotment of benefits (Satô and Matsuzaki, 1986, p. 56–63, for the
latest summary of the arguments; Ramseyer and McCall-Rosenbluth, 1993, Cox and
Rosenbluth, 1999, for the most recent review of the literature, and also Woodall, 1996,
p. 105–112 and 174–176). They help their Diet members to gain re-election against
other LDP candidates in the multi-member electoral districts; they also scout promising
new candidates, then fund and run their campaigns. Cabinet and party posts are shared
on the basis of factional affiliation, and the factions leaders themselves — as opposed
to the prime minister — allocate them to their supporters. Since these two functions
typically belong to political parties, we may be tempted to see the LDP as a coalition
of small political parties. But the habatsu do not perform any policy-making function.
For debating and promoting policies, like-minded LDP legislators congegate in interfactional groupings. The party policy-making organ — the secretive Policy Research
Action Council — is driven by the so-called “tribes” of influential legislators characterized by common expertise and interests, not by factional affiliation (Satô and Matsuzaki, 1986 p. 92–101; for a review of literature, Woodall, 1996, p. 175). Habatsu as
such neither aggregate or accommodate the interests of any social group, nor care
about the government policies. Their sole raison d’être is to win seats and allocate
offices for the benefit of a few dozen Diet members. Thus, we can define the habatsu
as unidimensional actors whose role in coalition-building game differs from that of
political parties, which are multidimensional actors concerned with demands from the
electorate at large, as well as policies decision-making and policy outputs.
1.2. “Dominant groups” within the LDP
The most striking feature of the politics of coalition within the LDP is that it
gradually came to produce a very precise proportional sharing of cabinet and party
posts among all of the habatsu (Kohno, 1992; Satô and Matsuzaki, 1986, p. 66–73).
J.-M. Bouissou / Electoral Studies 20 (2001) 581–602
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Fig. 1. Towards a proportional sharing: bonus and malus for majority, minority and others/1955–1983
Average per period. Calculated according to the number of posts won (PN). a = Perfect insulation /
Hatoyama and Ishibashi Cabinets (1955.11.22 - 1956.2.25); b = Perfect insulation / Dominant duo regime:
Kishi and Ikeda - A (1957.2.25 - 1960.12.8); c = Perfect insulation / Majority without the “core group”:
Ikeda B-F (1960.12.8 - 1964.11.9); d = Perfect insulation / Dominant duo regime: Sato A-C (1964.11.9 1967.11.25); e = Loosening insulation / Dominant duo regime: Sato D-F, Tanaka (1967.11.25 - 1974.12.9);
f = Loosening insulation / Minority government: Miki (1974.12.9 - 1976.12.24); g = Near parity / Minority
government: Fukuda (1976.12.24 - 1978.12.7); h = Naer parity / Dominant duo regime: Ohira (1978.12.7 1980.07.17); i = Territory under stress / Suzuki regime and Nakasone A-B (1980.07.17 - 1984.11.1).
At the beginning, the winning coalition or shuryu-ha (majority group) — the one
which won the prime ministership for its candidate at the bi-annual party convention — used to grab a disproportionate share of posts, while the losers or han shuryuha (minority group) received only a few. But as time went by, the bonus for the
winners diminished until the prime minister’s faction sometimes came to get less
than its proportionate share of posts. Thus the distinction between shuryu-ha and
han shuryu-ha became so blurred that the terms faded out of use; Satô and Matsuzaki
stopped using them after the second Nakasone cabinet (1983–1984).
Fig. 2. Towards a proportional sharing: bonus for prime minister faction/1957–1993 Average per regimes
and periods.
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Many models of coalition bargaining especially those dealing with the allocation of
a fixed set of rewards of office, such as cabinet portfolios, carry the implication that
bargaining power is not proportional to size. In particular, the notion of a “dominant
party” has been developed within the office-seeking approach to the analysing of
government formation. A dominant party is always the largest party. It is found in a
party system in which the largest party can form a winning coalition by joining each
of two mutually exclusive losing coalitions, while the two losing coalitions themselves
cannot combine themselves to form a winning coalition. This allows the dominant
party to play off the two losing coalitions against each other and increase its share of
the payoff. In other words, the expectation is that a dominant party, if one exists, will
receive a disproportionally large share of the payoffs (Peleg, 1981; Einy, 1985; van
Deeman, 1989; van Roozendaal, 1992). If coalition politics between groups within a
party operates in the same way as coalition politics between parties in a party system,
then we can think in terms of the notion of a “dominant group” within a party that
is likely to receive a disproportional share of the payoffs going to that party.
Once we take policy objectives into consideration, and if only one dimension of
policy is important, then the median party on this dimension is also in an especially
strong bargaining position. It is able to form winning coalitions both with parties to
the left of it, and with parties to the right, and is thus very difficult to exclude from
power — finding itself at the “core” of the political bargaining game. Again, by analogy with political parties, intra-party policy-seeking coalition bargaining between party
groups should place the median group in this pivotal central position. A party group
that is both dominant, as defined above, and at the median of the policy space within
the party can be though of as being a “dominant central group” (van Roozendaal,
1992). One possible reason for the very proportional sharing of payoffs between LDP
factions in Japan, therefore, is that the party has no dominant, or dominant central
group. We can explore this possibility with a brief historical view of the development
of the factional structure of the LDP and the payoffs going to the major factions.
While there is no scientific evidence for ranking LDP habatsu on a left-right scale,
some faction leaders did strongly advocate particular policies. Kishi and Nakasone have
constantly advocated “rightist” positions, while Miki was reputedly “leftist”. Meanwhile,
since the founding of the LDP, observers have identified a “conservative mainstream”
(hôshu honryû) comprising the Satô-Tanaka–Takeshita–Obuchi lineage, the Kôchikai
(Ikeda–Maeo–Ohira–Suzuki–Miyazawa) and the Kishi–Fukuda–Abe–Mitsuzuka group.
These groups shared common roots in the former Liberal Party, which dominated the
political scene from 1948 to 1955. These groups constantly favoured each other as
coalition partners. In contrast to this, Miki and Kônô, who occasionally flirted with the
left before 1955, were outsiders. They were deprived of the prime ministership until
1974 (Miki) and 1982 (Kônô’s heir, Nakasone). The proximity between the mainstream
groups derived mostly from historical and personal factors, however.
In terms of the relative strength of each faction, in 1955 there were 12 habatsu, no
one of which controlled more than 13 per cent of the LDP members of the Lower House.
But, as early as 1957, Satô-ha and Kishi-ha formed an effective cartel, a “dominant duo”.
They allied to win the prime ministership for Kishi in 1957. After this, they never took
sides against each other, and their followers in the Upper House adopted the same
J.-M. Bouissou / Electoral Studies 20 (2001) 581–602
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strategy. Furthermore, Satô and Kishi had the most powerful financial backing among
the business community as well as the strongest appeal among the independent LDP
Diet members (Leiserson, 1968, p. 777). By 1960, they controlled 42 per cent of the
party convention (see Fig. 3). Kishi-ha broke up following the stormy end of Kishi’s
cabinet in June 1960. But as soon as Fukuda Takeo picked up the pieces in 1964, the
dominant duo resurrected its cartel. It controlled 36 percent of LDP Diet members in
1966, and grew to 42 per cent in 1971. Within the duo, Satô-ha regularly controlled
around 24 percent of the LDP lawmakers, while no other faction reached 14 per cent
and only three surpassed the 10 per cent threshold. Also, since the habatsu grow by
enlisting any promising candidate at election time without any consideration for his
policy preferences (if any), the larger groups are structurally prone to be the more centrist; henceforth, Satô occupied the centre of the LDP policy space. Given this overall
configuration, the dominant duo was able to handpick additional coalition partners almost
at will, effectively being at the core of the LDP policy space. This may well explain
why Satô was prime minister a record seven years and eight months (1964–1972).
In 1972, Satô’s foes succeeded in amending LDP by-laws to allow them to push him
out (see below). He tried to transfer the post of prime minister to Fukuda, but Tanaka
Kakuei forcibly seized the leadership of Satô-ha and defeated Fukuda in a hard-fought
Convention. A new dominant duo emerged. In 1972, Tanaka and Ohira-ha controlled
33 per cent of LDP Diet members between them and subsequently always sided together.
The duo steadily expanded until 1986, when it controlled more than 50 per cent of the
Convention and Tanaka-ha reached an unprecedented 139 members (31 per cent). But
Fig. 3. “Dominant duos”, “core groups” and their shares (PV)/1957–1953.
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the duo was unable to reap the benefits that should have ensued. It relinquished the
presidency to the outsider Miki (1974), then to Tanaka’s arch-rival Fukuda (1976) —
although neither controlled a majority within the party. After an all-out factional battle
which almost broke the LDP in 1980, the dominant duo engineered a new period of
stability under the Suzuki cabinet (1980–1982) and Nakasone regime (1982–1987) —
the second longest under the Gojyûgonen taisei. But the dominant duo had to pay a
heavy price by renouncing any disproportionate sharing of payoffs. And, although it
maintained its numerical supremacy (48 percent in 1992), from 1987 to 1993 it won
the prime ministership only twice. Tanaka’s heir, Takeshita Noboru, resigned in the
wake of the Recruit scandal (1989) and, under Ohira’s heir, Miyazawa Kiichi, the LDP
finally broke and fell from power in 1993.
What can be inferred from this short historical overview?2 First, LDP by-laws
entail structural cabinet instability, which would have had involved heavy costs if
coalition-building had been chaotic. The fact that LDP politicians kept reshuffling
the cabinet at the hectic yearly pace rather than changing the party by-law suggests
that these costs were successfully reduced, at least in their eyes. One way of doing
this was to simplify the game by reducing the coalition-building to a straightforward
exercise in post-sharing, leaving policies aside.
Second, two dominant duos successively came into being and played a central role in
intra-party coalition-building. The Satô–Tanaka–Takeshita–Obuchi lineage, constantly the
most powerful partner in these duos, can be seen as a dominant central group within the
LDP for the whole period under investigation. Altogether, the dominant duos held the
prime ministership for 20 years and seven months (54.6 percent of the whole period ).
They were pushed out of the shuryu-ha only under exceptional circumstances — during
the second part of the Ikeda regime (from 1962–1964), and with Miki and Fukuda cabinets (1974–1978). When this happened, there were shaky cabinets and fierce factional
infighting. During the period when the dominant duo managed the winning alliance,
however, we did not observe the expected outcomes of stability and disproportionate
sharing. Satô’s long-lived regime was achieved at the price of instability in portfolio
allocations. The prime minister engaged in a yearly re-allotment of cabinet and party
posts. He gradually surrendered the majority’s disproportionate share (see Fig. 2) and
even the chief executive’s right to choose his own ministers. The allotment of portfolios
by the ryôshû to their supporters, according to seniority, became an iron-rule (Kohno,
2
The LDP by-law stipulates:
(1) The party president is elected every two years by the party convention, made up of all the LDP
Dietmembers plus 47 delegates from the regional LDP chapters.
(2) Once elected, the party president runs before the Diet as the LDP candidate for the post of Prime Minister.
(3) No party president can be re-elected more than once (since 1972).
As a result, the life span of a Prime Minister is four years at best. But since 1972, all but one lasted only
two years. Furthermore, in the hope of gaining support for re-election in the next Convention, since the
founding of the LDP, the party president/Prime Minister routinely reallocate all the cabinet posts after
one year. Since Dietmembers eagerly wait for this yearly chance to get a post, no Prime Minister dares
to dispense with this re-allotment — whatever the cost for the efficiency of decision-making.
J.-M. Bouissou / Electoral Studies 20 (2001) 581–602
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1992). Thus the dominant group paid a heavy price for managing the coalition that kept
its leader in power. After 1972, under Tanaka’s guidance, this group succeeded in forging
another, numerically stronger, dominant duo. Nevertheless, it let the party presidency be
decided more and more by hanashiai (negotiations between party elders), than by voting
power within the party. The duo won the top post only 45 per cent of the time between
1972 and 1993. The allotment system became so rigidly proportional that shûryû-ha and
han shûryû-ha faded out of use after 1983. The key question is thus why the dominant
group and its privileged partner in successive dominant duos gradually surrendered more
and more benefits, despite enjoying a very strong bargaining position by the virtue of
both numerical strength and position at the centre of the LDP’s internal policy space.
Third, the decline in executive power was very heavy for the party. Given the duration of the LDP regime, we might infer that the party controlled the damage. One
way of doing this was to transfer policy-making to non-factional venues such as the
PARC (the LDP’s powerful Policy Board) and to numerous external consultative bodies, sympathetic to the LDP but under the aegis of the bureaucracy (see below). But
the secretive nature of these “smoke-filled rooms” (misshitsu) gradually led to media
criticism and citizen distrust. During the 1980s, as the process of globalization confronted Japanese society with traumatic changes, both public opinion and the media
cried out for political leadership and the disbanding of the habatsu, and this demand
for “political reform” (seiji kaikaku) finally broke the LDP. Hence we must answer
another question: why did the government party tolerate such a costly system for managing coalition-building? It is to these questions that we now turn.
2. Political “sub-spaces” in Japan
Most formal spatial models consider policy spaces as a continua. Moving beyond
formal legislative politics, however, they might be more accurately seen as connected
sets of political “sub-spaces”, or “territories”, more or less insulated from each other.
In talking about such sub-spaces I don’t pretend to introduce a well-polished new
concept into political science, but rather to use the notion in a more modest way,
as provocative images intended to provide some food for thought. A political subspace may be broadly described as a private territory under the dominance of a single
political party. This territory is in a sense “inhabited” by a hardcore electorate that
never ventures “abroad” as well as by a set of politicians and administrators who
service this clientele. Inhabitants share a strong sense of identity rooted in the same
political sub-culture. In addition to the party concerned, the sub-space is co-managed
by other bodies with which its relationship is both exclusive and structural — as,
for example, with a labour union that maintains strong institutional links with the
party and is rewarded with parliamentary seats on the party’s ticket. Some of these
co-managers usually cater to the clientele on a daily basis. In effect, therefore, the
notion of a political substace is intended to extend traditional theoretical models to
take into account the fact that a political system such as that found in Japan is based
in a deeply-rooted clientelism.
Examples of such extra-parliamentary co-managers in Japan include the Sôhyô,
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labour union, which used to fulfil this role in the sub-space centred on the Japan
Socialist Party. The buddhist sect Sôkagakkai fulfilled the same role for the Kômeitô’s supporters. The agricultural cooperatives and the 500,000-plus building and public works companies (Woodall, 1996) between them took care of more than twenty
million people, a large majority of whose were hard-core conservative voters — that
is “inhabitants” of the conservative sub-space.
A sub-space has its own Constitution — the by-law of its ruling party — and its
own institutions which deliver posts, prestige and money to competing actors within
its clientele. Taken as a whole, it is a community with a strong identity, a web of
functional relationships, the framework for the daily life of large number of people,
and it has a political system of its own.
We might think of a given sub-space as being more easily maintained if it is
“insulated” from other sub-spaces. “Opening” it through an alliance with “foreigners”
challenges its identity, forces the sharing of resources and inserts potentially disruptive elements into the well-oiled wheels of its institutions. Thus coalition with another
subspace may force an adjustment of a given sub-space’s institutions to the prevailing
norms of the political system as a whole. The costs of this will be greatest for those
sub-spaces with the most distinctive sub-culture and institutions. Therefore, such
insulation must be seen as an asset, as long as a sub-space has sufficient resources
on its own to cater for its clientele and provide rewards for its elites.
All of this suggests the following:
a)
b)
c)
Parties evaluate payoffs primarily by relating them to their own sub-spaces.
An opposition party may renounce entering a winning coalition at the
national level, and a governing party may tolerate a certain degree of loss
in policy- and decision-making power, as acceptable prices to pay for maintaining the cohesiveness of their own local territories.
A strongly organized party whose sub-space is endowed with plentiful
resources will pay a higher price to enter a coalition than others with fewer
resources, and therefore has less incentive to do so.
Two parties located side-by-side in the policy space are not necessarily the
best possible coalition partners. Panebianco (Pridham, 1986, p. 9) has
already noted that exclusiveness must be fostered primarily against ideological neighbours, since local clienteles will move more easily to a neighbour
than a more remote party. Indeed, under the Gojyûgonen taisei, the opposition parties’ sub-spaces were all the more insulated from each other
because their policies and constituencies were rather similar. Accordingly,
their inability to mount a coalition against the LDP, often derided as “pathological”, was indeed understandable.
During most of the Gojyûgonen taisei period, there were five neatly-defined subspaces in Japanese politics. These were centred on the Communists, the JSP–Sôhyô,
the Buddhists (Sôkagakkai–Kômeitô), and the small Democratic Socialist Party sponsored by the moderate Dômei labour union. The conservative elite controlled the
“solid vote” (kôteihô) of about 20 per cent the electorate. They co-managed the
J.-M. Bouissou / Electoral Studies 20 (2001) 581–602
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political and economic decision-making process among themselves within what was
known as the “Power Triangle” (sankaku dômei) formed by the LDP, the big business
establishment (zaikai) and the bureaucracy. This enjoyed — and still enjoys — huge
resources. These include control of the State budget, enormous political contributions
from the zaikai and favourable decisions from the bureaucracy, to name but three.
It operates its own sophisticated structures for policy- and decision-making. Accommodation of interests among the co-managers takes place in thousands of consultative
bodies and study groups, where policies and law projects are discussed privately
before being decided by the PARC. Only then, does the process move outside for
rubber-stamping by the Diet. Thus, national policy- and decision-making is operated
from within the conservative sub-space, screened from unwelcome scrutiny. To let
“foreigners” into this would put a very convenient system at great risk. Therefore,
LDP politicians are subjected to intense pressure by their co-managers to ensure that
the territory remains closed to outsiders. The risk of being deprived of the resources
provided by the zaikai and the bureaucracy is worth almost any price paid by the
factions — including the dominant group — in order to keep the party united. And
since the policy- and decision-making operates primarily through highly institutionalised structures within this particular sub-space, any consequent weakening of the
cabinet is not seen as a cost in the eyes of the politicians.
While the stakes in preserving this insulation are very high, the conservative subspace is not cohesive in several areas. The fidelity of the conservative voters is
directed primarily towards individual Diet members. Many of them would follow
their patron if he or she were to leave the party. A huge socio-economic gap separates
the Triangle elites from the hard-core conservative voters, who are mostly drawn
from the peasantry and small business and are strongly organized in their own right.
And, since the territory includes so many interest groups, these compete fiercely for
resources. Thus cohesiveness is a perpetual matter of concern. In 1955, the conservative territory was perfectly insulated by the overwhelming LDP dominance of the
Diet and by the major cleavages that separated it from the opposition parties. As
time went by, however, insulation gradually weakened, until the sub-space was no
longer protected either by parliamentary arithmetic or socio-economic cleavages. As
a consequence, LDP powerbrokers were forced to offer ever-growing benefits to
those who might otherwise have been tempted to leave.
3. Weakening insulation and the changing pattern of coalition-making in the
conservative sub-space
3.1. Period one: perfect insulation (1955–1967)
In order to run the Lower House smoothly, a working majority of 18 seats above
an absolute majority is necessary3. During the period under consideration, the LDP
3
The Lower House has 18 standing committees, whose members are apportioned according to each
party’s representation. The committee chairmen are elected by the House during plenary meeting. They
are at the core of the Diet’s legislative activities. Since their function is to run the committee “smoothly
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surpassed this threshold by between 43 to 57 seats. To build a rival working majority,
three of the five large habatsu, or up to six of the medium and small-sized groups,
would need to have defected in a concerted move. The only available partner for
would-be defectors was the Socialist Party. But JSP and LDP were locked in an allout battle — even involving the assassination of the JSP head in 1960 — about
issues crucial to the entire social and political order. Since no feasible exit option
existed for the losers, intra-party rule by a minimal winning coalition of factions and
a disproportional allocation of payoffs to the shuryu-ha were the probable outcome.
Indeed, the LDP presidency was hotly contested. In 1956 and 1964 party conventions,
razor-thin minimal coalitions won by only a handful of votes. In 1959 and 1960, seemingly large surpluses elected Kishi (320 to 166) and Ikeda (302 to 194). However, both
relied upon a minimal three-faction winning coalition that controlled only 51 per cent
of conservative Diet members (Leiserson, 1968, p. 777). The surpluses were due to a
bandwagon effect among the “floating vote” — the 46 prefectural delegates and the
50-plus muchozoku. In 1962, the Convention was won without contest by Ikeda,
because the Kishi–Satô dominant duo temporarily disintegrated. Only in 1966 was Satô
elected (by 289 votes to 161) by a genuine surplus coalition of six groups, which
between them controlled almost 70 percent of LDP Diet members.
The winners duly maximized their gains. In the first LDP cabinet, prime minister
Hatoyama awarded a huge 31.5 point payoff bonus to his own followers, who took
36 per cent of the posts even though they comprised only 4.5 per cent of LDP Diet
members. From Kishi-A to Satô-C, the Prime Ministerial factions and the dominant
duo regularly took large bonuses (see Figs. 1 and 3) — measured either by the
percentage of posts won (PN) or by their percentage “value” (PV), computed according to the importance of posts on six-point scale devised by Leiserson (Leiserson,
1968, p. 778)4. In contrast, the “minority” groups within the party were subjected
to harsh treatment. Miki-ha won only four posts under Kishi regime — 5 per cent
PN or 6.5 per cent PV for 11 per cent representation within the party. Kônô was
and impartially”, they are supposedly “neutral” and doesn’t vote except for breaking a tie — just like
the speaker and vice-speaker of the House. Therefore, in order to override any opposition at the committee
level, the governing party must not only control 50 per cent of the House’s seats — and be awarded half
of the seats in every committee as the result — but also fill every of the 18 chairmenships (Valeo and
Morrison, p. 39–50).
4
According to this scale, the prime ministership is worth six points. The LDP general-secretaryship and
the Ministry of Finances are worth five points. The chairmanship of both the LDP Executive Board and the
Policy Board (PARC) is worth four points, as well as Agriculture, MITI, and the two “cashboxes portfolios” — Transportation and Construction. When there are either an LDP Vice-president, a Deputy prime
minister or a State minister without portfolio, they are worth three points for their faction, as well as the
minister of Foreign Affairs and the Economic Planning Agency chief. Justice, Education, Health and Welfare,
Defense, Home Ministry, Labor, Post and Telecommunications, and National Territory are worth two points
each. Science and Technology Agency, Management Coordination Agency, Hokkaı̈do Agency, Environment
(created in 1971) and Okinawa Development Agency (created in 1972) are worth only one point, as well
as the post of Cabinet chief-secretary. When a post — usually Science and Technology, Hokkaı̈do or Okinawa
Agency — is combined with another one, its value is halved. In order to account for the growing importance
of some issues after 1980, we raised the value of the Ministry, of Foreign Affairs to four points, the Defense
to three points and the Management Coordination Agency to two points.
J.-M. Bouissou / Electoral Studies 20 (2001) 581–602
591
left out of Ikeda-A and-B cabinets, despite having about 15 per cent representation
(the same as the prime minister’s group) and the same thing happened to Fukuda
and Ishii, with about 16 per cent representation, in the Ikeda-E and—F cabinets.
The costs of this system of allocating the spoils are obvious. Factional infighting
led to extreme instability — six of the 15 cabinets lasted only six months — and
endangered decision-making. Kishi’s favoured Police Law and some important welfare and economic projects promoted by Ikeda failed as a result (Satô et al., 1990,
p. 194). Miki and Kônô episodically threatened to defect (Satô et al., 1990, p. 187).
When their followers resigned in anger from the second Kishi cabinet, intense pressure from the zaikai was necessary before fences between were mended (Satô et al.,
1990, p. 166–167). In order to reduce these costs, Ikeda devised a pattern of “revolving winning coalitions”, in which the prime minister invited the main habatsu in
rotation to enjoy a disproportionate share of the payoffs (Kohno, 1992). During the
next period, the combination of this pattern with a resurgent dominant duo produced
an era of “stability through unstability”.
3.2. Period two: loosening insulation (1967–1976)
Following the Lower House elections of January 1967, the LDP surplus slid to
24 seats. It rebounded to 44 in 1969, then went down again to 28 in 1972. Any of
the five main habatsu were in a position to deprive the party of a working majority
by defecting, and any of the three biggest could shatter its absolute majority. Outside
the LDP, new parties emerged at the centre of the policy space. The DSP, which
left the JSP in 1960, and the Kômeitô, which entered the Lower House in 1967,
won 19–31 and 25–47 seats, respectively, during this period. With most controversial
issues either solved or pushed onto the back burner as a result of economic growth,
an alliance with these centrist parties was no politically unthinkable. While the
Kômeitô at first joined hands with leftist local governments, the shrewdest ryôshû —
especially Tanaka — began to forge ties with the Buddhists. Furthermore, the cohesiveness of the conservative sub-space weakened. The relationship between the LDP
and the zaikai soured due to the pollution crisis and the hyper-inflation that followed
the first oil shock. At one point, the big business organization — the Keidanren —
announced that it was (temporarily) stopping financing the party (Baldwin, 1976).
As a consequence, the pressure against would-be defectors weakened and the threat
of defecting became credible. Miki used this to gain the prime ministership in 1974,
and to hold onto power until the end of 1976 despite being supported by only 96
of the 408 LDP Diet members (Satô et al., 1990, p. 337, 369).
In a context in which defection is a credible threat, the basic assumption is that
the dominant group will have to pay a higher price to ensure the stability of
coalitions. Indeed, as soon as the LDP majority shrank, the portfolio shares of the
Prime Ministerial faction and the dominant duo began to diminish (see Figs. 2 and
3). Satô attempted to lower this cost by increasing the duration of the cabinet —
Satô-F lasted a record 18 months. But this feat prompted “an enraged reaction”
among LDP backbenchers (Satô et al., 1990, p. 264), to whom the yearly turn-over
of posts guaranteed portfolios in due time. Satô’s foes mounted a successful drive
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among the 100 or so “party powerfuls” (yûryoku giin) to rewrite the party by-law.
The party president was limited to no more than two mandates — precluding Satô
from run for a sixth time in 1972.
Although this change prevented the incumbent faction from indefinitely using the
device of the “revolving” coalition and thus greatly weakened his bargaining power
vis-à-vis the other groups, it did not prevent the dominant duo from exercising a
“tyranny of the majority” (tasû no ôubô) in any open contest determined by numbers.
Thus, the minority groups attempted to avoid such contests. They bypassed the Convention by pressuring the prime minister into retiring (Satô, 1972, Tanaka, 1974)
and ensuring that the presidency was awarded as a result of a process of arbitration
by “neutral” party elders (Miki, 1974) or negotiations between the ryôshû themselves
(Fukuda, 1976). The attempt by the dominant duo to keep the old way under
Tanaka’s regime led to costly factional infighting. Tanaka-A lasted only five months,
Tanaka-C seven months, Tanaka-C’ four months, and Tanaka-D less than three
weeks. After this, Miki and Fukuda succeeded in establishing “minority cabinets” —
at one point reducing the share of the dominant duo to only 22 per cent of the posts
by value (PV) for 38 per cent representation (Miki-B).
3.3. Period three: near-parity in the Diet (1977–1980)
During four years between 1977 and 1980, the LDP was deprived of a working
majority in the Lower House, and reduced to a razor-thin majority in the Upper
House. The party sealed an informal or “partial” coalition (pâsharu rengôron) with
the opposition parties that allowed these a say in budget-making and a de facto veto
upon any piece of legislation (Satô et al., 1990, p. 389–392). Any of the five remaining habatsu were in position to end LDP hegemony by defecting — and the continued survival of the five lawmakers who defected in 1976 to form the New Liberal
Club had proved that defection was now a viable option. The political distance
between the LDP and the Centrists was reduced to almost nothing, as they now
joined hands to expel the leftists from local power all over Japan. The JSP itself
entered into coalition with the Conservatives at the local level. In the Diet, lawmakers
interacted in a friendly way in a “grey area” of hidden compromises, inebriated
conviviality and secret money (for an example, see Kishima, 1991, p. 26–43). Most
political pundits foresaw a grand coalition stretching from the liberal wing of the
LDP to the right wing of the JSP.
The period began with “minority cabinets”. Fukuda, supported by only 37 per
cent of LDP Diet members, made concessions to every other group. For the first
time, the Prime Ministerial faction won less than its “fair share” of posts (18.8 per
cent PV for 20.6 per cent representation) and the han shuryu-ha got more than the
shurya-ha. Fukuda relinquished some all-important posts to his foes — the LDP
general-secretaryship, one of the two “cashbox-portfolios” (Construction and
Transportation), and even the Ministry of Finances and the MIT1 — that the prime
minister’s faction used to monopolize. The system of perfect proportional sharing
was taking roots. Even Miki, the outgoing prime minister, was not made to pay for
J.-M. Bouissou / Electoral Studies 20 (2001) 581–602
593
having repeatedly threatened to break the party in 1974–1976. In Fukuda-A, his
group won 9.5 per cent PN for 10.5 percent representation.
The last attempt by the dominant duo to return to a system disproportionate payoff
allocations by exploiting their majority — by forcing an election for the presidency
to oust Fukuda, then taking back the LDP secretaryship under Ohira regime — led
to savage infighting. In what amounted to a de facto split, Fukuda vied against Ohira
in the Diet for the prime ministership, and the second Ohira cabinet lost a no-confidence vote in May 1980. Only an unexpectedly large victory in the ensuing Lower
House polls and intense pressure from within the “Power Triangle” — in other
words: the co-managers of the conservative sub-space — saved the LDP from breaking up (Masumi, 1985, p. 200–201).
As this period came to an end, the rules of the coalition game within the LDP had
changed. The dominant duo, albeit more numerous than ever (see Fig. 3), came to
accept the rule of proportional sharing. Moreover, the selection of the LDP president
was moved to venues where the “tyranny of numbers” was secondary to the necessity
of maintaining the party as a functional body. In this process, the so-called “party
elders” (chôrô giin) — about 20 senior politicians — acted as de facto representatives
of the LDP as a unitary actor. Since they were no longer eligible for any post, they
were supposedly neutral. Their intervention was called for by the ryôshû themselves
at the height of the factional battle. They nominated Miki for prime ministership, then
helped to negotiate the agreement which conferred the post to Fukuda.
3.4. Period four: LDP “territory” under stress (1980–1993)
In June 1980, the LDP won 23 seats more than a working majority. In 1983, it
fell short by five seats and needed to bring the NLC into the cabinet. In 1986, it
surpassed the threshold by 37 seats, and by 17 in 1990. However, since factions
greatly increased in size during the period we have just discussed, the defection of
a single habatsu could still destroy the conservative majority. Furthermore, the LDP
lost its majority in the Upper House in 1989, ushering a new regime of informal
coalition with opposition.
New and pressing issues gained salience. Notable among these were “administrative
reform” (code-word for economic deregulation and the market economy) and the cutting
of both the public deficit and social welfare. These issues divided the LDP, whose
backbenchers stubbornly resisted anything that threatened their constituencies. The
decision-making process within the “Power Triangle” was unable to cope with this
activation of new policy dimensions in the Japanese political space (Katô et al., 1995),
because the weakened executive power was unable to control both the lobbies within
the secretive PARC and the backbenchers. It took nine full years to establish a (greatly
watered down) consumption tax in 1989. LDP decision-making gradually ground to a
halt when the bursting of the “bubble economy” in 1990 pushed the issue of “political
reform” (seiji kaikaku) into the forefront amid public outcry over scandals. Neither
Kaifu nor Miyazawa could make the LDP move on this issue. This context shattered the
cohesiveness of the entire conservative sub-space. Large parts of the zaikai advocated
administrative reform, which was stubbornly opposed by both the bureaucracy and by
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privileged LDP constituencies among the peasantry and small business. Bureaucracy
and business furthermore were losing their own cohesiveness under the pressure for
changes. The price for keeping the LDP at the helm increased both in terms of declining
legitimacy (scandals) and increasing financial costs (Bouissou, 1995) while its performance in terms of decision-making declined. At the end of the 1980s, the Keidanren
called for the building of a new political structure patterned on the American two-party
system5, and some powerful LDP members of the dominant duo (from the Satô–
Tanaka–Takeshita lineage for example Kanemaru Shin) openly advocated breaking both
the governing party and the JSP in order to make space for a coalition at the centre
of the political spectrum (Kaku, 1992; Drucker, 1993; Silk and Kono, 1993). This
seemed all the more possible, since a majority of Conservative and Socialist backbenchers were by now cooperating to protect the status quo.
Within this general context, we might assume that the LDP would try to avoid
the threat of break-up by reducing the cost of the coalition game among the habatstu
to a minimum. In order to avoid any open confrontation between the factions, the
Convention was systematically bypassed in favour of hanashiai whose outcome was
endorsed afterward by the general assembly of LDP Diet members with minimal or
no opposition at all. In order to guarantee the fairest possible payoffs to everybody,
strict proportional sharing allocation of portfolios by seniority and regular yearly
turnover of cabinet and party posts became a way of life to which most LDP Diet
members comfortably accustomed themselves. The prime ministership itself was
allocated in turn to each of the five habatsu. The value of this top post was lowered
further, to a point where the prime minister’s faction was made to pay for getting
it by renouncing almost any other portfolio (see Fig. 2).
Fig. 3 clearly shows the way in which the allocation of payoffs became almost
perfectly proportional. From 1980 to 1993, the dominant group —
Tanaka/Takeshita — got 29.5 per cent of the posts by numbers (PN) and 29.7 per
cent by value (PV) for 27.7 per cent representation. Its dominant duo partner,
Suzuki/Miyazawa, did slightly less well (with 18.3 per cent PN and 18.5 PV for
19.8 per cent representation). But together they got 47.8 per cent PN and 48.2 per
cent PV for a total of 47.5 per cent representation: an exercise in extreme proportionality! Fukuda/Abe ha (21 per cent PN and 21.9 per cent PV for 18.6 per cent
representation) and Nakasone/Watanabe (17.2 per cent PN and 19.3 percent PV for
only 14.9 per cent representation) were slight winners. This was to the detriment of
the independents, who got only 5.2 percent PN and 3.8 percent PV for 10.3 per cent
representation. Even the declining Miki/Komoto group, which slid from 42 to 30
members, was fairly treated, with 8.8 per cent PN for 8.7 per cent representation.
While still noticeable, these deviations from proportional sharing were much less
significant than in any of the previous periods.6
5
See for exmple the declaration of the Keidanren in Asahi Shimbun, 5 January 1993.
Only one cabinet — Kaifu-A — clearly deviated from the pattern. The dominant duo won only 36.9
percent PV — a hefty 10 points malus. This “punishment” was readily explainable by external factors.
Kaifu came to power right after the LDP’s crushing defeat in the Upper House elections of July, 1989.
The two main causes for this defeat were the Recruit scandal — which tainted mainly the Takeshita
6
J.-M. Bouissou / Electoral Studies 20 (2001) 581–602
595
Admittedly, cabinet and party posts are not the only spoils of office that the factions battle for. They can reap another benefit in the form of dominance over the
decision-making “tribes” of the PARC — and the ensuing capacity to raise money
or gain party endorsement for their newcomers at election time. During this period,
they continued to battle for both endorsements (Cox and Rosenbluth, 1996) and
control over tribes (see below). Even in these fields, however, the benefits became
more and more evenly shared (Cox and Rosenbluth, 1993), while the space left open
to competition for posts was reduced to almost nil. As a consequence, there were no
more open struggles between factions, much less mud-slinging and no more leaders
threatening to leave — all of which were heavy costs for the party in the preceding
periods. To set against this, the decision-making ability of the LDP was damaged
as a result of the further debilitation of the prime ministership, at a time when the
context called for painful reforms under strong political leadership. This cost generated pressure from within the conservative sub-space, which tended to want to split
the party rather than keep it united as in the preceding periods. Furthermore, although
the habatsu made a concession to the party by renouncing disproportionate sharing,
their ultimate raison d’être remained to win the best possible share of the spoils.
The iron-rule of proportionality weighed most heavily upon the most powerful group
(which was forced to renounce any advantage associated with being at the core of
internal party politics) and upon the younger backbenchers, who faced the prospect
of waiting 15 to 17 years before getting a portfolio. In the end, a strong man from
the dominant Takeshita group7 — Ozawa Ichirô — led the defection of 35 of his
fellow faction members, of which 72 per cent were in their first, second or third
mandate. They joined with the Centrists and Socialists to give birth to the Hosokawa
cabinet (August 1993) and in this way brought the Gojyûgonen taisei to an end.
4. Conclusions and questions
The first purpose of this paper has been to explore the interaction between the
politics of coalition between factions within the LDP, on one hand, and inter-party
politics in the wider political system, on the other.
The yearly reshuffles of cabinet and party posts that characterized the Goyûgonen
taisei were full-fledged exercises in intra-party coalition-building, in which primary
actors were the habatsu. This exercise was deemed by LDP backbenchers to be
necessary in order to advance their careers because posts consistently enhanced their
group — and the creation of a very unpopular consumption tax — for which responsibility was borne
by Miyazawa Kiichi, Finance Minister since 1987. Since Lower House elections were due before the
summer of 1990, the “dominant duo” has to be punished in the eyes of the electorate. But the punishment
was not so heavy if we consider the number of posts they won (43.4 percent PN). Proportionality was
re-established as soon as the Lower House election was over (Kaifu-B), and the loss incurred by the
dominant duo was made for by a hefty bonus in Kaifu-C.
7
Takeshita has pushed an ailing Tanaka out of the presidency of the group in 1985 and remained as
its sole leader.
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ability to raise money and be re-elected. This is why they pushed out the powerful
Satô when he tried to change the rule. The habatsu were exclusively office-driven
actors. Their desire to maximize the number of posts available to their members was
the ultimate explanation for their unwillingness to amend the party by-law in order
to reduce the frenetic frequency of the re-allotment of spoils. But the office-driven
logic of the factions essentially ignored a wide range of other costs this entailed for
the LDP as a party.
These costs were of three kinds:
1. the debilitation of the party’s decision-making role as a result of cabinet instability, which threatened the capacity of the government to produce the outputs
necessary to satisfy the electorate;
2. the damage produced by mud-slinging during open confrontations between factions, which threatened to delegitimise the party in the eyes of the electorate;
3. the ultimate risk of the party breaking-up, aggravated by the fact that the LDP
was an ideological melting-pot, whose liberals were closer on some issues to the
opposition parties than to their rightist conservative party colleagues8.
The dynamics of coalition politics within the LDP thus offer some important insights
for coalition theory. Office-driven logic clashes head-on with policy-driven logic,
since all Diet members want as many posts as possible, while all faction leaders
have some preferred policies. In order to advance these policies, the faction leaders
want to build the strongest possible habatsu. In order to do this, they must gain as
many posts as possible for their men. Containing the zero-sum conflict generated by
this scramble for posts leads to the frenetic re-allotment of posts typical of the Gojyûgonen taisei. And this frenetic re-allotment led to an instability that undermined
policy- and decision-making. In other words, the demands of purely office-driven
factional actors conflicted with those of the governing party, since satisfactory policy
outputs are a key determinant of overall electoral success.
Beneficial as the yearly coalition exercise was for LDP Diet members, they were
forced to lower the costs of this as much as possible in order to avoid weakening
the party to the point where it could lose the election. In doing this, they attempted
to use most of the tricks discussed by Carol Mershon in the Italian context (Mershon,
1996, p. 540–541, 1997). These included:
앫 The expansion of offices — used by Italian DC (Mershon, 1996, p. 540) — might
have reduced the costs by making more portfolios available rather than turning
these over so frequently. The bureaucracy, however, opposed any reform that
might encroach upon the “territory” of any ministry The bureaucracy, furthermore,
8
To cite only a few, in 1972, Tanaka, Ohira and Miki promoted a pro-Beijing foreign policy, together
with the JSP, against the pro-Taı̈pei Satô and Fukuda. In 1976, Miki advocated the right to strike for the
public servants — a key revendication for the JSP, but anathema to most of the LDP. Also, the moderate
cud rightist wings among the LDP have been constantly at odds about the Constitution, which the moderates oppose amending, together with opposition parties.
J.-M. Bouissou / Electoral Studies 20 (2001) 581–602
597
was not a subordinate organ of the executive, but rather an all-important co-manager in something that we have characterised as “the conservative sub-space”, the
cohesiveness and survival of which were the prime goal of the LDP. Thus there
was only a marginal expansion of offices. Three additional posts were created on
some occasions — these were LDP Vice-president, Deputy prime minister and
State minister without portfolio. Some other posts, which were usually combined
with more important portfolios, were sometimes upgraded to full-fledged portfolios (Hokkaı̈do Agency, Science and Technology Agency). Nevertheless, only
between 23 and 26 posts were distributed in all the cabinets from 1955 to 1993.
앫 Reliance on rules and codification of bargaining procedures. As in the Italian
DC, the LDP’s politicians put limits on their own behaviour, and these limits
became more and more constraining as time went by. Proportionality became an
iron rule for distributing cabinet portfolios and the top party posts. The qualitative
differences among posts were as precisely measured — as a matter of common
knowledge — by the LDP politicians than they were in Italy by “The Cencelli
Manual” (Mershon, 1996, p. 541). In order to escape the “tyranny of majority”,
another set of constraints was introduced to protect the minority (Satô and Matsuzaki, 1986, p. 63–64; Kohno, 1992). For example, after 1980, no faction was
entitled to more than one of the three top party posts or “cashbox portfolios”.
The party general secretaryship could not be held by the same faction as the post
of party treasurer. The job of nominating cabinet ministers was taken away from
the prime minister and given to the faction leaders. The faction leaders themselves,
however, were constrained by the iron-rule of seniority. This forced them to nominate every one of their members in their sixth mandate, then to give each member
another post before the end of their eighth mandate; any attempt at leap-frogging
a “favourite son” into power would have endangered the cohesiveness of the group
(Kohno, 1992, p. 379–380).
앫 Revision of rules was firstly used in order to put an end to the “tyranny of
majority” in 1972. The amendment of party by-laws forced the leader of the dominant duo to relinquish the presidency after four years. This change opened the
way to heightened competition within the dominant duo itself, beginning with the
eviction of Satô by his lieutenant Tanaka. This opened a new whole world of
opportunities to the minority groups. In 1976, in the wake of the Lockheed scandal, the LDP “democratised” the selection process for presidency under pressure
from public opinion. Each party member was allowed to vote in primary elections,
after which the Convention was given the job of choosing between the two top
candidates. This change was dangerous, however, because it entailed enormous
financial costs and a head-on struggle between the candidates in front of the public
as a whole. The first contest (1978), which led to the ousting of Fukuda by Ohira,
almost broke the party two years latter. Thus the politicians became more pragmatic and changed party practices according to the context. From 1974 to 1993,
only two presidents were chosen according to the formal rule (Ohira, 1978, Nakasone, 1982). In other cases the choice was left to an agreed arbitrator (Miki, 1974)
or to the outgoing prime minister (Takeshita, 1987) negotiated directly between
the top contenders (Fukuda, 1976) or arranged by the five ryôshû under the guid-
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ance of party elders (Unô, 1989, Kaifu, 1989, Miyazawa, 1991). The “official
candidate” was then presented for approval to the general assembly of the party’s
Diet members — where there was no more than symbolic opposition.
앫 A restriction of the flow of information resulted from this way of relegating the
selection process to smoke filled rooms. This allowed the LDP to escape the type
of criticism that erupted after the Convention of 1972, when the media reported
stories about cash-stuffed envelopes changing hands in corridors, and coined the
word kinken seiji (money politics), which instantly became a common word used
to criticize the style of the governing party. Coalition-building was thereby insulated from the pressure of public opinion — which Tanaka and then Miki tried
to use for enhancing their position vis à vis opposing factions. The more secretive
and insulated the process, the less both policies and personality issues complicated
the pure office-driven logic of the process. This logic prevailed to the point that
politicians unknown to 95 per cent of the electorate and without any articulated
position on the issues became prime ministers, by the sole virtue of proportional
allocation and the seniority rule — most notably Suzuki Zenkô in 1980.
As a result of all these mechanisms, the yearly turnover occurred smoothly, the
criteria for the allotment of spoils were reduced to pure arithmetic, every actor was
guaranteed a fair share, and no factor alien to the logic of this process was allowed
to interfere. The restriction in the flow of information also reduced certain costs for
the party, such as delegitimization, but at the same time it aggravated other costs,
most noticeably producing a decline in the effectiveness of policy-making.9 Not only
did posts change hands yearly but, to ensure that they were just numbers in the
arithmetic of internal party politics, posts were also deprived of almost all decisionmaking power. The Cabinet Law (Naka hô), which stipulates that a proposed law
must be signed by all the cabinet members before being sent to the Diet, gives every
minister a veto upon any policy — in practice neutralizing the cabinet as an organ
of collective decision-making. Significantly, this stipulation was never questioned;
as we already seen, LDP politicians managed this cost by delegating the policy- and
decision-making to party organs — especially the zoku (tribes) of the PARC — and
even further into the conservative sub-space, to the bureaucracy and to innumerable
consultative bodies.
Since the zoku are very important actors in the policy- and decision-making we
might think that faction members would try to grab hidden pork-barrel gains and that
their leaders would try to realise their policy objectives by establishing dominance at
this level. Indeed, the dominant group (Tanaka/Takeshita) succeeded in establishing
an iron grip on the all-important Construction tribe, which is the key to both financial
contributions from companies involved in public works and to constituency services
such as roads and bridges. According to a computation by Satô and Matsuzaki, in
9
As witnessed during the l980s’ by the ultimate failure of the first attempt at the “administrative
reform” — the name code for the deregulation of the economy and balancing budget — despite a strong
pressure from both the zaikai and part of LDP’S powerfulls.
J.-M. Bouissou / Electoral Studies 20 (2001) 581–602
599
1986, six of the 13 “powerful of the tribe” (kankei yûryoku giin) belonged to Takeshita-ha and two belonged to its ally into the then dominant duo (Ohira/Suzuki), as
opposed to only one each for the Fukuda/Abe lineage and Nakasone-ha, and none
for Miki/Kômotô, with five independents. The Takeshita-ha members were the most
powerful among the powerful. Representation was much more proportional in most
other tribes, however (Satô and Matsuzaki, 1986, p. 267–272). And, since every
faction was entitled to a post of Deputy secretary-general, Deputy PARC chairman
and Deputy Executive Board chairman — these posts were the keys to decisionmaking after the PARC commissions (idem p. 63–64) — this set of constraints prevented any faction leader from forcing its preferred policies upon the others. It also
ensured that intra-party coalitional politics would remain office-driven, according to
the office-driven logic of the habatsu.
As we noticed above, the costs of all of this finally put an unbearable burden on
the party’s policy- and decision-making during Period Four. The politicians tried to
remedy this by creating a growing number of ad hoc commissions directly attached
to the Prime Minister’s office and by expanding the human resources of the cabinet
(Thayer, 1996; Hayao, 1993), but to no avail. As the conservative territory lost its
cohesiveness under the stress of new and pressing issues, a growing part of the
“Power Triangle” elite and the public as a whole clamoured for a strong political
leadership — the code-word for which was “political reform” (seiji kaikaku) —
whose ultimate goal was to replace the office-driven intra-party coalition game by
a policy-driven logic. The reluctance of the backbenchers to agree to this paralysed
any attempt at change until the LDP finally broke, with the help of some co-managers
from within the “conservative subspace” itself.
The second purpose of this paper was to explore the notion of a “political subspace”, and especially the notion “insulation as a political resource”. The idea of
a “political sub-space” helps to throw some light on the Japanese case, as well as
others in which clientelist politics mean that the daily life of the inhabitants of “insulated party territories” is at least partially catered for by organizations so closely
linked to party and/or individual politicians that they may be defined as “co-managers” of the territory. This is illustrated by the striking parallel between the changing
pattern of the factional politics within the LDP and the changing conditions within
the conservative sub-space as a whole.
We have argued that the notion of a sub-space helps us to understand why politicians were unable to lower the cost of coalition-building through an expansion of
offices — which the bureaucracy opposed — while at the same time they were able
to reduce the cost burdening the party’s policy- and decision-making by delegating
a large part of this function to the bureaucracy. This is because LDP politicians did
not feel that they were “giving away” their power to “foreigners”. Rather, they shared
it with the co-managers of a strongly institutionalised and sympathetic community,
whose smooth and efficient functioning was vital for the very survival of the politicians themselves.
The concept of insulated political sub-spaces also explains why, even when the configuration of the Japanese policy space and parliamentary arithmetic seemed to make
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exit from the party feasible for certain factions, the minority habatsu did not use this —
even if they sometimes threatened to do so. This is because the coalitional politics was
played out primarily within an insulated and exclusive “conservative territory”, separated from the opposition parties by much more than a few parliamentary seats and
ever-diminishing cleavages over issues. The LDP Diet members were not only “politicians”; they were members of a Conservative establishment and decision-making
machinery of which the LDP was only a part. This structure dispensed not only vital
material resources but also the symbolic and psychological gratifications associated with
the belonging to a tightly knit elite. As a consequence, its preservation took precedence
over the immediate incentives to increase individual spoils—arising for example from
the defection of a faction from the LDP—that were available within the limited framework of the parliamentary system. In fact, significant defection occurred only when the
cohesiveness of the Conservative establishment and the efficiency of its “private”
decision-making machinery was shattered — and after defection was even openly called
for by some elements from within the conservative sub-space.
The concept of a sub-space also explains why the opposition parties never seriously
tried to encourage any faction to defect from the LDP. For example, in 1979, when
Fukuda ran in the Diet against Ohira for prime ministership, the opposition parties did
not take sides. They all ran their own presidents as candidate — thus deliberately
shutting themselves out of the “real” power game, which was taking place within the
LDP. For the seven and half years during which the LDP was not in full control of
one of the two Chambers — from January 1977 to June 1980 and after July 1989 —
they obviously preferred to maintain a regime of informal interaction with elements of
the LDP, rather than forcing the governing party to let one of them enter the cabinet.
One reason for this may well have concerned the fear that opening up their own exclusive territories might have had started a process of disintegration. Indeed, this is exactly
what happened to the Socialist territory as soon the JSP finally sealed a formal coalition
with the LDP after June 1994. The voters ran away from it and the party simply
disappeared, plunging from 143 House members in 1990 to only 19 in 2000. And the
same fate is now threatening the two parties that dared to enter into a coalition with
the LDP in 1999 — the New Conservative Party and the Kômeitô — both of whose
lost heavily in the Diet elections of 25 June 2000.
Appendix A. JAPANESE GOVERNMENTS (1955-1993)
HATOYAMA : November 1955
ISHIBASHI: December 1956. Continues with Kishi as Prime minister from February 1957.
KISHI-A to KISHI-C : July 1957–July 1960. Cabinet changes every June.
IKEDA-A to IKEDA-F: July 1960–November 1964. Ikeda-A and –B last only 6
months each, then cabinet is reshuffled every July. Ikeda-F continues with Satô
as Prime minister until June 1965.
SATO-A to SATO-G: July 1965–June 1972. Reshuffles are moved to November
in 1966, then carried on a yearly basis except for Satô-F (January 1970-J to
June 1971)
J.-M. Bouissou / Electoral Studies 20 (2001) 581–602
601
TANAKA-A: July–December 1972. TANAKA-B: December 1972-November
1973.
TANAKA-C: November 1973–November 1974 (partially reshuffled in June
1974).
TANAKA-D: November 1974 (lasts only three weeks)
MIKI-A: December 1974 (partially reshuffled in December 1975). MIKI-B: September 1976.
FUKUDA-A and -B: December 1976–December 1978
OHIRA-A and –B: December 1978–July 1980 (Ohira-B shortened by Prime minister’s death)
SUZUKI-A and –B: July 1980–November 1982 (Back to winter reshuffles in November 1982)
NAKASONE-A to NAKASONE-E: November 1982–November 1986 (Yearly
winter reshuffles)
TAKESHITA-A to –C: November 1986–May 1989 (Takeshita-C shortened by
scandal)
KAIFU-A to –C: August 1989–November 1991
MIYAZAWA-A to –C: November 1991–July 1993
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