Scheiner (2006) Democracy without competition

Scheiner (2006) Democracy without competition

The puzzle that Scheiner attempts unpack is what has allowed for the survival of the LDP as Japan’s leading party since 1955 and what explains opposition failure. The puzzle is even more interesting because the LDP is not popular with the voters and unlike other hegemonic parties such as Mexico’s PRI which win elections with over 60% of the vote the LDP barely wins with 55% of the vote. Scheiner finds that the Japanese case especially telling because the LDP has not only survived being unpopular but has also survived even when the economy tanked and there was no reason why voters would reward them by reelecting them. He also shows that the general public was disgusted by rampant corruption and yet the opposition has not been able to capitalize on this weakness and make inroads in the political arena.

 Scheiner argues that the main reason why the LDP has continued to win and the opposition fails is because of clientelistic networks that the party has built and the opposition has not been able to match them.  He defines clientelism as “benefits that are awarded to people who supported the party and are withheld from those who are found, on the basis of some kind of monitoring, not to have supported it.” He acknowledges that it is hard to measure clientelism but in the Japanese case he used observations of investments in the regions being punished and those being rewarded as a measure of clientelism. The difference between clientelism and ordinary pork in this case is that in Japan resources are centralized and the government has a hold on all the public resources and can use those to reward or punish those whom it sees as opposing them.  The combination of clientelism and centralized government  and electoral protection of groups who benefit  from clientelism has led to the survival  of the  LDP.

What explains opposition failure?  He argues that the opposition has been fielding weak candidates who are easily credited and unknown outside the communities. The ruling party has resource advantage, they have access to the state pots which they then use to fuel their clientelistic networks, voters do not trust the opposition, the opposition sometimes has radical ideology, the ruling party has been using its majorities in parliament to change the electoral institutions the SNTV as been influential in keeping the LDP in power.

Scheiner uses evidence from expenditure from public works and development projects to measure clientelistic networks and their hold on national politics. He also uses content analysis and observational methods to assess the relationships.

The strength is that the book is very intuitive and well written and that is a big plus. I am actually thinking that a lot of the focus was on opposition parties and so that is what the book should have been about, tracing the formation and failure of opposition parties.  I also don’t think of the LDP as hegemonic because it has not been winning with large margins of the vote, so in that way I think it is no longer hegemonic. I would have also liked to see a lot more attention paid to the tactics that the ruling party uses to keep the opposition out of office. A study on individual voters and their perceptions of the opposition party would also build on to the explanation.