5 - Perfect Storm Conditions for Tournaments in Japan

Summary

The book adopts a two-pronged empirical strategy to test the theory. First, a deep dive into a country’s political institutions is required, to ascertain whether electoral districts meeting the conditions for group-based clientelism exist. Second, after these electoral districts have been identified, the researcher must gather data on voting behavior, resource allocations, and other confounding variables at the level of the administrative entity within (tournament-possible) electoral districts and devise stringent empirical tests capable of pitting the theory’s expectations against those of rival theories. This chapter implements the first prong of this empirical strategy, using information about Japan. It presents a detailed overview of how electoral district boundaries are drawn, how votes are counted, what the relevant lower-tier entities are (in Japan’s case, they are municipalities) and how these entities are funded. It explains that Japanese municipalities depend for large shares of their revenue on national treasury disbursements (NTD), which are allocated by bureaucrats but vulnerable to influence by politicians. It classifies the universe of electoral districts that have been used in Japan’s Lower House elections, 1980–2014, as tournament-possible (or not), and it presents evidence that election outcomes are qualitatively different across both sets of districts, in the direction expected by the theory.