Democracy Without Competition in Japan: Opposition Failure in a One-Party Dominant State

Extract

Democracy Without Competition in Japan: Opposition Failure in a One-Party Dominant State. By Ethan Scheiner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 286p. $70.00 cloth, $27.99 paper.

The resilience of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is the most remarkable feature of the Japanese political system. The party sustained majorities in both houses of the Diet and ruled the cabinet alone from its founding in 1955 until 1989. It was one of the few ruling parties in the industrialized democracies to survive the oil crises of the 1970s, and it somehow managed to escape the voters' wrath over innumerable corruption scandals. The party's image in public opinion surveys became so negative in the middle to late 1970s that political scientist Ichiro Miyake coined the term “negative partisans” to describe the many voters who backed the LDP in elections despite professing negative images of the party.