Speaker：Amy Catalinac [the Department of Politics, New York University]

Date：July 3, 2024／15:30‐17:30 (JST)

Location：Room 549 on the 5th floor of Akamon General Research Bldg.
　　　　　http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/campusmap/cam01_08_02_j.html

Language：English

Target : Open to the public

Abstract：Japan is the fourth largest economy in the world and an important ally of the United States. Yet its politics are highly anomalous: it has been ruled almost continuously by a single party since that party's formation in 1955. My book offers a new theory, group-based clientelism, that can account for this puzzle. The theory holds that under the right institutional conditions, democratically-elected politicians will be able to form clientelistic relationships with groups of voters in their electoral districts. By this, I mean they will be able to tie the amount of central government resources groups of voters receive to the level of electoral support they provide. I further argue that in Japan's case, the sheer dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party has allowed politicians to pit groups of voters against each other in a competition for resources, what I call a tournament. Leveraging a wealth of quantitative and qualitative data over the thirty five-year period from 1980 to 2014, I show that tournaments have been a key component of LDP electoral strategies since 1980. The book provides a new lens through which we can understand many facets of Japanese politics, such as the LDP's longevity, the weakness of the opposition, the source of internal conflicts in the LDP, the truncated effect of Japan's 1994 electoral reform, and discrepancies in what voters want and what the LDP provides.