Democracy in Japan: The Logic of One-Party Dominance

Analyzes Japanese democracy utilizing a comprehensive survey of politicians and voters.

Democracy in Japan is based on the monumental UTokyo-Asahi Survey, a survey of Japanese voters and political leaders conducted over two decades. It succeeds in estimating the preferences of individual politicians-including prime ministers and other top leaders-in the most straightforward and reliable way and comparing them with voters on the same scale. As a result, Masaki Taniguchi shows, the survey empirically reveals that the Liberal Democratic Party has been able to maintain one-party dominance despite its unprecedented shift to the right since 2012-not because voters’ preferences have become more conservative but because it has maintained its valence in economic policy, which is not related to the left-right axis in Japan.

Masaki Taniguchi is Professor of Political Science at the University of Tokyo. He is the author or coauthor of many books, including (in Japanese) Representative Democracy in Modern Japan: Voters and Politicians.