Abstract
I argue that the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) of Japan employed a strategy to prevent unpopular prime ministers from tainting the party’s image. Time-series analyses of public opinion data from 1960 to 2006 show that national economic performance had modest effects on prime minister support ratings and no effects on LDP ratings. When prime minister ratings fall below party ratings, cabinets are more likely to be reshuffled and prime ministers to be replaced to avoid having the cabinet’s negative image ‘rub off’ on the LDP. Although electoral rules, culture, and other factors surely play a role in sustaining the LDP, I show for the first time that the party manages its cabinet personnel strategically to maintain support.
Introduction
Among liberal industrial democracies, Japan’s long history of single party rule makes it unique. Aside from a short period in 1993, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) held an outright majority of seats or was the largest party in government from the 1950s until 2009. Twenty-two of the last 28 prime ministers were from the LDP, covering all but four and a half years since 1955. This record of one-party hegemony puts Japan above countries such as Mexico, India, Sweden, Italy, and Israel that also experienced lengthy periods of control by one party or coalition. The LDP’s dominance appeared to be reasonably well explained by scholars until the 1990s, but structural changes since then have raised additional questions. In this article I propose and test the notion of ‘strategic calibration’ as an explanation for the long-term success of the LDP in Japan. Reflecting the fundamental truth that parties endure longer than leaders do, I show that the party managed its leadership to take advantage of popular prime ministers and avoid being dragged down by unpopular ones.
Two of the most common explanations for LDP success centre on the credit the party earned for presiding over post-war economic growth and the advantage it received from the electoral system. Both of these accounts contain valuable insights, yet have difficulty explaining LDP success from the early 1990s onward, when economic performance stalled and the electoral system was reformed. The apparent lack of accountability raises serious normative issues and makes Japan something of an outlier among industrial democracies. How does a party remain dominant in the face of challenges to its traditional bases of support?
As with any party, the LDP employed multiple tactics to stay in power (Curtis, 1999; Greene, 2007; Hrebenar, 2000; Krauss and Pekkanen, 2011; Pempel, 1990; Scheiner, 2005). Because no single manoeuvre can guarantee its continued success, the party worked simultaneously on multiple fronts to retain its place in government over the post-war period. Yet these well-worn strategies should have become less effective over time, thus raising questions about how critical they were to LDP success over the entire post-war period. Building on existing arguments about the ideological flexibility of the party and its use of government spending to win votes, I posit that the LDP also managed its personnel to take advantage of popular leaders and dissociate itself from the cabinet when the prime minister falls into public disfavour. Using public opinion data from 1960 to 2006, I show that the prime minister’s ratings affect party ratings but not the other way round. This asymmetric relationship is convenient because the party has the power to replace its leaders but leaders generally cannot change their parties. 1 I observe that when the relative support of the prime minister compared to the party is low, leadership changes are more likely to take place. Because outgoing leaders are blamed for government failings, the party is largely able to maintain its public image and retain its parliamentary dominance.
The rest of the article unfolds as follows. First, I note how the reforms in the early 1990s changed party politics in Japan in light of theories that attempt to explain LDP dominance in terms of the electoral system and economic performance. Although quite plausible during the ‘system of 1955’, these accounts have more trouble explaining LDP success since then. Public opinion surveys show that support for the LDP fell sharply during the reform era, but that ratings of the prime minister’s cabinet went even lower. I demonstrate that unemployment and inflation have modest effects on ratings of the prime minister but no effects on LDP support. In addition, party support is a function of prime minister support, but not the other way round. Finally, I propose a theory of ‘strategic calibration’ by which party leaders replace the prime minister or other cabinet officials when prime minister support drops below that of his party. The popular standing of the prime minister relative to his party is significantly related to LDP personnel changes. I conclude that the LDP has taken advantage of the asymmetries in public opinion and structural relationships between the party and its leadership to filter out adverse public judgements.
Explanations for LDP dominance
No one factor underlies the LDP’s electoral dominance in the post-war ‘system of 1955’. The party benefited from a complex ‘virtuous circle’ in which the advantages of incumbency, a biased electoral system, cooptation of fragmented opposition parties, a docile press, political culture, and a growing economy all reinforced one another (Pempel, 1998). Without fully revisiting all of these arguments here, I briefly highlight how popular theories fail to explain continued LDP success in the 1990s and beyond.
A factor widely believed to have underwritten LDP success over the post-war period was the electoral system. According to this popular argument, election rules were contributing factors to the LDP’s victories because they awarded the party significantly more seats than their vote-shares alone would suggest (Christensen and Johnson, 1995; Cox and Niou, 1994; Hrebenar, 2000). Specifically, the Liberal Democrats were provided with two crutches. Malapportioned districts overrepresented voters in rural LDP strongholds. Some research finds that unequal districts augmented the LDP’s vote (Baker and Scheiner, 2007), although other evidence attributes much of the bonus to district magnitude rather than malapportionment per se (Christensen, 2005; Christensen and Johnson, 1995). Perhaps more importantly, the multi-member districts used in lower house elections encouraged factionalism, parochialism and voters’ personal ties to LDP incumbents (Carey and Shugart, 1995; Curtis, 1999; Reed, 1994). 2
Multi-member districts also splintered the opposition. The electoral system helped fragment socialists, communists and opponents on the left, thus prohibiting a single progressive alternative to the LDP (Kohno, 2001). Fragmentation of the left was exaggerated at the end of the Cold War when a major political cleavage based on national security became less salient. Although there is disagreement about whether factions in the LDP caused the party to ‘over-nominate’ in an inefficient manner (Nemoto et al., forthcoming; cf. Reed, 2009), it is clear that opposition parties failed to run candidates in enough districts where they could have won seats, thus handing victories to the LDP in many cases (Reed and Kabashima, 2001). The magnitude of LDP nomination errors may have diminished over time (Cox and Rosenbluth, 1994), at least relative to other parties (Baker and Scheiner, 2007; Browne and Patterson, 1999). Furthermore, the success of the LDP created something of a self-fulfilling prophecy as new candidates joined the party’s ranks after winning office on their own (Scheiner, 2005).
But this multi-member district system was abandoned in favour of a mixed-member system in 1994. The mixed-member system selects some legislators by proportional representation and others via single-member districts (Shugart and Wattenberg, 2003). This design was expected to challenge the LDP by coalescing smaller parties into a left of centre voting bloc (Reed, 1990). Parties and voters have been slowly adapting to the new rules.
In fact, it has been argued that the new electoral system favours the LDP just as much as the old one did (McKean and Scheiner, 2000), and that the old electoral system provided less advantage than previously thought (Krauss and Pekkanen, 2011). My approach circumvents this specific debate by examining poll data rather than election results. Malapportionment and multi-member district might well have contributed to LDP electoral majorities, but the same cannot be said of public opinion. Filtering public sentiment through a biased system would have given the LDP undue advantage only in elections. Public opinion, in contrast, ought to show less support for the LDP than election results alone would imply.
As the governing party, the LDP surely got much of the credit for the Japanese post-war economic miracle. Whereas the electoral system theory posits that Japanese voters were held captive by unfair election rules that prevented their dislike of the LDP from being realized, the economic theory assumes that voters rewarded the party for economic prosperity. According to this view, voters willingly tolerated corruption during the LDP’s reign in exchange for great economic success. Although frequent scandals might have lowered public trust in the government (Pharr, 2000), it was never enough to knock the LDP from power permanently. With low unemployment, a booming stock market, little inflation (outside the worldwide energy crises of the 1970s), and a burgeoning trade surplus, a dose of political graft was simply insufficient to knock the governing party from power. Such a relationship between voters and politicians is consistent with the ‘material inducement theory’ in which citizens provide support for a corrupt party as long as that party provides tangible economic benefits (Fackler and Lin, 1995).
While this account might nicely explain the ‘system of 1955’, the quid pro quo between voters and the LDP should have fallen apart by the 1990s. The Japanese economic bubble popped, sending the stock market downward, unemployment upward and the national banking system into turmoil. The economy grew annual at a rate of over 9 percent from 1956 to 1973, then a slower 4 percent rate until 1990, and barely at all in the 1990s (Bowen, 2003). The annual unemployment rate, which never reached as high as 3 percent until the mid-1990s, hit 5 percent by 2001. Twenty years later the Nikkei stock average sat as half of its 1990 value. While an exchange theory might explain both corruption and LDP dominance in the pre-reform era, it does not provide a complete account of Japanese politics since then.
In retrospect, it is possible that the economic theory does not even manage to explain LDP success between 1955 and 1993 that well. While political science scholarship shows the link between support for the incumbent government and the economy to be almost universal in post-industrial societies (Clarke et al., 2000; Erikson et al., 2002; Lewis-Beck, 1988; Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier, 2000; Norpoth, 1985), the economy’s influence on political support has not proved so robust in Japan. Reed and Brunk (1984) found some evidence for economic voting in Japan, but the effects only hold for the post-oil shock era, which has a sample size of just six elections. Inoguchi (1981, 1990) also showed some economic influence on elections, but only with limited samples and sparse models. Fukumoto’s (2004) more comprehensive analysis uncovered no impact of economic perceptions on prime minister support. Anderson and Ishii (1997) found that neither unemployment nor inflation helped to predict election outcomes. They concluded that ‘domestic economic conditions do not have a systematic impact on the electoral performance of either the LDP or JSP’ and researchers ‘need to revise our expectations that domestic economic conditions necessarily affect governments and parties’ (p. 630).
These mixed results are surprising because the Japanese setting is such an attractive case for studying economic effects on party politics. The factors that complicate studies in other nations are largely absent. Among other things, the LDP provides a convenient common denominator over a long period of time. Its central place in politics provides a consistent metric of evaluation. This provides ‘clarity’ to the electorate about who is responsible (Anderson, 1995; Powell and Whitten, 1993). 3 In addition, we need not account for the fact that left-leaning parties might be held more accountable for unemployment and right-leaning parties for inflation (Hibbs, 1977; Powell and Whitten, 1993) because the LDP essentially holds these factors constant. By comparative standards, the Japanese system ought to allow for maximal responsiveness of public opinion to macro-economic conditions.
Public opinion data
I begin the analysis with survey data compiled by the Jiji Press service during the post-war era. Remarkably, the methodology and question wording have remained unchanged through this entire period. 4 The Jiji data thus provide an invaluable resource for analysis of modern electoral politics in Japan (see Miyake et al., 2001). Early each month a representative sample of Japanese was interviewed in person and asked which party they currently supported and whether they supported the current prime minister’s cabinet. Following convention, I interpret the latter question as a measure of support for the prime minister. The prime minister is the head of government and has full authority to organize and staff the cabinet. Krauss and Nyblade’s recent analysis confirms that ‘these are the standard measures of prime minister popularity in Japan’ (2005: 365). 5 As I show below, these ratings jump quite dramatically when one prime minister is replaced by another, confirming that they are pegged to individual leaders. I study the period from June 1960 to April 2006 for a total of 550 monthly observations when lagged. 6
Figure 1 shows support for the prime minister and the LDP over this period. In terms of the prime minister, there are three things to note. First, support for the prime minister is generally low, averaging just 36 percent. Even in a single-party system, such low support rates make governing a challenge for the LDP and the careers of its leaders fragile. Second, there is tremendous volatility in the time series. Support ranges widely, from the single digits to nearly 80 percent. 7 Third, and related to the first two points, support tends to jump noticeably when a new prime minister is installed. The most dramatic upswings in the series are associated with replacement of an unpopular prime minister.
Support for prime minister and LDP.
Turning to the LDP series, the contrast with prime minister series is remarkable. LDP support rates are a bit lower than prime minister support and do not vacillate much, even during times of great tumult in the party system. Aside from the secular decline exhibited during the scandals of the 1970s, the only marked shift occurs during the reform era, when the party’s support dropped by ten points.
While LDP politicians would surely prefer to have strong public support for both the party and its leaders, I argue below that they are most interested in the relative standing of these two indicators, mainly because prime minister support may affect party support. I thus compute a composite measure called ‘relative support’, which is the difference between LDP and prime minister ratings. Figure 2 displays this measure over the past 45 years. Values below zero indicate more support for the current leadership than for the LDP, while positive values indicate that the party is more popular than its leader.
Relative support for LDP and prime minister.
The time series itself conveys useful information about specific events. For example, the large drop in 1972 corresponds to the installation of the popular Kakuei Tanaka as prime minister. The line rises above zero as the Lockheed bribery scandal later dragged Tanaka’s support downward, leading to his replacement. Aside from the unusual stamina of the Nakasone governments in the 1980s, the two series were roughly equal until the early 1990s. Since that time, the LDP has consistently underperformed relative to the prime minister. Until the end of the reform era, the mean levels of cabinet and LDP support were 35 percent and 32 percent; afterwards the values stood at 39 percent and 23 percent, thus widening the gap from 3 to 15 percentage points. Importantly, this separation does not generally result from the greater popularity of recent prime ministers. The gap has grown because of the LDP’s decline. While the reforms of the early 1990s might not have altered the relationship between economic performance and attitudes toward the LDP and its leaders, the noticeable drop in LDP support after 1994 and volatility of prime minister support since then has lowered relative support as well. This leaves the party in a more precarious position than governing parties in many other nations.
From these figures it is clear that prime minister support is more volatile, and in recent years is also higher, than support for the LDP. The prime minister time series swings up and down over time, crossing back and forth across the more stable LDP line. I operationalize the difference between the two percentages as relative support. The following section provides the empirical foundation for this argument.
Relationship between prime minister and LDP support
Having scrutinized party and prime minister support ratings visually, I now provide a more rigorous characterization of their properties and relationships. 8 The first order of business is to understand the causal relationship between the two key indicators of support for the LDP and support for the prime minister. I employ the Granger causality test, a test that has been widely used in political time-series analysis such as this one (Burden and Mughan, 1999; Freeman, 1983; MacKuen et al., 1992). The test assumes that series X causes series Y if lagged values of X provide information about Y even in the presence of lagged values of Y. This requires regressing series Y on lagged values of X and Y, then conducting statistical significance tests to determine whether X is causal. This test rejects the null hypothesis that prime minister support does not cause LDP support (p = 0.015) but fails to reject the null hypothesis that LDP support does not cause prime minister support (p = 0.282). In other words, the prime minister shapes LDP support, but not the other way round. These results are nearly identical if the analysis is limited to just the pre-reform or post-reform eras, or if levels rather than differences are tested.
The causal primacy of prime minister support thus appears to be general truism that holds for the post-war era in Japan. The fundamental asymmetry between the two series is more than a statistical curiosity. It supports the conventional – but heretofore untested – wisdom that party popularity in Japan is a function of the prime minister’s support (Krauss and Nyblade, 2005). This unidirectional influence becomes critical below as I develop an explanation for how the LDP has insulated itself from public blame and taken advantage of popular leaders. First, we consider how economic indicators affect support for the prime minister and his party.
Economics and prime minister support
Having shown that prime minister support is unaffected by LDP support, I estimate a regression model to identify the other factors that are responsible for the government’s approval rating. I estimate an ordinary least squares regression model with a lagged dependent variable on the right-hand side. This is functionally equivalent to the distributed lag model employed by MacKuen et al. (1992). 9 The key explanatory variables are three economic indicators. I start with what Lewis-Beck and Paldam (2000) call ‘the big two’: inflation and unemployment. To these I add the monthly closing value of the Nikkei 225 stock average. 10
To these key economic indicators I add several structural variables as controls. One is the number of months the current prime minister has been in office. This duration indicator captures the idea that incumbents historically lose support the longer they are in office (Mueller, 1973; Paldam and Skott, 1995; Stimson, 1976), a common occurrence in contemporary Japan. Also included are dummy variables for each prime minister to capture idiosyncratic effects due to governing style or personal popularity. This is a convention in studies of leader support in other nations because it reveals the effects of the economy holding the incumbent constant (e.g. Erikson et al., 2002). Finally, the model includes a dummy variable for the post-reform era after July 1993.
Table 1 shows that the ‘big two’ economic indicators do indeed affect prime minister support ratings, although the effects are small. Contrary to most scholarly wisdom, I find that a three-point rise in inflation lowers the prime minister’s rating by about one point. Unemployment, long a non-issue in Japan, actually matters more. A 1-point increase in the unemployment rate lowers approval ratings by 2.1 points. These effects are smaller than those found in other nations (Lewis-Beck and Paldam, 2000), but they do show that the prime minister’s standing rises in good economic times and falls in bad ones. Public opinion toward the executive is at least mildly responsive to national economic conditions. This is an important conclusion because it differs from the conventional wisdom about Japan in which citizens might even turn more toward the familiar LDP in times of economic uncertainty (Curtis, 1999). The results may also differ from existing research because I rely on polling data rather than election results, which are the product of both strategic election timing and electoral rules.
Regression model of prime minister support.
Note: Cell entries are ordinary least squares coefficients with robust stan-dard errors in parentheses. Dummy variables for individual prime ministers not shown. Constant suppressed.
*p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, one-tailed test.
The remaining results are of less importance, so I give them only passing discussion. The coefficient of 0.66 on the lagged dependent variable shows substantial continuity in leader’s ratings over time, as would be expected. Also consistent with findings of the ‘cost of ruling’ in other nations, the duration variable suggests that prime ministers lose a small amount of support each month.
The important conclusion for now is that macro-economic conditions do shape support for the Japanese prime minister. Although economic effects might be dampened when it comes to elections, due to biases in the electoral system, inflation and unemployment appear to play minor roles in the unfiltered realm of public opinion. To the extent that prime ministers care about increasing their support, this provides some accountability for national economic performance.
But this is where direct sensitivity to economic conditions ends. The economy may affect prime minister support, but I have already shown that evaluations of the LDP do not. LDP support can thus only be affected by economic indicators indirectly through prime minister support. But by then their weak effects will have been watered down to near non-existence. More importantly, LDP party officials may intervene strategically to take advantage of good times and avoid punishment for bad times, further muting economic effects. The following section shifts the analysis from prime minister support to LDP support to explore this possibility.
Economics and LDP support
Because the LDP is affected by public support for the prime minister, I approach the multivariate analysis of LDP support using an error correction model (ECM). The ECM has become widely used in the analysis of public opinion because of its flexibility and intuitive nature (Clarke et al., 2000; Clarke and Stewart, 1995; Erikson et al., 2002). The approach permits one to account for this property of the series by including a factor that ‘corrects’ a series that has been pulled temporarily out of equilibrium by another series.
The model assumes that a series that is temporarily shocked will eventually return to its equilibrium level. The ECM approach also incorporates short-term factors that can push a series upward or downward temporarily. Based on the Granger causality test results, I set Yt= LDP support and Xt =prime minister support. These appear in a standard ECM formulation, ΔYt = β0 + β1ΔXt + γZ t –1, where γZt –1 = Yt –1 – Xt –1. What makes this model unique is Z t –1, an ‘attractor’ (Wood, 2000) that is conveniently equivalent to my measure of relative support. Its coefficient should be negative and significant if the LDP and prime minister support series are in a long-run equilibrium. The β1 coefficient reveals the short-term relationship between the two series. Other short-term variables thought to influence LDP support can also be included. The key explanatory variables are economic measures and the other controls used in the prime minister support model.
Table 2 reports the results of the ECM. Just as the Granger tests above indicated, prime minister support is a significant predictor of LDP support. The party benefits when the prime minister is popular but it is also harmed when his support falls. The coefficient of 0.216 indicates that party support moved about a little over one percentage point for every five points of change in support for the prime minister. Thus, an unpopular prime minister can drag down the party’s image over time just as a popular leader can improve the party’s standing. In addition, the error correction mechanism is negative and statistically significant. Controlling for other factors, the post-reform era shows no independent effects on party support. 11
Error correction model of LDP support.
Note: Cell entries are ordinary least squares coefficients with robust standard errors in parentheses. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, one-tailed test.
Most importantly, all three economic factors fail to influence LDP approval. 12 This stands in contrast to the earlier finding that support for the prime minister’s cabinet is responsive to inflation and unemployment. Mirroring what the literature has found with regard to Japanese elections, it appears that economic effects have been filtered out before they reach the party.
To summarize the results to this point, I have shown that the economy has modest but direct effects on prime minister support. Economic variables do not shape LDP support directly, but they have minor effects on the party via its leader. This raises the question of precisely why economic accountability does not cross the threshold from leader to party, despite the LDP’s near-permanent hold on the government. In the next section I consider explicitly how the party manages the relationship between prime minister and party support to avoid the party being dragged down by a prime minister dragged downward by a weak economy.
Strategic calibration
There has been a growing tendency over time for prime minister support to run ahead of LDP support, sometimes by large margins. The gap has been especially evident in the post-reform era. Japanese newspapers have often noted when a prime minister was running ahead of his party in its coverage of monthly poll results. I contend that the LDP also monitors relative support and works to ensure that at least some of the cabinet’s popularity ‘rubs off’ on the party.
To the degree that voters identify a government with a particular party, there is a natural relationship between party and leader support (Clarke et al., 2000). A popular party leader can cause an enduring improvement in his party’s standing, as Ronald Reagan did for the US Republicans in the 1980s. LDP politicians care about the party’s image because it affects election results and thus their careers. 13 The relationship is more complex in Japan due to the historical strength of factions within the LDP. Especially in the pre-reform era, the prime ministership was expected to rotate among factions and cabinet positions are often distributed to balance factional demands. Factional candidates compete intensely for the party’s nomination because they value association with the party (Cox and Rosenbluth, 1996). By being part of the LDP, Diet members are able to raise more money, signal their credibility to voters, deliver pork to constituents, and be part of the governing coalition (Ramseyer and Rosenbluth, 1997; Scheiner, 2005).
More critically, when the LDP is in power the prime minister is also officially the president of the party. When a prime minister suffers publicly from poor performance, competing faction leaders will be waiting in the wings to replace him. LDP leaders are encouraged to step down by party factions who become dissatisfied with their performance, or what Richardson (1997: 67) calls ‘intraparty understanding’. Even in a party that is far from monolithic, Richardson points to such common concerns as poor election outcomes, weak standing in monthly opinion surveys, and lack of legislative accomplishment as possible motives for replacing a leader. In the case of Kakuei Tanaka’s ouster in 1974, Richardson explains that rank-and-file party members were concerned that Tanaka’s problems would hamper their electoral fortunes, precisely the kind of negative ‘rub off’ that my theory suggests. As Tanaka’s popularity plummeted that summer due to scandal, the party replaced him with Takeo Miki, the leader of another, less-tainted faction.
We now know that the relationship between party and prime minister support is asymmetric. LDP support responds to prime minister support, but not the reverse. In addition, the party and its leader are structurally unequal. Parties tend to endure but leaders must be replaced. Although a party can in theory disband, LDP politicians have invested too much in the party and expect too many benefits to abandon it hastily. 14 Low support levels for the party are especially dismaying because all members of the party must live with them.
In contrast, an unpopular cabinet can be replaced. This can happen by calling for a snap election under the guise that a new prime minister will be selected. Or the ruling party can simply sack its prime minister mid-term, choosing a replacement without the uncertainty of a national election. A more conservative, stop-gap, approach is to manage the current government by reshuffling the cabinet. Kam and Indriðon (2005) propose that government reshuffles are more likely when a prime minister’s personal support lags behind the government’s, a hypothesis that closely parallels mine. 15 I label this management of asymmetric support ratings ‘strategic calibration’.
I examine strategic calibration by analysing two acts: cabinet reshuffles and prime minister replacements. Both are ways that the LDP leadership might shift blame focused initially at the party to blame targeted at one or more individuals within the party. The key explanatory variable is relative support measured again as LDP support minus prime minister support. As this value grows – and the prime minister’s cabinet becomes less popular than his party – replacements and reshuffles should be more likely.
Prime minister replacements are measured as dummy variables indicating when one leader is supplanted by another. The theory would not predict cases where a prime minister leaves for non-political reasons, such as Keizō Obuchi’s coma-inducing stroke in 2000, so these are omitted. Reshuffle data are taken from the listing in Satō and Matsuzaki (1986), which I updated through 2006 from media reports. Although somewhat subjective, to be counted as a reshuffle a substantial reassignment of ministers must take place; a single resignation would not qualify but simultaneous replacement of four ministers would. A change in the prime minister or cabinet reshuffle is coded as a one so that positive coefficients indicate greater likelihoods of changes. During the period I study there were 13 prime minister replacements and 63 cabinet reshufflings to explain. The models follow Beck, Katz and Tucker (1998) by using a logit specification with indicator variables for each month of duration. 16
To be clear, not all changes in personnel can be explained by my theory. Some prime ministers are ousted because of health problems or scandal. Frequently members of the LDP will push for new leadership after a poor showing in upper house elections. At times the party reshuffled the cabinet on a pre-determined annual schedule to allow for fair representation of factions in the government, without regard for politics outside the party (Bouissou, 2001). To the degree that personnel changes were due to exogenous factors such as these, it will be more difficult to demonstrate the effects of relative support. In addition, it is the prime minister and not rank-and-file Diet members who are technically responsible for cabinet reshuffles. But a prime minister needs to continually earn the support of his party to remain in power. This means that he must to some degree internalize the concerns of party members who wish to retain their legislative majority (Cox and McCubbins, 1993). Reshuffles are often done pre-emptively to demonstrate that a prime minister is responsive to criticism and to prevent being replaced by a new leader.
The duration models in Table 3 show that relative support influences both cabinet shuffles and prime minister replacements. When the cabinet ratings fall behind the LDP, personnel changes become significantly more likely. Economic measures do not correlate with either, perhaps because their influence has already been felt in the cabinet’s support ratings. None of the other control variables carry much weight, suggesting that many personnel changes are made for idiosyncratic reasons. Yet we also find evidence that relative support for the party and prime minister motivates replacement of top party leaders. 17 The coefficients suggest that the effect is larger for prime minister replacements than simple cabinet reshuffles, but this is to be expected because reshuffling is much more common.
Duration model of cabinet reshuffles.
Note: Cell entries are logit coefficients with standard errors in parenthe-ses. Dummies for individual months not reported.
*p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, one-tailed test.
There is a simpler explanation for reshuffles and replacements that does not require strategic calibration. Rather than focusing on the gap between the prime minister and LDP ratings, it is possible that personnel decisions reflect the absolute levels of support for the prime minister and LDP. Under this alternative theory, personnel changes are more likely to occur when the party and especially when the prime minister’s approval ratings are low, without regard for how the two ratings compare to one another.
To test this possibility, I re-estimate the duration models after replacing the relative support measure with the two absolute support variables. The results appear in Table 4. The models show that cabinet reshuffles are not significantly related to either absolute LDP support or prime minister support. In addition, prime minister replacements are not related to what might be the most likely variable, prime minister support. There is, however, evidence that the prime minister’s tenure is affected by support for the party. This finding is actually consistent with the notion that prime ministers are not driven out because of their popularity levels but because of the influence they have on the party’s public image. There is also some evidence that economic variables have significant influence on prime minister tenure when relative support is not in the model.
Duration model of cabinet reshuffles.
Note: Cell entries are logit coefficients with standard errors in parenthe-ses. Dummies for individual months not reported.
*p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, one-tailed test.
Conclusion
Like any governing party, the LDP embraces a popular prime minister, hoping that some of his support will ‘rub off’ on the party. The party then acts strategically to remove unpopular leaders before they contaminate the party’s image, which affects all members regardless of faction or rank. The asymmetry between parties and their leaders manifests itself in two complementary ways. The party can replace the prime minister, but the prime minister cannot swap parties. Likewise, cabinet ratings affect LDP support but not the other way round. In addition to the other ways that the LDP has hung onto power, strategic calibration has permitted party opportunism when a prime minister is riding high and insulation of fellow party members when he falters.
This study should not be read as saying that prime ministers and cabinet ministers are always replaced when relative support drops. Other factors matter as well. Changes in personnel reflect influences such as factional conflict, interpersonal disputes, and party norms about leadership rotation (Bouissou, 2001). An exhaustive account would need to consider many variables simultaneously through a combination of quantitative and qualitative research. I also do not claim that this style of leadership management has been solely responsible for the LDP’s dominance. The electoral system and economic factors surely played a role, as did factionalism, clientelism and control over government largess (Scheiner, 2005). These advantages became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy because the LDP is better able to recruit high quality candidates to run for office once it is established as the dominant party.
More studies are needed to determine whether the relationships I have uncovered hold going forward. An examination of the DPJ’s leadership management would help to isolate whether strategic calibration is due to factors unique to the LDP or is a general feature of major Japanese parties. Whatever the results of that research, this article has made a contribution by showing that carefully timed replacement of cabinet members and prime ministers helped protect LDP dominance over half a century by avoiding the taint of unpopular leaders and riding the coat-tails of successful ones.
In the unfiltered context of mass public opinion, support for the prime minister is marginally dependent on unemployment and inflation as well as other idiosyncratic factors. Yet economic discontent stops short of contaminating the party’s image. Because the party can replace its leader, but the leader cannot change his party, the prime minister or his cabinet are replaced strategically to calibrate higher party ratings with lower cabinet ratings. It is this strategic calibration in the face of negative relative support that permits the LDP to maintain reasonable public approval despite scandals and poor economic performance. Although biases in the electoral system, missteps by opposition parties, and even culture all surely play a role in maintaining LDP hegemony, I have demonstrated that the party itself often intervenes before these factors even have an opportunity to act.
Footnotes
Acknowlegements
I received helpful comments from Jim Alt, Kentaro Fukumoto, Phil Jones, Yoshikuni Ono, Mark Ramseyer, Michael Schatzberg, Kristin Vekasi and Rob Weiner. I thank Kentaro Fukumoto for sharing data, Michael Kang, Phil Jones and Tiffany Nagano for research assistance.
I thank the Reischauser Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University for financial support.