Abstract
Pekkanen, Reed, and Scheiner have succeeded where many editors fail: They have successfully molded the writings of 23 different authors in 21 different chapters into a thematic overview of Japan’s 2014 general election. In addition, the editors and the authors have eschewed the tendency to be simply descriptive in their writing. Rather, their analysis of events repeatedly highlights and answers an intriguing puzzle of Japanese politics, how Prime Minister Abe has been able to win two landslide elections while pursuing policies that are not popular among Japanese voters? In answering this question for the 2014 election, they find that Abe was masterful in his timing of the election and his use of the media to frame the issues of the election. They also find fault in opposition politicians for failing to exploit Abe’s vulnerabilities in the short election campaign, a campaign for which they were not prepared. The authors repeatedly find, in issue areas as diverse as foreign policy, nationalism, nuclear power generation, agricultural reform, regional inequality, and free trade, that Abe successfully framed the election around the narrow issue of economic reform, specifically a delay in the timing of an increase in Japan’s sales tax, thus crowding out any discussion of other, potentially more controversial issues during the campaign.
These findings are supported in a variety of detailed and well-written chapters, many of which provide new evidence or analysis to our understanding of Japanese politics. For example, a chapter on public opinion shows how the media covered Abe’s framing of the election, almost to the exclusion of other prominent issues. An analysis of candidates shows how the opposition Democrats have largely erased any gap in the relative quality of candidates between them and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), while also showing an interesting trend in the LDP away from hereditary candidates and candidates with bureaucratic backgrounds. A fascinating analysis of campaign visits by party leaders show that Abe has a tendency to lend support to LDP candidates who share his nationalistic stance and conservative view on women’s issues, despite Abe’s strong promotion of women in the workforce as a part of his economic reforms. An analysis of women candidates also shows less progress by Abe in increasing women’s participation in the Diet than would be expected, given his prominent placement of women in his preelection cabinet.
Other chapters in the volume shine a much-needed light on political parties, with welcome chapters on both Komeito and the Third Force, the collection of new parties that sprung up before the 2012 elections and have now largely receded from the political stage. Missing is a chapter on the Communist Party, which enhanced its electoral position significantly in 2014, though several authors comment on Communist success in their other analyses of the election. Chapters on the increasing tendency toward open candidate recruitment methods, better electoral coordination among the opposition parties, and the newly legalized use of the Internet in campaigns also add significantly to our understanding of the evolving nature of Japanese elections.
Of course, not every chapter is a superb, analytical explication of the most important questions of Japanese politics. A few chapters seem a bit thin on evidence and analysis and more like a quick overview of recent events. There are also a few places where the discussion seems unrelated to the overarching analytical points or relies on a superficial or incorrect analysis of the data. For example, as much as I find maps of electoral districts personally interesting, I was hard-pressed to understand the relevance of the two pages of before and after redistricting maps. I was not persuaded that the LDP’s win of three proportional representation (PR) seats in Okinawa signified anything about voter attitudes toward the LDP in Okinawa, as the PR seats are decided by a regional vote, and the loss of all four district seats in Okinawa in what was otherwise a landslide win for the LDP means that the LDP will necessarily win PR seats in areas that it didn’t win district seats (because those are the only LDP candidates in the region not elected in their district races).
Finally, though the book marshals much evidence in support of its main point about Abe’s masterful manipulation of the election, I couldn’t help feeling a bit unsatisfied. There is always a tendency in political analysis to ascribe skill to winners and incompetence to losers. Was the timing of the 2014 election truly masterful; or do we simply conclude that it must have been masterful because Abe won? If it is true that Abe won the election by successfully framing the issues of the election, why has Abe consistently had higher approval ratings than any other prime minister of Japan? Yes, the opposition in 2014 did not stake out policy positions dramatically different from those of the LDP, but, of course, the dramatically different (pacifist) policies of the Japanese opposition were what supposedly explained their inability to win elections from 1960 to 1990. Is policy moderation a sin or a virtue? The policy pronouncements of the opposition in 2014 were also too vague to be persuasive, but it was promises that were too specific in 2009 that caused the Democrat’s losses in 2012. It is perhaps too easy to blame opposition incompetence for LDP victories, especially when the voters give this as the primary reason for their vote, but Japanese voters have been claiming that the opposition is incompetent for decades. As late as the 1980s, Japanese pundits claimed that the country’s voters still didn’t trust the Socialists with power because of the mistakes the Socialists made when they were in power, in 1947.
This book is an excellent collection of well-researched and argued essays. It sheds light on important issues of both Japanese politics and the politics of advanced industrial democracies.