Ending the LDP hegemony

In 1993 a political earthquake transformed Japan from a country of unchanging one-party rule under the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) into a nation of ever-changing and free-flowing political coalitions. The LDP's loss of control, however, brief, made obsolete much of what had been written on Japanese politics. Ending the LDP Hegemony answers the need for an up-to-date analysis of the political scene, providing both the information and framework needed to unravel the tangle of coalition politics in the 1990s and anticipate the composition and policies of future Japanese governments. This is the first study in English to focus on and put into historical context inter-party relations in Japan. Western scholars and media heretofore have focused either on the LDP's successes or the peculiarities of the individual opposition parties, ignoring interparty relations that are well known to the Japanese. Ray Christensen offers here a new perspective on the interaction among members of the Democratic, NewFrontier, Japan Socialist, Japan Communist, Democratic Socialist, and Clean Government parties, as well as on their general political orientation and tactics. He challenges the assumption that the LDP's accomplishments can be attributed to its being the most efficient, capable, and intelligent party, and describes in detail the strategies of the opponents, demonstrating the political savvy of their leaders. His analysis of key data on cooperation and elections reveals that opposition parties actually outperformed the LDP. Ending the LDP Hegemony not only fills a gap in our understanding of modern Japanese politics, it also adds a critical non-European perspective to analyses of oppositionpolitics and social democracy.