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.