FFJ WEBINAR

AFP/ Toru YAMANAKA

Party system fragmentation, demographic
change, and the representation of social
inequalities in Japan, 1953-2017
December 3rd 2020 | 9:30 - 10:30 am (CET) | 5.30 - 6.30 pm (JST)Webinar - In English
Mandatory registration: events_ffj@ehess.fr
This study exploits political attitudes surveys conducted between 1953 and 2017 to document
long-run changes in the structure of political cleavages in Japan. The author analyze the transformationof Japan’s one-party dominant system from the hegemony of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to thedisintegration of conservative forces into multiple splinter parties and the rise of a new centrist coalition.
Throughout Japan’s contemporary history, persisting divides based upon foreign policy and remilitarization
have remained a key axis of democratic conflicts. These divides have coincided with lower-educated votersshowing greater support for the LDP and other conservative parties, which have generally advocatedexpansion of military spending and overseas interventions. The strength of the LDP in postwar decades alsorelied on a unique coalition of poorer rural areas and business elites, while socialist and communist parties
relied on urban unionized wage earners. Urbanization, declining rural-urban income gaps, the expansionof education, and the subsequent fragmentation of the party system have put an end to these coalitions
and have been associated with the depolarization of Japan’s political space. I also analyze the long-run
transformation of generational divides in relation to changing attitudes to war memory and political parties.
This work is planned for inclusion in a forthcoming collective book co-directed by Amory Gethin, Clara
Martínez-Toledano and Thomas Piketty, Political cleavages and social inequalities. A study of 50 democracies.
The volume will bring together case studies and comparative chapters examining the long-run transformationof political cleavages in fifty countries from the mid-twentieth century to the present.

日仏財団

Fondation
FRANCE-Japon
de l’ehessSpeaker

Amory Gethin(Paris School of Economics)
Amory Gethin is a research fellow at the World Inequality Lab and a PhD candidate at the Paris
School of Economics. His research focuses on the study of economic inequality, redistribution, andthe politics of inequality in contemporary democracies. He has contributed to several projects on
the historical evolution of income and wealth inequality, with a specific focus on Europe and SouthAfrica, and participated to the development of the World Inequality Database. He has also workedon the long-run evolution of voting behaviors and political cleavages in a comparative perspective,including studies on India, Brazil, South Africa, and Japan.

DiscussantDavid Chiavacci(University of Zurich)David Chiavacci is Professor in Social Science of Japan at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.
His research covers political and economic sociology of contemporary Japan in a comparativeperspective. His main focus is on social movements, social inequality as well as on Japan’s new
immigration and immigration policy. His recent publications include Civil Society and the State in
Democratic East Asia: Between Entanglement and Contention in Post High Growth (Amsterdam
University Press, 2020, co-edited with Simona Grano and Julia Obinger) and Japanese PoliticalEconomy Revisited: Abenomics and Institutional Change (Routledge, 2019, co-edited with Sébastien
Lechevalier).