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B.J.Pol.S. 34, 000–000 Copyright  2004 Cambridge University Press
DOI: 10.1017/S000712340400000 Printed in the United Kingdom‘Presidentialization’ in Japan? The Prime Minister,Media and Elections in JapanELLIS S. KRAUSS AND BENJAMIN NYBLADE*

Both academics and journalists have given increasing attention to the rising importance of prime
ministers – a phenomenon often referred to ‘presidentialization’.1 Although many commentators
use the term differently, and the term blurs the line between the very different institutional contexts
of a parliamentary and presidential system, one careful definition of the term is ‘the movement overtime away from collective to personalized government, movement away from a pattern ofgovernmental and electoral politics dominated by the political party towards one where the party
leader becomes a more autonomous political force.’2This phenomenon has been observed primarily in Britain and in West European parliamentarydemocracies – no one has ever described the Japanese parliamentary system as even remotely‘presidentialized’. In fact, the Japanese prime minister has not been the subject of much academic
research, and even the Japanese press used largely to ignore the prime minister. Despite being theleader of a majority party in a centralized political system, the Japanese prime minister was almost
universally described as weak and uninteresting, with both academic and popular discourse focusing
on the powerful bureaucracy and factional politics within the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).
However, recent political changes, most prominently the selection and popularity of JunichirōKoizumi as Japan’s prime minister in the spring of 2001, have led to a surge of interest in the prime
minister.
This Note focuses on one core aspect of the ‘presidentialization’ argument: the relationshipbetween the prime minister, the media and elections. We seek to put the focus on the apparent sudden
increase in importance of the Japanese prime minister in perspective, arguing that the newly noted
importance of the prime minister is the culmination of a trend that began two decades ago.

UNDERSTANDING THE JAPANESE PRIME MINISTER

The standard account by scholars who engage in the comparative study of prime ministers (primarilyin Europe) is that prime ministers are most powerful when they lead a majority government thatis unconstrained by other powerful domestic and international actors.3 Japan does not fit well into
* Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California, San Diego. The
authors would like to thank Matt Shugart, Aurelia George Mulgan, Mikitaka Masuyama, T.J. Pempel, the Editorsof the Journal and several of its anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on previous versions of
this article. They are also grateful to Ken Karube of Jiji Press for supplying missing data, Tsujinaka Yutaka fora copy of his article on Cabinet advisory organs, Ikuo Kabashima and Hiroko Ide for indicating and providing
the Meisuikyo data, Neal Beck for comments on various statistical issues, and Melody Ellis for her suggestions
on some relevant comparative literature. The resulting article, however, is entirely their own responsibility.
1
Mughan, Anthony, Media and the Presidentialization of Parliamentary Elections (New York: Palgrave,2000); Thomas Poguntke and Paul Webb, eds, The Presidentialization of Democracy: A Study in Comparative
Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
2
Mughan, Media and the Presidentialization of Parliamentary Elections, p. 7
3
Rose presents a two-by-two typology of prime ministerial roles, with number of parties in government on
one dimension, and the degree to which the constitution centralizes government on the other; see Richard Rose,‘Prime Ministers in Parliamentary Democracies’, Studies in Public Policy No. 185 (Glasgow: Centre for the Studyof Public Policy, University of Strathclyde: 1990). These dimensions are similar to Lijphart’s conception of

2

Notes and Comments

this model. Although Japan has a centralized political system, and until recently has had a dominantmajority party, the prime minister has been invariably described as weak. Kenji Hayao’s pioneering
work on the subject found that although the prime minister possessed all the usual formal powersof the role, he was significantly constrained by other political actors.4 He was condemned primarily
to a role of ‘reactive leadership,’ despite sometimes being able to enhance the priority of favoured
issues in his party’s and government’s agenda.
Mulgan’s incisive analysis similarly emphasizes Japan’s ‘leadership deficit’ because of theconstraints imposed by informal power structures.5 In contrast to Hayao and Mulgan, Shinoda’sbook on the prime minister emphasizes the weakness of his formal resources.6 All agree thatdifference in informal sources of power of particular prime ministers explains any variations inleadership capability and their ability to effect policy and these studies all conclude that the Japaneseprime minister is in fact a weak leader, even if they disagree whether this weakness is a problem.7
The reasons for this weakness are clear. The prime minister was not necessarily considered to
be a strong leader of the government or his party. The policy-making process was primarily
bottom-up, not top-down, with a wide range of interest groups incorporated throughout.8 The prime
minister’s main role in a fairly pluralistic policy process was generally only facilitation andco-ordination, or providing extra energy to issues that had already been put on the policy table byothers.9
Although on paper Japan was an almost prototypical centralized parliamentary democracy, withessentially the ruling party as the only effective ‘veto player’, the policy-making process wasdecentralized. With the LDP highly factionalized, and all factions represented in the cabinet, allmajor government decisions had to be the result of consensual agreement among all the party leaders,
because cabinet decisions had to be unanimous. In fact, to maximize the distribution of cabinet posts
to the faction members, cabinets were shuffled every year or so, depriving the prime minister andministers of the ability to oversee their ministries effectively.
The LDP was a highly fragmented, decentralized party with independent bases of power in thefactions and the zoku (policy ‘tribes’) – veteran politicians who had developed expertise, experienceand contacts in a specialized policy area. Individual candidates had their own constituency support
base and ability to gain election independent of the party’s leader, due to an electoral system that
promoted intraparty competition.10 Intraparty competition led to a focus on the personal vote in(F’note continued)

majoritarian and consensual democracies, and generally fit with Tsebelis’s conceptualization of veto players(Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (NewHaven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999; George Tsebelis, ‘Decision Making in Political Systems: Veto Players
in Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, Multicameralism, and Multipartyism’, British Journal of Political Science,
25 (1995), 289–326; George Tsebelis, Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2002)).
4
Kenji Hayao, The Japanese Prime Minister and Public Policy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
1993).
5
Aurelia George Mulgan, ‘Japan’s Political Leadership Deficit’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 35(2002), 183–202.
6
Tomohito Shinoda, Leading Japan: The Role of the Prime Minister (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000).
7
Hayao argues that there is sufficient capacity for change and policy innovation in the Japanese politicalsystem even with the weakness of the Japanese prime minister, while Mulgan finds the lack of executive leadershipmuch more problematic. See Hayao, The Japanese Prime Minister and Public Policy, pp. 202–10; and Mulgan,
Leading Japan, pp. 200–1.
8
Ellis S Krauss and Michio Muramatsu, ‘The Dominant Party and Social Coalitions in Japan’, in T. J. Pempel,ed., Uncommon Democracies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 282–305.
9
Hayao, The Japanese Prime Minister and Public Policy
10
The House of Representatives had a multi-member district, SNTV system to which each districts elected
between two and six representatives, theoretically according to population, but each voter had only one ballot.
This placed candidates of the largest, ruling party, the LDP, into competition with each other in the district. See

Notes and Comments

3Japanese elections,11 and relatively weak emphasis on the party label, although empirical analysis
of voting behaviour has always shown that both are significant.12 Because of the importance of thepersonal vote, campaigns did not revolve around policy issues, party identity or the party leader’s
image, so that the public image of the prime minister had little meaning.
The electoral incentives for cultivation of the prime minister’s public image were weak, to thepoint that the academic literature on Japanese elections has largely ignored the behaviour and impactof the prime minister (and other party leaders) on election outcomes until quite recently.13 Although
Japan had majority party government and a formally centralized political system, the system wasmuch more fragmented than that would suggest. The prime minister was not considered therepresentative of the government or the LDP by voters, who based their voting decision primarily
on evaluations of individual candidates, not on parties or government performance.
The structure of the mass media also limited Japanese prime ministers’ ability to enhance their
public image. Most Japanese reporters from the major national newspapers and broadcasters are
assigned to specialized ‘beats’ within the important organizations of government and society – thereporters’ club (kisha kurabu) system.14 This system induced conformity of stories and dependence
on official sources. Although some aspects of press–government relations elsewhere resemble
Japanese reporters’ clubs,15 in Japan the majority of these clubs have been attached to thebureaucracy, and news from the prime minister’s office has been given less attention.
Television news, which usually provides the primary means for enhancing political executives’
image, remained rather unimportant as an information source about elected politicians. NHK, themajor public service broadcaster, dominated television news. In part because of the reporters’ club
system and in part because of its fear of alienating the ruling party through the controversial news,
its news emphasized coverage of the bureaucracy rather than the prime minister.16
Reporting focused on policy making by the bureaucracy, and coverage of politicians centred on(F’note continued)

J. Mark Ramseyer and Frances McCall Rosenbluth, Japan’s Political Marketplace (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1993).
11
On Japan, see Ramseyer and Rosenbluth, Japan’s Political Marketplace, and Steven R. Reed, ‘Democracy
and the Personal Vote: A Cautionary Tale from Japan’, Electoral Studies, 13 (1994), 17–28. For a comparative
perspective see Bruce Cain, John Ferejohn and Morris Fiorina, The Personal Vote: Constituency Service andElectoral Independence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986); and John Carey and Matthew S.
Shugart, ‘Incentives to Cultivate a Personal Vote: A Rank Ordering of Electoral Formula’, Electoral Studies, 14(1995), 417–39.
12
Much depended on the number of candidates that the LDP ran in that district. The fewer the candidates, themore important the party label. See Thomas Rochon, ‘Electoral Systems and the Basis of the Vote: The Case ofJapan’, in John Creighton Campbell, ed., Parties, Candidates, and Voters in Japan: Six Quantitative Studies (AnnArbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1981), pp. 1–28; Bradley M. Richardson,‘Constituency Candidates Versus Parties in Japanese Voting Behavior’, American Political Science Review, 82(1988), 695–718; Scott C. Flanagan, Shinsaku Kohei, Ichiro Miyake, Bradley M. Richardson and Joji Watanuki,
The Japanese Voter (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991); Stephen M. Swindle, ‘The Supply and
Demand of the Personal Vote: Theoretical Considerations and Empirical Implications of Collective Electoral
Incentives’, Party Politics, 8 (2002), 279–300.
13
The few exceptions include Sadafumi Kawato, ‘Shū-San Dōjitsu Senkyo to Nakasone Ninki’ [An Analysis
of Voting Behavior in the 1986 ‘Double Elections’], Hokudai Hōgaku Ronshū [Hokkaido Law Review], 39 (1988),
432–90, and more recently Ikuo Kabashima and Ryosuke Imai, ‘Evaluation of Party Leaders and Voting
Behaviour: An Analysis of the 2000 General Election’, Social Science Japan Journal, 5 (2002), 85–96.
14
See Laurie Ann Freeman, Closing the Shop: Information Cartels and Japan’s Mass Media (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2000); Ofer Feldman, Politics and the News Media in Japan (Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press, 1993), pp. 67–93; and Ivan P. Hall, Cartels of the Mind (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), pp. 45–79.
15
Michael Cockerell, Peter Hennessey and David Walker, Sources Close to the Prime Minister: Inside the
Hidden World of the News Manipulators (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 9–12, 31–47. See also Feldman, Politics
and the News Media in Japan, pp. 196–7
16
Ellis S. Krauss, Broadcasting Politics in Japan: NHK and Television News (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 2000).

4Notes and Comments

their scandals, factional backroom deals and need for money, with comparatively little attention
placed on the nation’s leader. Through the 1970s even school children had little affective attachment
to the prime minister, and their view of the Japanese executive’s competence and honesty fell
precipitously in higher public school grades, decreasing to an extent not found in any otherindustrialized democracy. Japan’s prime minister was called the ‘missing leader’ in the politicalsocialization of children.17
In general news coverage in Japan is a zero-sum game where coverage of any single actor or event
has been limited.18 In this type of media system, it seems likely that the prime minister, even if there
were incentives to cultivate an increasingly prominent public image, might be constrained in doing
so. Image-enhancement activities are pointless if they are not prominently conveyed to the voters.
However, we suggest in this Note that this view of the prime minister, although certainly
appropriate two decades ago, has become much less accurate. Beginning twenty-five years ago, an
important increase in the relevance and impact of the Japanese prime minister’s public image canbe seen, a trend that has continued and even accelerated over time.
The most frequently noted change in the Japanese political system in recent years is the 1993
reform of the electoral system. A new mixed electoral system of single-seat districts and regional
proportional representation districts was created, which many have argued should increase theimportance of the party label in voting. Getting rid of intra-party electoral competition was one of
the explicit purposes of the reform, with the aim of leading to more voting based on party and issues.
It is important to note however, that this was not the first major electoral reform in post-war Japan:
the electoral system in the House of Councilors was reformed in the early 1980s. The electoral
system remained mixed, but what had previously been a single non-transferable vote in one
nationwide district was transformed into nationwide proportional representation.
The introduction of proportional representation was only for 100 seats out of the more than 750
in the two chambers of the Diet. But for the first time in their lives voters were directly faced with
the need to consider which party (not which candidate) to vote for. And as a number of scholars
have noted, there often is a ‘contagion’ or spill-over effect from one electoral system to others,
particularly when the elections are concurrent.19 We should expect an overall increase in theimportance of the party label and the prime ministers’ public image to parties and voters, beginningin the early 1980s with the change in the electoral system. This effect should be further reinforced
with the electoral reform to the House of Representatives in the early 1990s.
In addition to the increased importance of the party label, we see another important factor: changes
in partisanship and the party system. LDP politicians, beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s,
became more nervous about their electoral prospects and chances of holding on to theirparliamentary majority. The LDP vote share in national elections began a long decline almost
immediately after its formation in 1955. However, support did not gravitate towards the Japan
Socialist Party (JSP), the LDP’s main rival. Rather, the party system fragmented with the arrivalof new smaller parties. Despite the steady decline in popular support, the LDP majority was notparticularly threatened until the mid-1970s.
Perhaps more important than the threat to the LDP parliamentary majority in making LDP MPs
more concerned with the public image of the prime minister was the decline of partisan identification
and rise of swing or ‘floating’ voters, especially those who cared more about policy and issues.20
17

Joseph Massey, Youth and Politics in Japan (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1976), pp. 27–31.
In part this is because of a fixed ‘news hole’ in newspapers in which stories were never continued on later
pages and each topic – such as politics, economics or international affairs, also appeared daily in the same, fixed
number of pages.
19
Matthew S. Shugart, ‘The Electoral Cycle and Institutional Sources of Divided Government’, American
Political Science Review, 89 (1995), 327–43; David Samuels, ‘The Gubernatorial Coattails Effect: Federalism andCongressional Elections in Brazil’, Journal of Politics, 62 (2000), 240–53. Karen E. Cox and Leonard J. Schoppa,‘Interaction Effects and Mixed-Member Electoral Systems: Theory and Evidence from Germany, Japan, and Italy’,
Comparative Political Studies, 35 (2002), 1027–53.
20
Gary D. Allinson, ‘Japan’s Independent Voters’, Japan Interpreter, 11 (1976), pp. 36–55.
18

Notes and Comments

5

In the mid-1970s, the first time pollsters had asked what party people supported, the number who
replied ‘no party’ surpassed the LDP (and all other parties). Non-partisans consistently polledaround 30 per cent of the electorate since in the mid-1970s, occasionally temporarily increasing(particularly when scandals broke), but rarely dropping much lower.21 Long-term partisan
identification weakened; strong partisans were replaced by floating voters who based their support
on contemporaneous evaluations of parties. The LDP (and other parties) faced a new challenge intrying to appeal to those voters.22
Both the decreased vote share of the LDP and the increasing percentage of the public that did
not support a political party served to make the public image of the prime minister more crucial.
If the prime minister had even a minor impact on his party’s electoral fortunes prior to this period,
its importance would have been magnified by the increase in marginal candidates and the threat to
the LDP majority as the whole party was forced to become more responsive to swing voters’interests. Furthermore, the fact that the loss of supporters is primarily not to other parties but to the‘undecided’ category since the mid-1970s makes the prime minister’s public image even more
important because these voters’ decisions were made at the last minute and had been strongly
influenced by news and scandals.23
We should only see changes in the importance of the prime minister’s image, however, if theefficacy of his public image enhancement activities improved. As noted previously, the rigid
structure of the printed press and of NHK (the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation), the dominantpublic broadcaster whose turgid, bureaucracy-focused television news was similar to and modelledon the printed press’s news, offered little opportunity for the prime minister to connect to voterspersonally and cultivate a clear public image prior to the 1980s. However, this too changed.
One of the most important changes was in the increasing importance of television in politics.24
The relationship between the prime minister, voters and the non-print news media has also been
undergoing profound changes since the mid-1980s, when the media environment was transformed
with the appearance of a new programme: Kume Hiroshi’s ‘News Station’. This programme madeits debut in 1985 on TV Asahi and brought a combination of entertainment and cynical commentary
to the news, a stark contrast to NHK’s factual news primarily about government bureaucracy.
Focusing more attention on government mistakes and corruption and on politicians as individual
personalities, it eventually rivaled NHK news in popularity, and spawned other commercial station
imitators. Simultaneously, television public affairs interviews and debate shows featuring
politicians became a staple of weekend and late night viewing. Voters were exposed more directly
to national politicians and the prime minister, and the coverage of them became much more criticaland opinionated.
It is clear that changes in the electoral arena and in the media could have led to an increase in
the importance of the Japanese prime minister’s public image over the last two decades. In thefollowing section we assess the degree to which this has happened.

ASSESSING THE CHANGESThe importance of television news (and its more personalistic emphasis) in politics has increased
vastly in the years following the arrival of the News Station. In post-election voter polls that began
in 1972, shown in Figure 1, we see a clear upward trend in the number of voters who report thattelevision news reports and commentary were useful in deciding which candidate or party to votefor. The percentage in House of Representatives elections more than doubled to roughly 20 per cent21
Jiji Press, ed., Sengo Nihon no Seitō to Naikaku [Postwar Japanese Parties and Cabinets] (Tokyo: Jiji Press,
1982); Jiji Press, ed., Nihon no Seitō to Naikaku, 1981–1991 [Japanese Parties and Cabinets 1981–1991] (Tokyo:
Jiji Press, 1982).
22
Flanagan et al., The Japanese Voter.
23
Allinson, ‘Japan’s Independent Voters’.
24
Krauss, Broadcasting Politics in Japan.

6Notes and Commentsin the most recent elections, and more than tripled in House of Councilors elections to nearly 30
per cent. As expected, the influence varies by the type of election, with more voters in proportional
representation districts being more likely to suggest that television news was important in theirdecision making. The most significant increase occurs in the late 1980s and early 1990s, after theadvent of more opinionated, personalistic coverage of politics.
There were significant changes even in the more rigid print media. Figure 2 draws on arepresentative sample of newspaper coverage from each election campaign period,25 showing a
gradual increase in the coverage of the prime minister during election campaigns; the increased
coverage seems to have begun in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Figure 2a shows the trend forelections for the House of Councillors: even without Koizumi’s highly increased coverage in 2001,
the average number of stories about the prime minister per day increased in our sample by nearly
half. Figure 2b shows that the same trend is manifest, and perhaps even clearer, in elections for theHouse of Representatives. Again the changes seem to originate around the early 1980s, with theaverage number of articles roughly doubling over the thirty years we have examined.
This enhanced coverage of the prime minister during electoral campaigns has gone hand-in-handwith the increased role the prime minister has played in these campaigns. The prime minister has
become much more actively involved in campaigning, not only for himself, but for the party as awhole and also on behalf of specific candidates. Figure 3 shows the increasing role the prime ministerhas played in campaigning in the elections to the House of Representatives from 1972 to 2000.
Not surprisingly, the two most recent elections under the revised electoral system saw a dramaticincrease in campaigning by the prime minister. The new electoral system includes one ballot on
which voters directly choose a political party (the PR portion), and in such a system the importanceof party labels (and party leaders as representatives of the party) should naturally increase. However,
it is important to note that there is a significant increase earlier in the series as well. The prime
ministers for the first two elections in the 1970s, Tanaka and Miki, were not as active as subsequent
prime ministers, with Ohira, Nakasone and Kaifu all engaging in more than twice the number ofspeeches and meetings in constituencies as the earlier prime ministers.
Prime Minister Miyazawa was significantly less popular than the LDP as a whole during the 1993
campaign, which, combined with the major split in the party prior to the elections, makes it
unsurprising that he was less active in campaigning on behalf of candidates. The trend noted in thisgraph, however, cannot be explained away by the popularity of prime ministers. The highest prime
ministerial popularity during this period at election time was for the 1972 election, when Tanaka’s
campaign activities were the most infrequent.
Does this campaigning matter? While data limitations make it difficult to do similar analyses as
those done on the impact of campaigning by the US President for congressional candidates,26 wedo think that it may be important. At a most basic level, if the visits to districts and other forms of
campaigning by the prime minister did not matter, why would candidates request it and the prime
minister spend so much time and effort? While it is possible to come up with alternative stories,
the most plausible explanation is that which the actors themselves seem to believe: the prime
minister has an impact on party popularity and elections. In fact, survey and election analysis makeit clear that the public has distinguished much more between the LDP and its prime ministers since25
The data is from a sample of five days from each official election campaign period of the Asahi Shimbun,
Japan’s national ‘paper of record’. The data are the articles that featured the prime minister in all aspects of hisrole, governmental and political, and included election and non-election-related activities. Election campaign
periods for the House of Councillors varied from seventeen to twenty-four days (with the latter being prevalentprior to the 1980s); twelve to twenty-one days for the House of Representatives (again with the longer periods
common before the 1980s). The five-day sample in each case consisted of one of the weekdays for each of theweeks of the campaign, chosen so that all the weekdays were represented in the sample.
26
For example, see Gary C. Jacobson, Samuel Kernell and Jeffrey Lazarus, ‘Assessing the President’s Roleas Party Agent in Congressional Elections: The Case of Bill Clinton in 2000’, Legislative Studies Quarterly, 29(2004), XXX–XX.

Notes and Comments

7Fig. 1. Share of voters who find television useful in making vote decisions
Source: Election surveys provided by the Akarui Senkyo Suishin Kyōkai.
Note: The data for 2001 is for the ‘combined’ House of Councillors election decision (changes in the electoral
system gave voters the opportunity to combine their ballots).

8

Notes and Comments

Fig. 2. Average number of newspaper articles on the prime minister during campaigns
Source: Sample of Asahi newspaper coverage during the election campaigns.
Note: The 1980 election is excluded due to Prime Minister Ohira’s untimely death.

Notes and Comments

9Fig. 3. Prime ministers’ visits to candidates during House of Representatives elections
Source: Data collected from Asahi newspaper coverage of prime ministers’ daily activities.

the early 1980s, and that prime ministerial support has increasingly affected support for the LDP
and election results.
Figure 4 shows popular support for the prime minister and LDP between 1960 and 2001 using
data from monthly polls conducted by Jiji Press. Polls of this sort in Japan ask whether respondents
support the prime minister’s cabinet, rather than the prime minister himself, but as these are thestandard measures of prime ministerial popularity in Japan, we use them here. Prior to Nakasone,
the support rates generally followed each other extremely closely. On average, no prime minister
had a support rate that differed from the LDP support rate by more than 5 per cent, as one might
expect in a system where the executive hardly stood out amidst the collective factional leadershipof the party in image or policy-making influence.27 However, after Nakasone all but two prime
ministers had an average cabinet support rate that differed from the average party support rate by
5 per cent or more.28 Koizumi’s literally ‘off-the-chart’ popularity is in fact an example of theincreased variability of popular support for Japanese prime ministers – the record popularity
followed the record unpopularity of Mori at the end of his tenure.
Despite the increasing divergence between cabinet and LDP support figures, there still is a strong
relationship between the two; particularly notable is the honeymoon effect when a new prime
minister takes office.29 While it would be ideal if we could use election surveys to test our theory
about the impact of the prime ministers’ image or cabinet support on voters at the individual level,appropriate individual-level data over the time frame we consider in this Note is not available.30
27
Tanaka seems to be an anomaly: in the end his final support averaged close to that of the LDP overall, but
his popularity varied more extremely than any other pre-Nakasone prime minister. It started out at record levels
and then dropped like a stone.
28
The two exceptions, Takeshita and Mori, follow the pattern of Tanaka mentioned in the previous footnote,and so in essence, all post-Nakasone prime ministers in office for more than three months have been quite distinct
from the LDP.
29
See Ichiro Miyake, Yoshitaka Nishizawa and Masaru Kohno, 55-Nen Taiseika no Seiji to Keizai – Jiji Seron
Chosa Deeta no Bunseki [The Economy and Politics Under the 1955 System: An Analysis of Jiji Poll Data] (Tokyo:
Bokutakusha, 2001).
30
In order to test our argument we require data that go back at least through the 1970s – this prohibits the useof the major academic election studies and the surveys by other organizations, such as the Akarui Senkyo Kyokai,
which do not ask the appropriate questions.

10

Notes and Comments

Fig. 4. Cabinet and party support by LDP prime minister, 1960–2001
Source: Polling data is from Jiji Press
Note: Prime ministers whose tenure lasted less than three months are excluded. All polling data is from monthly
polls done by Jiji Tsūshinsha (Jiji Press). The data were collected by Jiji Press (1982, 1992) and Seron Chōsa
Nenkan (various years, published by the Prime Minister’s Office upto 1999) and the Cabinet Office (2000).

We can, however, test the impact of changes in party and cabinet support on district-level vote shares
over time. Table 1 presents the results of a pooled time-series cross-sectional analysis31 of the effectof cabinet support on the LDP vote share in Japan’s Lower House under the old single
non-transferable vote (SNTV) electoral system, comparing elections from 1960 to 1976 with thosefrom 1979 to 1990.32
The polling data again comes from Jiji Press, combined with Steven Reed’s electoral data for
Lower House elections in Japan.33 While the independent variable is national-level party and prime
ministerial support, we use a district-level dependent variable (LDP vote share) in order to include
superior control variables. We include the following controls: lagged district LDP vote share, voteshares for ‘independent’ conservatives, lagged independent conservative vote share, and two
measures to capture the effects of incumbency.34 The incumbency variables were coded as thenumber of LDP candidates who were incumbents and the number of opposition candidates who were
31
The table reports results for a random-effects OLS model, but fixed-effects specification finds similar results
for the effect of cabinet support in the two periods.
32
We limit ourselves to the old electoral system for several reasons: it is the ‘hardest’ test of any change inimpact of cabinet support; as was noted earlier, the emphasis in this system was on the personal vote for individual
candidates. And by limiting ourselves to one electoral system we can avoid issues of cross-system comparability
and still are able to have the necessary timeframe to test our theory.
33
Steven R. Reed, Japanese Election Data: The House of Representatives 1947–1990 (Ann Arbor: Universityof Michigan, 1992).
34
Some scholars may be surprised that economic control variables are not reported; however, generally little
evidence is found of economic voting in Japan (see Christopher J. Anderson, and Jun Ishii, ‘The Political Economy
of Election Outcomes in Japan’, British Journal of Political Science, 27 (1997), 619–30), and normally are notincluded in district-level analyses; for a recent example, see Eric C. Browne and Sunwoong Kim, ‘Factional Rivals

Notes and Comments
TABLE 1

11

Effect of Cabinet Support on LDP LH Vote Share 1960–90

Change in LDP support (1960–76)
Change in LDP support (1979–90)
Change in cabinet support (1960–76)
Change in cabinet support (1979–90)
Lagged LDP vote share
Independent Conservative vote share
Lagged independent Conservative vote share
LDP incumbency
Opposition incumbency
Post-1979 dummy
Constant
Observations
Adjusted R2

0.204 (0.08)**0.354 (0.12)**0.037 (0.02)*
0.179 (0.06)***
0.794 (0.02)***⫺ 0.663 (0.02)***0.642 (0.03)***0.083 (0.01)***⫺ 0.015 (0.01)
0.015 (0.004)***0.053 (0.015)***
1,256
0.81

Note: This table reports an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression on district-level LDP voteshare, using a random effects time-series cross-sectional specification. Significance noted asfollows: * ⫽ p ⬍ 0.05, ** ⫽ p ⬍ 0.01, *** ⫽ p ⬍ 0.001. Standard errors are reported inparentheses.

incumbents, both divided by district magnitude (and as such they both varied from 0 to 1). Finally,
we included a dummy variable coded 1 for the second period, to act as a second constant.35 The
effects of all control variables are in the expected direction, and each is significant except for
opposition incumbency.
Change in LDP support from the previous election is significant in both periods, and the effectis 75 per cent larger in the second period. The results suggest that an increase in party support of
10 percentage points would lead to a predicted increase of 2 percentage points in the LDP vote sharethrough the mid-1970s and 3.5 points in the 1980s. This is consistent with our suggestion that theimportance of the party label increased from the mid to late 1970s, although support was notespecially strong, as the difference between the two periods is not statistically significant.
The central claim of our argument is more strongly supported. The impact of cabinet support on
LDP vote share has increased significantly across the two periods. The effect of cabinet support issignificant but relatively small in the earlier period – a 10 percentage point increase in cabinet
support would lead to an increase of less than half (0.4) of a percentage point in LDP vote share.
However, since the 1979 election, the effect of changes in cabinet support became much greater,in fact more than quadrupling.36 In the latter period a 10 point jump in cabinet support would increase
the LDP’s share of the popular vote by almost 2 points.
The results strongly suggest that the greater impact of cabinet support on LDP vote share in Japan
has significantly increased between the two periods examined, even under the personal vote-centred
SNTV electoral system. While more work on prime ministers’ coattails in Japan should be done
to enhance our understanding of the electoral impact of prime ministers, this analysis strongly
supports our contention that the impact of prime ministers’ popularity on voters has increased
significantly in the last twenty years.

(F’note continued)

and Electoral Competition in a Dominant Party: Inside Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, 1958–1990’, European
Journal of Political Research, 42 (2003), 107–34.
35
This is necessary as not only the slope but also the intercept for the variables may vary between the two
periods. The variable, although significant, is not substantively important, however.
36
A Chow test gave a computed F of 5.98, meaning the difference between the two periods is significant forthis sample size at 0.0146.

12

Notes and Comments

CONCLUSION

While recognizing that individual leaders have agency and that generalized theories about
constraints and incentives may not capture all that is important to understand politics,37 there havebeen clear, systematic changes in the role of the prime minister of Japan. The recent focus on theJapanese prime minister in the media and increased academic interest in the subject is not anaberration; it is recognition of a longer-term trend towards the greater ‘presidentialization’ of therole. The importance of the public image of the prime minister as a factor in Japanese politics hasgrown significantly in the past twenty-five years.
Prior to the 1980s, the prime minister’s role and image had little independent influence on the
media, on the public or on voters other than those voting for the ruling party. Now the Japanese
focus on the position to a degree not seen before, and evaluate him critically as the leader of his
party and of Japan. While the Japanese prime minister may not necessarily be the strong leader seen
in many other countries, most notably Britain, the public image of the prime minister has becomea more potent force in Japanese politics.

37
Richard J. Samuels, Machiavelli’s Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 2003).

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