Long Developing Party

It seems like a great conspiracy that the Liberal Democratic Party more commonly knows as the LDP is winning even though a majority of voters do not like or better yet hate t. Believe it or not, it is surprising to know that the LDP only has a one digit numbered supporters since 1963. So the great question is how come the LDP continues to garner a great number of seats despite of the voter’s hatred toward the LDP? The first thought that came to my mind was the possibility of an election cheat however Japan was not like the Philippines therefore all votes actually came from the voters and not what we call in the Philippines as the “ghost voters”. This is what we call as an “uncommon democracy” wherein a party continues to win despite low support from the people. There are two main important reasons why this happens to the LDP wherein this reasons really do justify the “great conspiracy.

Quality Please
The LDP wins not because people vote for the party but because of the candidate they are voting. The new election institution introduced in 1994 wherein there would be a mix member system meaning that the voter would be given two ballots each, one ballot for candidate one ballot for the party is an advantage to the LDP because they have strong candidates compared to the opposing party who has weak candidates. LDP has “quality candidates” meaning that people are more likely to vote candidates who already had an experience in government or what Jacobson labels as the “quality candidate”. This candidate could have acquired their experiences from local offices, being a former member of upper house of parliament, being a former bureaucrat, or being a mayor or governor. Quality also extends to the name recognition of the candidate wherein he/she could have been a newscaster or inherited a seat from the family member. I could understand why the voters would want a quality candidate because like the Japanese voters, I want to vote for someone who already knows how things are done inside the government. A candidate who already had an experience serving the people would have been already honed as a good government official. He or she is passed the stage of trial and error so that candidate could be assured when given the chance to serve the people once more, the candidate would have lesser failures compared to the new candidate. However, this is not always true because there are candidates who never had a chance to work inside the government but would definitely serve the people better than those “quality candidates.” Well, even though this is sometimes the case, a known candidate despite his or weakness would still win simply because we all feel more assured to trust someone known.

Pipe It Up
Since the LDP had acquired the majority of seats from the central government, it assures them seats from the local to the national level of government, thus the opposing party finds it impossible to acquire their “quality candidates. So how does this thing works? First, it starts with clientelism wherein the voters are greatly influenced by their Japanese culture of being idealistic. Japanese voters prefer a representative who addresses safe issues such as water line improvement, construction of dam, and so on. They do not want candidates who address heavy controversies because the Japanese see their state as a perfect one so any tinge of negativity from the part of the candidate regarding Japan would definitely lose him a great number of votes. As a result the government officials spend a large amount of money building projects to create a perfect looking society. In fact, the local government spends more than the allotted allowance for projects. The next question is where do the candidates get the money to build their projects? In Japan, there is what they call a financially centralized systems wherein the local government because of their over expenditure could acquire the needed money from the central government. However, not every local government official could get the money, not unless they have powerful a connection which is their political party. This is what they call as the “piping effect” or “pipu effect” for the Japanese. A great number of seats already belong to the LDP which means that LDP local government officials get a great deal of projects done but those who are not LDP don’t. This in effect makes LDP more and more appealing to the voters because fiscal dependence is important to local elections. Of course, voters would vote a candidate who has the ability to actually make the projects he or she preached which is why a well connected candidate, wins. This is a vicious cycle because this doesn’t give the non-LDP candidates a chance to have an advantage over the LDP candidates.

Future Mayhem
In conclusion, does the opposing party have any chance to win over LDP? Well maybe in some parts of Japan such as the rural area but when it comes to the urban areas, then it’s a different case. Rural areas tend to be more conservative to the Japanese culture and they greatly need more projects. So the LDP is more appealing because from the voter’s point of view, LDP could change the society for the better. However for the voters from the urban areas, they could see the real world and that change could occur even though LDP wouldn’t lead the country. Maybe in the future, the opposing party could top of LDP but that would take more years to come because idealism and conservatism is still paramount in Japan which makes LDP very attractive even though despiteful.