Event Report: Dominance Through Division: Group-based Clientelism in Japan
On January 9th, 2026, the Centre for the Study of Global Japan hosted Professor Amy Catalinac from New York University for a book talk about her recent publication, Dominance Through Division: Group-based Clientelism in Japan (2025). The event was moderated by Phillip Lipscy, Director of CSGJ and Richard Charles Lee Director of the Asian Institute.
Professor Catalinac began by discussing the principal goal of her book: investigating how the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has remained the central political party of Japan despite significant challenges. She attributed their dominance to the use of central government funding by LDP politicians to reward municipalities that provide them with electoral support. Although such a pattern of funding had been long suspected, Catalinac’s book develops a novel theory to clarify expectations and successfully delivers convincing empirical evidence for the first time.
Japan has had free and fair elections for the past seventy years, but the LDP has headed the government for sixty-six of those years. However, these successes cannot be explained solely by the LDP’s popularity. Catalinac noted that, according to survey evidence, the LDP is considerably more conservative on a wide variety of policy issues compared to the average Japanese citizen. Furthermore, the party has been plagued by numerous scandals, economic stagnation, and dynastic politics. While scholars traditionally believed that Japan’s electoral system was a major cause of the LDP’s success, the party continued to win elections even after the 1994 electoral system reform.
To address this puzzle, Professor Catalinac argued that politicians in a dominant party can entrench themselves through the use of a ‘tournament’. She described a tournament as a scenario in which politicians are able to convert voting into a competition between two groups when a party is expected to win the election. For example, if there are two municipalities within a district, the politician offers a reward to the municipality that offers the most electoral support while the other municipality receives nothing. The consequence of this model is that voters are incentivized to support the incumbent, not necessarily because they support their policies, but because they do not want to miss out on crucial resource allocations to their community.
Catalinac discussed how municipalities in Japan are often starved of independent fiscal resources, with 32% of revenue coming from central government transfers. LDP politicians take advantage of this and make distribution of central government resources contingent on repeated displays of electoral loyalty. However, Professor Catalinac also noted that LDP dominance is becoming increasingly vulnerable due to fewer districts where tournaments are possible, stemming from changes like municipal mergers and urbanization. In districts where it is harder to run tournaments, LDP politicians are forced to adopt more programmatic, policy-based strategies, which often result in lower turnout and fewer votes for the party.
Following the presentation, there was a lively question and answer session. Audience members asked questions on topics like the application of the theory to regional parties, the effects of rural flight, and the possibilities for the growth of new political parties. We would like to thank Professor Catalinac for her insights and the audience for their participation in the Q&A session.
