Dominance Through Division: Group-based Clientelism in Japan

The governance of Japan presents a puzzle: it is a democracy yet is dominated by a single party that wins almost all elections. Stranger still, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its policies are not particularly popular with voters. How has this situation arisen, and how is it sustained? Amy Catalinac argues that when politicians compete in electoral districts with discernible voter groups, they can make allocations of central government resources contingent on how groups vote. Using a wealth of quantitative and qualitative data spanning 1980–2014, Catalinac shows that LDP politicians have been doing just that, leveraging their dominance to make groups compete for resources. Dominance Through Division sheds new light on why the LDP has remained in power for so long, why opposition parties are weak, and why policy preferences do not always align with vote choice. It also explains why Japan’s 1994 electoral reform has had limited impact.

 

 

Amy Catalinac is an Associate Professor of Politics at New York University. She is a scholar of electoral systems, distributive politics, and contemporary Japanese politics. She is the author of two Cambridge University Press books, Dominance Through Division: Group-based Clientelism in Japan (2025) and Electoral Reform and National Security in Japan (2016), as well as articles in journals such as the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, World Politics, and Comparative Political Studies.  She earned her Ph.D. at Harvard University, where she was also a postdoctoral fellow at the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, and has held positions at Australian National University and Princeton University.  Professor Catalinac is currently Associate Editor at the Journal of Politics, and serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies at NYU.

 

This event is part of The Japan Seminar Series, presented by the Centre for the Study of Global Japan and the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto.