Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to understand the failure of the Japanese new parties to create a credible alternative to the LDP. Using comparative case studies, it explains why most new actors are short lived, while the strategies of lasting challengers also cannot translate survival into thriving.

Paper long abstract:

The Japanese party system has been undergoing continuous change over the last two decades due to the successful challenge of new parties at every national election. Yet, none of them managed to establish themselves as a credible alternative to the major actors and most perished or re-organised shortly after their formation. Volatility among these challengers undermined the competitiveness of the political system and facilitated the return to one-party dominance of the LDP. This paper seeks to understand the reasons behind new actors' failure to sustain themselves beyond the initial electoral breakthrough and transform into a formidable opposition force. This paper argues that the survival of new parties hinges on their ability to develop a strong organisation and a differentiated policy profile, so as to generate material and immaterial benefits that can serve the vote-seeking interests of their members and keep them attached in the long run. In order to substantiate this argument, the paper uses an original dataset that covers all competitive parties over the period of 2005-2016 and develops a typology of new challengers based on their position-taking and organisational strategies. It then examines the cases representative of each type contrasting those that dissolved completely to those that survived. The analysis demonstrates that the Japanese challengers faced a trade-off between organisational expansion and positional differentiation, which resulted in their chronic inability to produce sufficient benefits for their members and precipitated their demise. On the one hand, those parties that targeted floating voters with decisively oppositional appeals built sizeable organisations at the expense of programmatic differentiation from other competitors, which undermined their willingness to go it alone. On the other hand, those that relied on their core electorate preserved a distinctive conservative character but failed to expand and withered. Only those actors that compensated for the lacking benefits with appropriate functional equivalents avoided dissolution over a prolonged period of time. However, the strategies they used—boosting differentiation through the local executive office or mending organisational weakness by co-opting other parties' organisations—also precluded their pursuit of the national ambitions for being a viable force against the major parties.