Party Ideologies and Regional Inequality: An Analysis of Party Manifestos in Japan

ABSTRACT

Regional inequality within Japan has been a key political issue in Japanese politics throughout the entire postwar period. In this analysis, we examine how Japanese parties have positioned themselves on the question of regional inequality, focusing on how the party system response has been shaped by ideas and ideologies. The article analyses two 15-year periods separated by a quarter of a century (1960–75 and 2000–15) during which regional inequalities became a particularly salient and pressing issue. We compare institutional and socioeconomic contexts, broader governing ideas, and policy responses to this issue by major parties in their election platforms (manifestos). We find that party ideology and broader paradigms continued to shape party responses to regional inequality during both periods.

KEYWORDS:

• Japan
• Japanese politics
• regional inequality
• ideational studies
• manifesto research
• Liberal Democratic Party
• party politics

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the editorial board and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We presented preliminary versions of this research at the Japanese Consortium for Political Science (JCPS) workshop in September 2015, organised by Naofumi Fujimura. We would like to thank the organiser and participants for their comments.

Notes

1. Regional inequality is a direct translation of chiiki kakusa, meaning socioeconomic differences among regions within Japan, which are primarily, albeit not exclusively, found between urban and rural areas.

2. As a comparative reference, we looked at another policy issue of significance, pollution. The search term “kōgai mondai” returned 4,543 hits, or an average of 70 articles per year, for both newspapers between 1950 and 2015. A search for the same term in Diet deliberations returned a total of 3,670 hits, an average of 62 deliberative sessions per year in which the term was used, over the same period. This compares to a total of 2,189 articles, or an average of 33 articles per year, and 2,351 Diet deliberations, or an average 36 deliberations per year, featuring the term “regional inequality”. During the two salient periods for regional inequality, reporting and Diet discussions on “regional inequality” were more frequent than average annual reporting/deliberations on pollution during the postwar period.

3. Direct elections were reintroduced in 1975.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [JSPS grant number 26885038 – “Ideational analysis of decentralization in developed democracies”].