The Cost of Intraparty Competition

Many scholars have argued that money politics in Japan has been driven in part by the imperatives of intraparty competition under the single, nontransferable vote (SNTV) system used for lower house elections until 1994. However, to date, no one has undertaken a systematic, quantitative study of campaign expenditure in Japan. In this article, the authors exploit the intraelection reports—which are believed to be accurate accounts of spending during the brief official campaign—to investigate how Japanese candidates adapted their last-minute expenditures to SNTV. The authors show that candidates spent more when they faced more intraparty competition. The results for Liberal Democratic Party candidates suggest that intraparty competition boosted campaign-period spending by approximately 4% to 18%. The authors also find evidence that the spending appears to be reactive, with candidates increasing their expenditures to counter higher spending by other candidates and especially spending by copartisans.