The Electoral Fortunes of Legislative Factions in Japan

The legislative factions of the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan are so autonomous that the LDP is typically viewed as a coalition of factions, rather than a unitary party. We focus on the electoral role of these factions, finding that the five main factions differed substantially in electoral success in the 1960–79 period, but have been so closely tied together in the 1980s that differences in their electoral fates are statistically indiscernible. In particular, we find that the so-called mainstream factions did consistently better than their nonmainstream rivals before 1980 but not after. We explain the lessening of interfactional differences in terms of a decentralization of fund-raising within factions, which tended to equalize factional war chests (on a per capita basis).