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WELFARE AND CAPITALISM IN POSTWAR JAPAN. By Margarita Estevez-Abe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xv, 340 pp. (Tables, graphs.) US$30.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-521-72221-6.
Margarita Estévez-Abe has written a bold, ambitious book diat makes sense of the postwar Japanese welfare state through the lens of rational choice theories of electoral politics. Beginning with an arid, list-like exposition of the structural logic of various forms of government, Estévez-Abe builds a capacious and powerful argument about why Japan's welfare state has taken the distinctive approach it has. From the end of the Occupation in 1951 until the LDP lost its absolute majority in the Upper House in the Diet in 1989, Japan was governed by an electoral system that required candidates to mount expensive campaigns for office, mobilizing well-organized groups to support them by providing welfare programmes tailored to benefiting these key constituents. Operating in a system with intraparty competition and incentives to build strong personal support networks, LDP Diet members collaborated with bureaucrats to come up with social programmes that would maximize electoral supports: health plans that doctors, nurses and pharmacists saw as beneficial, functional equivalents to more conventional social benefits (e.g., agricultural subsidies to farmers, public works projects to provide jobs to the...