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What explains the electoral staying power of many Japanese interest groups in the wake of electoral reform? Electoral explanations provide part of the answer; candidates in elections to both houses of the Diet continue to face incentives-many of them unintended-to court the organized vote. But missing from such accounts is an explanation of why economically noncompetitive groups provide the bulk of such support. The primary reason for this, I argue, is organization. As a result of their historical linkages to the bureaucracy, many interests developed hierarchical, national organizational structures that enabled them to carry out a variety of vote-gathering functions that the parties had trouble performing themselves. Although electoral reform and long-term demographic trends have weakened the electoral influence of interest groups, these organizational complementarities between groups and the parties continue to matter in Japanese elections-including under conditions of two-party competition. To illustrate these points, I trace the evolution of interest group politics from the era of LDP dominance through the rise of two-party competition and the LDP's recent return to power, using postmasters associations and agricultural cooperatives as case studies. KEYWORDS: agricultural cooperatives, bureaucracy, elections, exchange relationships, interest groups, political parties, postmasters associations
ON JULY 21, 2013, JAPAN'S RULING LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY (LDP) won a comfortable majority in the twenty-third upper house election. More than just a milestone in the LDP's return to power after spending more than three years (2009-2012) in the political wilderness, the victory promised to usher in an era of more proactive, reformist politics after years of legislative logjams caused by a "twisted Diet" (nejire kokkai)-the control of both chambers by opposing parties.
A closer look at the election returns, however, reveals that the road to reform is still littered with impediments. Of particular note is evidence of a small but significant upsurge in the power of interest groups representing noncompetitive sectors of the economy. Of the LDP's eighteen lawmakers who were elected as individual candidates in the national proportional representation (PR) district, the top, second-, fourth-, sixth-, seventh-, and eleventh-place finishers in terms of the number of votes received were the official representatives of the postmasters associations, agricultural cooperatives, medical groups, and other interest groups that at one time stood at the heart of the LDP's electoral machine...