Political Cleavages and the Representation of Social Inequalities in Japan, 1953–2017

This paper exploits political attitudes surveys conducted between 1953 and 2017 to document long-run changes in the structure of political cleavages in Japan. I analyze the transformation of Japan’s one-party dominant system from the hegemony of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to the disintegration of conservative forces into multiple splinter parties and the rise of a new centrist coalition. Throughout Japan’s contemporary history, persisting divides based upon foreign policy and remilitarization have remained a key axis of democratic conflicts. These divides have coincided with lower-educated voters showing greater support for the LDP and other conservative parties, which have generally advocated expansion of military spending and overseas interventions. The strength of the LDP in postwar decades also relied on a unique coalition of poorer rural areas and business elites, while socialist and communist parties found greater support among urban unionized wage earners. Urbanization, declining rural-urban inequalities, the expansion of education, and the subsequent fragmentation of the party system have put an end to this equilibrium and have been associated with a remarkable “depolarization” of Japan’s political space. I also analyze the long-run transformation of generational divides in relation to changing attitudes to war memory and political parties. † Paris School of Economics – World Inequality Lab. I wish to thank Kentaro Asai, David Chiavacci, Sébastien Lechevalier, Thanasak Jenmana, Clara Martínez-Toledano, Thomas Piketty, Carmen Schmidt, and Yoshida Toru for their comments and advices. I am also grateful to the teams of the Social Science Japan Data Archive, the Japanese Election Studies, the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, and the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research for making the data exploited in this paper available.