Junko Kato and Michael Laver, "Theories of Government Formation and the 1996 General Election in Japan," Party Politics, 4 (April 1998), 229-252.

First Paragraph:

The purpose of this paper is to take a number of theories that have been used to analyse government formation in West European parliamentary democracies and apply them to the government formation process set in motion in Japan after the 1996 general election. In dealing with a number of different models at the same time, the paper continues the enterprise of adapting what are essentially European models to a Japanese government formation process that has been fundamentally transformed by the Liberal Democratic Party's (LDP) loss of its long-standing status as hegemonic majority party, a loss confirmed by the 1996 election result. An earlier article (Kato et al., 1996) set out to apply a single model of government formation, the portfolio allocation model, to the governments formed in Japan during the 1985-95 period. In the present article, we broaden the enterprise by elaborating and exploring a number of basic questions about government formation and party competition in Japan that must be answered before we can make an informed judgement about which of a range of possible models is best suited to the Japanese context.

Figures and Tables:
Table 1: Distribution of seats in the Diet, 20 October 1996
Table 2: Decisive structure of Diet, excluding 'others', before dissolution, 1996
Table 3: Decisive structure of Diet, excluding 'others', 20 October 1996
Table 4: Japanese party positions on a general left-right policy dimension in 1996
Table 5: Japanese party policy positions on four key policy dimensions, 1996

Last Paragraph:
The intuition is that the unitary actor status of political parties (in practical terms, the effectiveness of party discipline) may come under particular pressure when the party system is close to a strategic threshold in the government formation process. This is because, if the party system is far from a strategic threshold, then small-scale defections from one party to another, or small-scale party splits, make no effective difference to the equilibrium structure of the government formation process. When the party system is close to a strategic threshold, in contrast, even small-scale strategic defections can make all the difference in the world, which of course offers far greater incentives for them actually to take place. All of this is without doubt going to be very, very complex to model, but it nonetheless offers the potential for enormous theoretical and substantive payoffs.