What next for the LDP?

With the exit polls suggesting that the LDP will edge out the DPJ in this election and recover some of its strength in the upper house, it is worth asking what will be the consequences of victory for the LDP.

Most obviously, LDP leader Tanigaki Sadakazu will have a new lease on his position, delaying generational change within the LDP for a bit longer. 

Generally speaking, the LDP's old guardsmen will be able to use this vote as vindication for their resistance for anything more than superficial reform to the party. If the Diet does indeed remain twisted — if the DPJ is not able to cobble together a coalition that would swing control back to the government — the LDP will be sorely tempted to use the upper house's powers to harass the government instead of focusing on internal reform and revitalizing the party's policies.

Of course, an electoral victory against a hobbled DPJ is by no means a vindication of the LDP's approach. The party's reformers may have been better off had the LDP lost.

Twisted again

The various newspapers are reporting that according to exit polls, the DPJ won somewhere between forty-three and fifty-one seats, falling short of the total needed to preserve control of the upper house.

Once again the Diet is "twisted," barring the formation of a new coalition that enables the DPJ to retake control of the upper house.

Adamu is living blogging the returns at Mutantfrog here. I won't necessarily be live blogging, but I will be updating intermittently.

Is Ozawa back?

If there is one lesson that this upper house campaign has taught us, it is a lesson that we all should have already learned: there is no stopping Ozawa Ichirō. Despite what looked like a marvelous coup by Hatoyama Yukio in getting Ozawa to step down as DPJ secretary-general, Ozawa has been a public critic of the Kan government throughout the campaign.

However, is Ozawa's criticism of the government — he's been particularly harsh about the Kan government's comments about raising the consumption tax to 10%, which he argues with plenty of justification that the government has made life more difficult for DPJ candidates — the prelude to Ozawa's being a thorn in Kan's side after the election (as Yuka Hayashi suggests in this post at the Wall Street Journal's Japan Realtime)?

It is tempting to see Ozawa's remarks as the beginning of an Ozawa-led anti-mainstream within the DPJ that will force the Kan government to make further concessions to party backbenchers when it comes to policymaking, particular if the DPJ falls short of a majority on Sunday.

Working in Kan's favor, however, is that he has government and party leadership united behind him. United in their opposition to Ozawa's influence, Kan's leadership team already looks more effective than the Hatoyama-Ozawa team, missteps regarding the consumption tax notwithstanding. More importantly, Kan has already made concessions to the party's backbenchers, giving them a vehicle for having their voices heard by the cabinet. Ozawa's concerns about the government's abandoning last year's manifesto would carry more weight if the Kan government had not already begun working on a mechanism for incorporating the concerns of backbenchers into government decision making. Furthermore, there are few signs that Ozawa is any less unpopular now than he was before resigning as secretary-general — or that MPs are keen on preserving every piece of the 2009 manifesto. While there are still concerns that Ozawa stands at the head of a proto-faction that could number more than 100 members, I wonder how many members Ozawa can actually count on to back him. How many backbenchers would be willing to buck the new party regime to stand with Ozawa? It is worth noting that few senior party members have echoed Ozawa's critique of the Kan government.

That's not to say that party members are happy with how the government has handled the consumption tax issue over the past month. The understandable desire to give the voters a chance to render judgment on the Kan government's new approach to the consumption tax likely forced the government to roll out the proposal before properly vetting it with party members, which in turn led the government to back away from its initial position, ironically damaging the position of the government and the DPJ even further.

But backbencher dissatisfaction does not automatically translate into support for Ozawa. Far from signaling the beginning of an Ozawa-led anti-mainstream, Ozawa's behavior during the campaign could signal a new role for Ozawa as an internal critic, concerned less with vying for control of the party than with keeping the party on what he sees as the right path. It seems to me that the Kan government could live with Ozawa's moving into this role.

The meaning of the Upper House election

On Thursday campaigning for the House of Councillors election scheduled for 11 July begins, as 440 candidates vie for 121 seats. (Michael Cucek has the breakdown here.)

The significance of this election has been thrown into clear relief since Kan Naoto took over from Hatoyama Yukio as prime minister and head of the DPJ. What once looked to be a referendum on the leadership of Hatoyama and DPJ secretary-general Ozawa Ichirō — a referendum that polls suggested that the DPJ would not win — is now an election on the future of Japan, perhaps to an even greater extent than last summer's historic House of Representatives election. If the DPJ can retain control of the upper chamber, it will have three years before it will have to face the voters again in an election, provided that no snap election is called in the meantime. Those are three years that the government can use to make tough political decisions that a government with a shorter time horizon might be less inclined to make, like, say, a consumption tax increase.

And so this election is critical for Japan's future. For the Japanese people, there's not much of a choice. Under the DPJ Japan now has a prime minister who is everything that his predecessor was not: Kan is clearly willing to take a position, stick to it, and make his government follow along. He is devoted to clean politics and dynamic political leadership, and under his watch the DPJ once again looks like a party capable of bringing substantial change to how Japan is governed.

Much of the discussion during the campaign will focus on the government's plans related to the consumption tax and deficit reduction more broadly. But once again this election is less about the competing policies offered by the DPJ, the LDP, and the smaller parties than about how Japan is governed. The choice is between unified DPJ government that will face few institutional checks as it attempts to introduce sustainable growth, sustainable government finances, and sustainable social security and a divided system in which the government will have to cobble together working coalitions in order to pass legislation in the upper house (or use its lower house majority to pass legislation over the upper house's objections).

In other words, voters have to decide whether they're willing to tolerate an "elective dictatorship" for the next three years as the Kan government sets to work implementing the DPJ's modified but still ambitious political program or whether they would prefer that the LDP, Your Party, Komeitō, and the other parties retain a perch from which to challenge the government and retard its progress.

Why did Hatoyama go after Futenma first?

With little surprise, the Hatoyama government has decided to postpone a decision on the future of Futenma, after alienating both the Okinawan people and the US government with its indecisiveness on the issue. Reuters reports that after months of treating the end of May as the deadline for solving the dispute, the government has announced a new target of November.

The damage has, of course, already been done, now that the government's approval ratings have sunk below twenty percent and with the DPJ's looking certain to fall short of a majority in the House of Councillors in this summer's election. As Michael Cucek suggests, Hatoyama may be holding on to power simply because no DPJ member wants the responsibility for leading the party to near-certain defeat in the election.

When the history of the Hatoyama government is written, the central question that will have to be answered is why it made Futenma the top priority of its government. While the Hatoyama government has been up to other things — some good (calling bureaucrats to justify their programs, liberalizing campaigning practices), some not so good (its ambiguous record on public works) — it is not an exaggeration to say that the government has been mortally wounded by the dispute over Futenma, not because of the government's position per se, but because of its inability to take a position. Arguably it is due to his mishandling of Futenma above any other issue that has led Hatoyama to be branded as a poor leader, for good reason.

It is truly mystifying why the Hatoyama government not only threw itself into the Futenma morass shortly after taking office, but took on the problem without a clear plan of action. The easiest — the wisest — course of action would have been to delay. The relocation was already delayed, thanks to LDP foot-dragging. The transition to a new, inexperienced ruling party offered the perfect excuse for delaying the issue further. At the very least the government could have stalled for time until after the House of Councillors election. And why not? The DPJ was elected last year on a manifesto that was, but for a short (and short on specifics) section on foreign policy, wholly concerned with fixing Japan's economy and society. The government would have good reason for putting Futenma on the shelf for at least its first year.

I can think of a few explanations for why the prime minister acted as he did. 

First, as I've argued before, he may have believed that he would be able to find a solution that would satisfy both Okinawans and the US simply by negotiating one-on-one with Obama. Alternatively, he may have simply thought that the US would be more willing to compromise than it proved to be. We might call this the miscalculation hypothesis. 

Second, perhaps the government wanted to make a clear statement that it marked a departure from LDP rule, and Futenma proved a good, high-profile demonstration case. Given the relatively narrow window between the launch of the government and the campaign for the upper house, perhaps the Hatoyama government reasoned that tackling Futenma was a way of achieving some policy goal that could be presented to voters in a way that other pledges, which will take a longer time to deliver, would not. (This hypothesis is compatible with the first.) 

Third, the DPJ could have been acting on the basis of ideological beliefs. I'm less convinced by this argument, if only because by trying to please all sides the Hatoyama government has elicited almost a total absence of its own beliefs on the issue other than the need to find an alternative site than the one in the 2006 roadmap.

Fourth, I suppose it is possible that during the 2009 general election campaign the DPJ leadership came to believe that the issue had to be resolved immediately, and acted accordingly.

I'm not sure which of these explanations, if any, best captures the government's reasoning. Perhaps there is no clear reason, which would explain why the government wandered into the issue seemingly without a plan. Meanwhile, the Hatoyama government's mishandling of the dispute means that even November could be a difficult target to meet.

This post will likely be the first of several on the fallout of the Futenma dispute.

UPDATE: As can be seen in the comments, I did leave out one obvious explanation: US pressure, both explicit in the form of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's infamous visit to Tokyo shortly after the DPJ took power, and implicit, in the pressure posed by Obama's November visit to Japan, for which the DPJ wanted to have something to offer to the US President.

Media coverage of tension between the US and Japan meant that every comment, every plan, every "promise" reverberated in Japan, so that each step the government took on Futenma was one step deeper into the quagmire.

A new dawn?

On Thursday, Masuzoe Yoichi, former minister of health, labor, and welfare and the most popular politician in Japan, will inform the LDP that he is exiting the party. On Friday, he will announce the formation of his own party (for now, the Masuzoe New Party), which is projected to have enough members to clear the five-member minimum to be considered a party and be eligible for public election funds. Whether and how many LDP members will follow Masuzoe out remains to be seen, but if Masuzoe has decided to exercise his exit option instead of trying to reform the LDP from within, who among the LDP's reformists will continue to try to force the party's leadership to change its way?

Masuzoe's decision comes after the LDP virtually dared Masuzoe to leave: at a meeting of LDP Diet members last week, several members suggested that if Masuzoe isn't willing to work with the executive he should leave. Similarly, Tanose Ryotaro, head of the LDP's general council, recently questioned Masuzoe's sincerity.

Perhaps one sure consequence of Masuzoe's departure is that it will spell the end of the LDP as an important factor in Japanese politics. The LDP does indeed appear hellbent on its own destruction. Instead of taking Masuzoe's criticisms seriously, the leadership instead goaded the one politician that LDP candidates can stand to be seen with into bolting the party. Just as the LDP quickly turned its back on Koizumi Junichiro's agenda once he left the premiership, the LDP seems determined to reject any politician from within its own ranks who wants to drag the party into the twenty-first century. Now stripped of the interest groups that supported it for so long, the LDP has failed to reinvent itself for the age of floating voters and is rapidly becoming a loose alliance of koenkai. As more politicians leave the party, it becomes harder to imagine that the LDP will ever adapt.

Where does that leave the Japanese political system?

On the whole, it might make the DPJ-led government better. The Masuzoe New Party and Your Party surely stand poised to pick up a decent share of seats in this summer's House of Councillors election. In doing so, they will force the DPJ-led government — assuming that the government does not call a double election, which seems a reasonable assumption after Sengoku Yoshito was roundly criticized for raising the idea — to cobble together a coalition in the upper house in order to pass its legislation (or else governed by the cumbersome Article 59 procedure). Both Masuzoe and Watanabe Yoshimi and his colleagues in the YP are serious about policy, and in Masuzoe's case in particular, he is serious about addressing the social concerns of the Japanese people. Having to negotiate with these two parties may make the policymaking process more unwieldy (counter to the spirit of the government's administrative reforms), but it may result in better policy. And when the government fails to measure up, they will be formidable critics, much more formidable critics than the LDP has been in opposition.

Moreover, as I've argued before, Masuzoe's departure will put pressure on Hatoyama Yukio and Ozawa Ichiro as a DPJ member's threat to exit the party has more power with Masuzoe's party as a destination. That's not to say that the new party will immediately trigger an exodus of DPJ members but it does raise the likelihood that Hatoyama will face a revolt, perhaps from within his own cabinet with the likely failure to solve Futenma by the end of May the convenient excuse for the palace coup. Even if Hatoyama and Ozawa survive until the HC election, a defeat in that election could clear the way for new leaders who will be better able to deliver upon DPJ's reform program.

Replacing the LDP with a motley group of small parties may not seem like an improvement, but with Masuzoe in the mix, that group immediately has stature that it would not otherwise have. Masuzoe is not about to ride a wave of popular support into the premiership, not without a general election being called (and Masuzoe's defection probably makes a snap election even less likely). The DPJ will now face opposition parties that can credibly challenge the DPJ to live up to its own promises for reform.

Hatoyama is the problem

Watching the shambles that the Hatoyama government has become, I went back into the archives and found the post I wrote on the occasion of Hatoyama Yukio's being selected as DPJ president in May 2009.

Called "The DPJ bets on Hatoyama," I stressed the risk associated with choosing Hatoyama to succeed Ozawa Ichiro, noting in particular Hatoyama's history of indecisive leadership, poor decision-making skills, and over-reliance on those around him for guidance.

The arc of his career also suggests that Hatoyama lacks a certain toughness — not a problem that Ozawa has — which will be indispensable if Hatoyama is to become prime minister and will have to be responsible for keeping the DPJ united, coaxing coalition partners, and overriding a recalcitrant bureaucracy. These tasks would be hard enough for Ozawa. Will Hatoyama be any more adroit?

The answer, it seems, is no.

I don't fault the Hatoyama government for taking on a tough issue like Futenma or postal privatization. After all, signaling changes of course on these policies is a good way to show how Westminster-style reforms can promote cabinet-led policy changes, making elections meaningful. But I fault the Hatoyama government — I fault the prime minister — for failing to exercise the least bit of control over his cabinet and his ruling party, making a total mess of these policies and others and dragging the government's approval ratings into dismal terrain. Taking on the US over Futenma demands finesse, subtlety, a deft hand in cabinet, and a clear media strategy. Not only has Hatoyama failed to keep his ministers on message on Futenma, he has struggled to develop a message in the first place.

Some might argue that the leadership vacuum in the DPJ-led government is a function less of the prime minister's failings than irreconcilable divisions within the DPJ or within the ruling coalition. While it is difficult to say for certain, I would argue that those divisions matter only insofar as Hatoyama has left a vacuum in the highest reaches of his government, which some ministers (i.e. Kamei Shizuka) have exploited from the earliest days of the Hatoyama government. Were Hatoyama capable of exercising his power, he would have an easier time controlling his ministers and pushing back against Ozawa.

Given the extent to which the government's problems rest on Hatoyama's shoulders, I have to ask the same question posed by Michael Cucek: Why do the Seven Magistrates not act? Cucek's logic — that they are hedging, ensuring easy conquest of the party in the wake of an Upper House election defeat, survival in case of victory — is compelling, but it also entails huge risks on their part. As the LDP learned, the public can be particularly fickle when it votes for the Upper House. I can imagine that a big enough defeat for the government could set in motion events that would go beyond a mere leadership change within the DPJ. As such, If Hatoyama cannot find a solution to the Futenma problem that satisfies all actors, I would think that the time would be ripe for a cabinet rebellion.

A new prime minister would still have an uphill battle to score a victory in July, but if he (or she) were to be in a position to lead — to set an agenda and force ministers and party to adhere to it, or at least to debate within clearly delineated bounds — the DPJ's fortunes would likely improve. The party's agenda, after all, isn't the problem. It's leadership. 

For years polls have shown that the value the public wants in its leaders is "the ability to get things done." I am convinced it's why Koizumi Junichiro enjoyed the support he did. And at this point it's the only way the DPJ can save itself.

The strange death of the LDP

When the Hosokawa government — with Ozawa Ichiro, then secretary-general of one of the leading parties of the eight-party coalition backing the government — passed electoral reform in 1994, one of the arguments made then and ever since by Japanese politicians (and American political scientists) was that the new mixed single-member district/proportional representation electoral system would produce a British-style two-party system that would complement the British-style administrative and political reforms desired by Ozawa and other politicians.

In other words, the Japanese political system should favor the existence of a second large party to challenge the DPJ, if not the LDP then an LDP-like successor party. But presumably the LDP should be the favorite to survive in the two-party system. By virtue of its existence — by virtue of its possessing institutional infrastructure, finances, an organizational history — the party presumably has an advantage over any party not yet born, not to mention the various micro-parties that stand virtually no chance of expanding to rival the DPJ.

And yet the LDP appears to be stumbling along to destruction. Matsuda Iwao, an LDP upper house member from Gifu prefecture, recently became the fifth LDP member of that chamber to leave the party since the LDP's defeat last year. (Yomiuri suspects the hand of Ozawa, given Matsuda's membership in Ozawa's Japan Renewal and New Frontier parties during the 1990s.)

The party has failed to articulate a policy agenda to challenge the Hatoyama government's, as suggested by the LDP's four-day boycott of Diet budget proceedings — discussed here and here. Aside from calling for the heads of Ozawa Ichiro and Hatoyama Yukio and demanding a new election, the LDP has apparently nothing to say about the problems facing Japan.

Keidanren, an important financial backer of the LDP (2.7 billion yen in 2008, roughly ten per cent of the party's income that year), has once again decided to suspend its political donations, a serious blow to the LDP given that its public subsidies have also shrank due to the extent of its defeat.

Most seriously, at least for the party's current leadership, Masuzoe Yoichi, the popular former minister for health, labor, and welfare and the one party member that LDP candidates wanted to be seen with in 2009, has stepped up his criticism of party leader Tanigaki Sadakazu and other party executives. He has created a new study group with thirty members — the Economic Strategy Research Group, discussed here — but Masuzoe's power may be less in his numbers than in his ability to discredit the party's leaders every time he opens his mouth. Masuzoe provides a constant reminder of just how little the LDP has done to reform itself since losing last August. Indeed, speaking at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan Monday, Masuzoe identified Tanigaki as a cause of low public approval for the LDP and ann obstacle to party reform, and suggested that his resignation would open the way to reform. He did not rule out the possibility of forming a new party or a total political realignment including current DPJ members (including cabinet member Maehara Seiji).

In recent weeks party leaders have begun discussing dissolving the factions once again, an idea that flared up during the post-election leadership campaign only to die shortly after Tanigaki's victory, but abolishing the factions — or referring to them as mere study groups — is at best a cosmetic change and at worse no change at all. The kind of changes the LDP needs to make are the changes the DPJ made over the decade leading up to its taking power: centralizing control over party administration, policymaking, and electoral strategy in a small group around the party leader, and then developing a coherent policy strategy that actually speaks to the public's concerns.

Why has the LDP failed to reform up to this point — and why is it likely to fail to reform in the future, even if Masuzoe gets his way and forces Tanigaki out?

There is no shortage of plausible explanations. One explanation would suggest that the LDP is failing because it is not designed to exist in opposition. For all the headlines grabbed by LDP reformists over the past decade, perhaps most of the party's members may be simply incapable of saying anything of substance to their constituents. There is no longer any public money to do the talking for them. And presumably they also have less access to the bureaucracy, which might otherwise have been able to provide them with ideas and proposals. This problem may be common to other defeated dominant parties struggling to adapt in opposition.

Another — which I think is important — is the composition of the LDP after its defeat. Namely, it has too many senior (read: former ministers) and hereditary politicians in its ranks and not enough followers, especially of the reformist variety. The LDP members who survived 2009 showed that they can get reelected on the strength of their own names and campaign organizations. They owe little to the party headquarters, and, one would assume, they would be less likely to support efforts to centralize control of the party.

A further explanation might consider the role played by the LDP's policy ideas. In this argument, the LDP's internal organization is not irrelevant — the party's organization, after all, has some control of what's included in the party's platform and more generally what narrative the party tells in public — but the more important factor may be the balance of power among ideological camps within the LDP. As noted, Masuzoe has the popularity, but not the numbers within the party (and I find it odd that Masuzoe, who was a critic of Koizumi's "neo-liberal" reforms, is now the face for continuing those reforms). Similarly, the revisionist conservative wing may also lack the numbers — there was some overlap with the Koizumi Children, after all — and its surviving leaders are intimately associated with the LDP's downfall. That leaves the pragmatists, the party leaders who are at once the most flexible and pragmatic in policy terms and also the most wedded to existing party structures. At the same time, the LDP faces the same dilemmas facing any party in opposition in a (mostly) two-party system. Should it copy the governing party's policies and serve as the well-meaning critic in opposition? Or should it adopt a rejectionist pose and rail about the good old days before the DPJ took power? Koizumi's ambiguous legacy as party leader, not to mention the failures of its last prime ministers, makes the latter option difficult, and the LDP seems simply incapable of adopting the former approach. The result is that attacking Hatoyama and Ozawa on the seiji to kane issue appears to be the default option, the problem being that the public doesn't particularly care about money politics relative to other issues, especially when the LDP is the messenger.

Finally, the LDP may be failing to reform for precisely the reason suggested by Masuzoe: Tanigaki is simply not up to the task, being little more than a placeholder upon whom the faction leaders could agree when the party was in chaos following the electoral defeat. It seems dubious that Tanigaki is the primary cause of frustrated reform, but he is certainly not helping the process along.

In short, while it is easy to assume that organizations do whatever necessary to ensure their survival in their environments, making the changes necessary for survival is easier said than done. It may be the case that the survival imperative of individual LDP politicians is trumping the organizational imperative to survive. The LDP's days appear to be numbered, especially if Masuzoe decides that the party is not worth saving.

Whether Masuzoe could build a second party around his splitists, Watanabe Yoshimi's Your Party, and whoever they could coax from the DPJ is an open question. Theories about the effect of the electoral system would predict that Masuzoe's bid would be successful, but the LDP's woeful performance post-election suggests that nothing is for certain. Showing up is not enough: the second party actually has to make the right decisions too. Perhaps Masuzoe, helped by his personal popularity, will make the right decisions and be rewarded with public support and numerous prospective candidates from which to choose. Perhaps he might even draw some DPJ members to a new party.

ON this last question, I suspect that despite the mass media's longing for another political realignment, DPJ reformists close to Masuzoe have greater incentives to exercise voice within the DPJ — given that the party is in government — rather than to exit and join Masuzoe in opposition. In other words, I expect that one consequence of Masuzoe's departure from the LDP would be a rebellion within the DPJ to replace Hatoyama led by the party members most likely to join with Masuzoe — potentially a successful rebellion were the emergence of a Masuzoe New Party to make enough Hatoyama allies nervous about the new rival.

If Masuzoe cannot break the DPJ, the result could be an unusual party system, with the DPJ joined by a rump LDP, a rising but struggling reformist party, and the other smaller parties, including its two coalition partners.

What seems certain is that the LDP will be unable to reverse its decline. The party that seemed uniquely suited to governing may simply be unable to survive an extended period in opposition. Even a good showing in the upper house election this summer — by no means guaranteed — could be negated should Komeito, the LDP's erstwhile partner, continue to move closer to the DPJ.

The LDP chooses inertia

In the past week, three LDP members of the House of Councillors have bolted from the party, calling to mind among some LDP members, according to Asahi, the last time the LDP was in opposition (1993-1994). None of the three — Tottori's Tamura Kentaro, Ibaraki's Hasegawa Tamon, and Kagawa's Yamauchi Toshio — have decided to join with the DPJ: Yamauchi has indicated his desire to join the Kaikaku Kurabu (literally the Reform Club, but apparently translated as the Japan Renaissance Party), a micro-party with four upper house members that caucuses with the LDP, and the others will be independents, for now.

For the moment the DPJ is no closer to gaining a majority in the upper house before the election that will likely be held in July.

But the exit of these LDP UH members provides a glimpse into the LDP's struggles to change following its defeat in August.

Political parties, like all complex organizations embedded in fluctuating, unpredictable environments, must achieve some balance between change and inertia. Successful — and long-lived — parties may well be characterized by higher degrees of inertia, changing policies, organizational structure, or party rules only when some external shock requires adaptation. It may be the case, however, that the more successful a party is, the less able it is able to adapt when its external environment changes.

The LDP has been in an almost continuous state of crisis since the late 1980s, starting with the Recruit and Sagawa Kyubin scandals and the Ozawa rebellion that led to the LDP's going into opposition for the first time. Returning to power in 1994 did not dull the sense of crisis in the LDP. We cannot understand the rise of Koizumi Junichiro without appreciating the backdrop of crisis. But returning to power, even in cooperation with a series of coalition partners, strengthened the influence of inertial forces within the LDP even as the external circumstances (stagnant economy, changing demographics, the decline of the countryside, etc.) continued to evolve, demanding that the party change too. The battle between reformists and the old guard, which came to a head in the debate over postal privatization, reflects the competing forces present in all large organizations — and is not dissimilar from the experiences of other political parties.

Having failed to reform in power, the LDP has been given another opportunity to reform out of power. Judging by the departure of the three upper house members, who expressed their dissatisfaction with the party leadership's reform efforts when they notified the party of their decisions, the LDP is still struggling to change in significant ways. Masuzoe Yoichi, the former minister of health, labor, and welfare, has also criticized the party's leadership: in a speech last Tuesday Masuzoe said that the LDP needed a "dictatorial leader exceeding [the DPJ's] Mr. Ozawa." He said that if he were party leader, he would strengthen the party's hands in nominating candidates, bringing new candidates in and preventing them from running in their home districts (like the DPJ, Masuzoe is borrowing from British politics). He stressed that the party does not need to be resuscitated — it needs to be reborn.

New rules for selecting candidates, new leadership institutions, new procedures for choosing leaders, new policies, even a new name: these are the kinds of changes that we should expect political parties to consider in the aftermath of a considerable defeat. And these are precisely the kinds of changes that the LDP under Tanigaki Sadakazu has failed to undertake. Earlier this month, a party committee debated and ultimately rejected a proposal to change the LDP's name. More comprehensive reforms have not been forthcoming. Talk of killing the LDP's factions, which continue to linger on despite having lost much of their power, seems to have ceased. The party has introduced some changes into how it picks its leader: in the party election in September the party's prefectural chapters wielded more votes than in the past, but this change was more a matter of necessity due to the party's vastly reduced Diet caucus than a matter of conviction. Post-election talk of introducing a DPJ-style shadow cabinet that would centralize the party's policymaking functions went nowhere. In its most important functions the party president is no stronger now than before the LDP's defeat. And there are few signs that party has a plan for introducing the changes discussed by Masuzoe or other innovations derived from the DPJ's experience in opposition.

Why has the LDP thus far been so reluctant to change, or even to discuss change?

The LDP's reluctance to introduce institutional and policy changes may not be all that atypical. In fact, in keeping with the importance of inertia for parties and organizations, it may take a series of shocks rather than a single shock for a party to overcome its natural resistance to change. After all, embracing inertia — retrenchment, in a word — can be a rational strategy for a party recovering from a major shock, a means of limiting the extent of post-defeat chaos. Tanigaki's election as LDP president is an effect of this tendency, and has also served to deepen its roots within the party. While Tanigaki had a reputation as a liberal prior to his election, it seems that his devotion to the LDP establishment outweighs even his liberal tendencies. His actions since his election suggest that Tanigaki is a proponent of the old guard's thinking: he has silenced talk of radical reforms, spoken on behalf of the factions, and adopted a political strategy that prioritizes political expediency (calling for Hatoyama to resign immediately and a snap election) over the long-term survival of the LDP. Unlike Masuzoe's position, which stresses the importance of significant reforms as critical for the medium- and long-term survival of the LDP, Tanigaki's position seems to be that returning to power as soon as possible trumps party reform. In other words, had the LDP selected a different leader — Kono Taro, for example — it is likely that the LDP would be debating and embracing different policies than under Tanigaki.

Tanigaki's tendency to retrench rather than reform also reflects the balance of power within the LDP after the general election, which, as I noted the day after the election, is skewed towards older party members who have held numerous cabinet and party leadership posts. The composition of the LDP's members reinforces the power of inertia present in all large organizations.

As Masuzoe's speech last week suggests, leadership is critical — but as the aftermath of the Koizumi government suggests, it is not enough. Without control of the party leadership, the LDP's reformists waned once Koizumi left office. Reformists like Masuzoe will have to remake the party both in Tokyo and at the grassroots. They will have to fight to open the nominating process to new candidates, while at the same time working at party headquarters to centralize party governance much as Ozawa made the DPJ a far more centralized and disciplined party than it had been previously. But it may take more defeats in national and local elections before the reformists are able to build a durable coalition in favor of significant party change. Fortunately for the reformists, given that the LDP's support has remained abysmal even as the Hatoyama government's approval rating has fallen, more defeats (and defections) may be in the offing.

For the moment, however, there may be little the reformists can do other than float proposals for party change and work with party rank-and-file in the hope of building support for reform from the bottom up. Sooner or later, the DPJ will overreach and need another spell in opposition. I hope for Japan's sake that when it does overreach the LDP — or an LDP successor — is ready to govern. As of now, the LDP is still a long way from becoming that party.