3
both copartisan and other parties’ candidates in multi-member districts. Scholars claimed
that both forms of competition promoted “money politics” and corruption in Japan (Cox
and Rosenbluth 1995; Hrebenar 2000). To secure a majority of Lower House seats, large
parties like the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) needed to nominate more than one
candidate in each district. Many of these candidates responded by competing against each
other not on the basis of national policy issues, but through the cultivation of a personal
vote and personal support networks called koenkai (Cain et al. 1987, Curtis 1971). As one
result, elections for Japan’s old Lower House were often extremely candidate-centered
and expensive (Shugart and Carey 1995; Johnson 1996; Mizuguchi 1993).
With the elimination of intraparty competition at the election stage, political
reformers and scholars hope less money will be necessary to “buy” votes in Japan’s
Lower House. However, candidates may still need to spend considerable sums to boost
their vote shares and to compete against competitors from other parties. Moreover, the
perverse incentives created by the parallel structure of the SMD and PR tiers may
encourage spending by individual candidates in the SMD tier to help their parties’
performance in the PR tier. To untangle the relationship between money and votes in
Japan’s new system, I focus on the dynamics of the SMD tier and how politicians in the
LDP and the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) responded to the dynamics of interparty
competition in the 2000 Lower House election.
2
To comprehend how the dynamics of interparty competition are operating in
Japan’s SMD tier, I examine some of the empirical linkages illustrated in Figure 1. The
most important linkage concerns candidates’ own expenditures, rival expenditures, and
the percentage of the district vote share. Consequently, the solid lines in the figure
2
This is the most recent election where the financial data used in this paper were available.
Convention