The book adopts a two-pronged empirical strategy to test the theory. First, a deep dive into a country’s political institutions is required, to ascertain whether electoral districts meeting the conditions for group-based clientelism exist. Second, after these electoral districts have been identified, the researcher must gather data on voting behavior, resource allocations, and other confounding variables at the level of the administrative entity within (tournament-possible) electoral districts and devise stringent empirical tests capable of pitting the theory’s expectations against those of rival theories. This chapter implements the first prong of this empirical strategy, using information about Japan. It presents a detailed overview of how electoral district boundaries are drawn, how votes are counted, what the relevant lower-tier entities are (in Japan’s case, they are municipalities) and how these entities are funded. It explains that Japanese municipalities depend for large shares of their revenue on national treasury disbursements (NTD), which are allocated by bureaucrats but vulnerable to influence by politicians. It classifies the universe of electoral districts that have been used in Japan’s Lower House elections, 1980–2014, as tournament-possible (or not), and it presents evidence that election outcomes are qualitatively different across both sets of districts, in the direction expected by the theory.

A vast scholarly literature addresses the question of why voters in certain electoral districts receive larger allocations of discretionary government resources than voters in others. When resource allocations are found to be positively correlated with electoral support for a ruling party across electoral districts, then it is presumed to favor core supporters. When resource allocations are found to be negatively correlated with support for a ruling party across electoral districts, then it is presumed to favor swing voters. The tournament theory offers an alternative explanation for why resource allocations can vary so substantially across electoral districts. When politicians use tournaments between the municipalities in their electoral districts to win elections, then across electoral districts, the size of a district’s resource allocation will be influenced by the relative sizes of municipalities therein. Moreover, this variable – district-level asymmetry – is expected to act on both electoral support and resource allocations: lowering lowers electoral support and increasing resource allocations. This chapter uses a host of regression specifications to test these two hypotheses using data from Japan, 1980–2014. In doing so, it provides an original account for why money is negatively correlated with support across electoral districts in Japan.

This chapter asks how a politician can tie the amount of central government resources a group receives to the amount of electoral support it delivers. I argue that when a party is dominant, like Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), its members will be able to gain the most votes, conditional on resources delivered, by pitting groups against each other in a competition for resources. This part of the theory draws on prior work that introduces tournaments to political science. I explain that in such a competition, politicians create the perception that groups will be ranked according to their loyalty in the last election and prizes (in the form of resource allocations) will be awarded on the basis of rank. By structuring resources so that the highest-ranked group receives the largest prize, politicians can encourage competition for this position. This drives up their electoral support, in all groups with a chance of attaining this position. This chapter fleshes out the intuition behind a tournament, the mechanics of how tournaments can be pulled off in different settings, and elucidates their implications for longstanding questions of interest, including the sources of incumbency advantage and opposition weakness, the degree of congruence between policy preferences and vote choice, and whether all democratic competition is created equal.