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.

This chapter provides a short summary of the book’s contributions to comparative politics, political economy, and Japanese politics. Then, it sketches out a range of questions pertaining to different genres of research in political science, which future scholarship should address.

This chapter presents an overview of the book’s theory, empirics, and contributions to the study of Japanese politics. The theory is in two parts. First, I make the case that when politicians run for office in electoral districts divisible into groups of voters, from whom electoral support is discernible and to whom central government resources are deliverable, they can pull those groups into clientelistic exchanges, in which the amount of money groups receive is tied to how they vote. Second, I consider the nuts and bolts of how a politician can go about tying a group’s resource allocation to its electoral support. I elucidate one method that politicians in a dominant party will be able to use. The chapter then presents an overview of the empirical strategy used to test the theory, which uses regression analyses of original data on resource allocations and voting behavior in Japanese municipalities, 1980–2014, buttressed by qualitative evidence. Finally, the chapter presents a summary of the headline findings for scholars of Japanese politics. Ultimately, the book helps to account for why a single party, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), has been able to win almost every election in Japan.

Chapter 8 looks for evidence of tournaments in the decisions of voters in Japan to turn out and vote in Lower House elections, 1980–2014. Under a tournament, decisions to vote are expected to hinge on where in the ranking a given municipality is expected to end up. All else equal, it expects that voters will be systematically more likely to go to the polls when they live in municipalities that are projected to place highly. Moreover, among municipalities projected to place highly, projections of further increases in rank are expected to bring about an even larger impact on turnout. The chapter presents three sets of empirical tests of these two hypotheses. The first two look within electoral districts and examine how turnout varies as a function of where municipalities are expected to place in the ranking. The third set of tests leverage variation in competitiveness across electoral districts, which we know impacts turnout, and variation in competitiveness and ruralness, which we know impacts turnout in Japan. The tests reveal support for both hypotheses and shed new light on determinants of political participation across time and space.

Politicians in all democracies have goods to distribute, and they employ different modes of distribution to deliver them. They can offer voters goods in the hope those goods turn into votes. Alternatively, they can try to make the distribution of a good conditional on how someone votes. The latter mode is clientelism. I point out that the literature on clientelism has been preoccupied with the idea that politicians form clientelistic relationships with individuals. This has led to an intense scholarly focus on how politicians can consummate such vote buying deals to their satisfaction, given that the secret ballot prevents them from observing how people vote. I argue that under a certain configuration of political institutions, it makes sense for politicians to form clientelistic relationships with groups of voters. To do so, a politician’s electoral district must be divisible into groups of voters, at which electoral support is observable and to which resources are targetable. I take four longstanding questions of interest in the clientelism literature, concerning brokers, economic development, democratic integrity, and club goods and explain how the theory of group-based clientelism opens up new lines of inquiry in each.

Japan is the world’s fourth-largest economy and a close ally of the United States. Yet its politics are highly anomalous: It is a democracy in which one party, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), wins nearly every election. Even an electoral reform, expected to bring about alternations in power between two large parties, has. The chapter uses data on the outcomes of every Lower House election held since the LDP’s inception in 1955 and public opinion surveys to flesh out the puzzle of LDP dominance. It surveys three explanations for this. One emphasizes structural features of the electoral systems Japan has used and explains how they have translated into advantages for the LDP. The other two probe the reasons why voters vote for the LDP. One holds that voters vote for the LDP because they prefer its policy positions, ideological orientation, leaders, or reputation for competence. The other holds that voters vote for the LDP because of the access to central government resources its politicians enjoy. This chapter explains how over time, real-world events and empirical studies have chipped away at the explanatory power of each account. This warrants another look at this question.

Chapters 6–8 use a comprehensive new dataset on the universe of Japanese municipalities in existence between 1980 and 2014 to examine whether tournaments are being conducted within tournament-possible electoral districts. Using regression specifications designed to minimize the influence of confounders, weigh up evidence for rival theories, and take advantage of distinctive features of the two electoral systems Japan has used, I test two hypotheses. First, I show that LDP politicians make the amounts of money municipalities in their electoral districts receive after Lower House elections conditional on where each municipality places in a rank order of municipalities. Second, I show that the difference in amounts received by municipalities at different ranks is larger at higher ranks, which is also evidence of a tournament. In addition to regression analyses, I consider two of the theory’s microfoundations which are that LDP politicians are capable of lobbying bureaucrats and voters are aware money is tied to support, respectively. Case studies, anecdotes, interviews, election manifestos, and voter surveys offer evidence for these microfoundations. Finally, I use the logic of a tournament to explain why prior studies of the relationship between votes and money in Japan reached strikingly different conclusions.