The Opposition: From Third Party Back to Third Force

Pekkanen, Robert; Reed, Steven R.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-76475-7_5

Cited by 17 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 7 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Finally, after the LDP returned to power in 2012, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe found great success in calling two surprise elections in 2014 and 2017. In both cases, established opposition parties found it difficult to recruit candidates, while newly formed, potential “Third Force” parties such as Toru Hashimoto’s Japan Innovation Party and Yuriko Koike’s Party of Hope struggled to coordinate with existing opposition parties and gain a foothold in the HOR (Pekkanen & Reed, 2018).…”

Section: Surprise Elections In Japanmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Element of Surprise: Election Timing and Opposition Preparedness

McClean

2021

Comparative Political Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

How can incumbent governments benefit when they control the timing of elections? The conventional wisdom is that incumbents gain an advantage by timing elections to coincide with favorable economic conditions. An alternative mechanism that has received less attention is the element of surprise: the incumbent’s ability to exploit the opposition’s lack of election preparedness. I theorize and empirically test this surprise mechanism using candidate-level data from Japanese House of Representatives elections (1955–2017). The results show that in surprise elections, opposition parties recruit fewer, lower-quality candidates, spend less money campaigning, coordinate their candidates less effectively, and ultimately receive fewer votes and seats. Evidence from fixed effects models and exogenously timed by-elections further suggest that surprise matters more in shorter, competitive election campaigns and helps incumbents more with confronting inter-party as opposed to intra-party electoral competition. These findings add to our understanding of how strategic election timing can undermine electoral accountability.

show abstract

Section: Surprise Elections In Japanmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Element of Surprise: Election Timing and Opposition Preparedness

McClean

2021

Comparative Political Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Other works have dealt with the cleavages in the DPJ from an electoral perspective (Hrebenar and Nakamura 2015;Pekkanen and Reed 2018a;2018b;Scheiner, Smith, and Thies 2018) but present the ongoing factional dynamics only incidentally. This work attempts to fill in a gap in literature after the 2017 Lower House general election, arguing that if there was not an exogenous factor -the founding of the Party of Hope, which I discuss in the 5 "The law is driven by the idea that in the long-run rational politicians and voters will realize that it is hopeless to have more than two parties competing at national level.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Family Feud, or Realpolitik?

Silva

2021

IAPSS Politikon

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this contribution, I use the breakup – just short of the 2017 General Election – of Japan’s former second biggest political party, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), as a case study so as to assess the practical implications of splits and realignments in the most relevant party split in Japan since the DPJ was ousted from government in 2012. First, I examine DPJ’s origin as an umbrella for ideologically diverse groups that opposed the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) – the government party in Japan throughout most of its post-war history, its tendency to factionalism, and the oftentimes damaging role the factional dynamics played in the party’s decision-making process throughout the years. In the case study, it is understood that the creation of the Party of Hope – a split from the LDP, and the salience of constitutional issues were exogenous factors particular to that election, which helped causing the DPJ split.

show abstract

“…This name was a clear reference to the new party position of defending the Japanese constitution, including Article 9 and its democratic institutions. Surprisingly, despite its organizational weakness and poorly conceived election agenda due to its short-term establishment, the CDP had notable electoral success and became the second largest party in the new lower house (Pekkanen and Reed 2018). Given the public opinion and these developments, even voices inside the conservative LDP establishment called for a postponement regarding any amendment or reformulation of Article 9 of the Japanese constitution (Ishiba 2017).…”

Section: Introducing the Abe Doctrinementioning

confidence: 99%

China-US Competition

2023

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The present introductory chapter shall set the stage for the edited volume by broadly sketching the contours of the intense strategic competition between China and the United States and its potential to reshape Asia-Pacific and the world order. Briefly, this chapter will also allude to the future probable fallouts of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its potential for redrawing geopolitical coordinates and allegiances, for the countries that are in the focus of the present volume.

show abstract

The Opposition: From Third Party Back to Third Force

Cited by 17 publications

References 7 publications

The Element of Surprise: Election Timing and Opposition Preparedness

The Element of Surprise: Election Timing and Opposition Preparedness

Family Feud, or Realpolitik?

China-US Competition

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About