Hi all,

Just to return briefly to the campaign laws issue, there have been over 80 statutory changes to the Public Office Election Law (POEL), Political Funds Control Law (PFCL), and Political Party Public Subsidy Law since 1950. Each of these legal reforms encompassed multiple discrete changes. For example, the 1992 POEL reform that raised campaign deposits also restricted donations to candidates, increased public funding for campaign signs and posters, raised campaign spending limits, and toughened electoral fraud penalties. My point being, it's not always easy to isolate the effect of any given POEL change, because it is likely part of a broader package of simultaneous reforms that may have contradictory effects.

In an article I wrote a few years back, I argued that the LDP has consistently altered campaign regulations to benefit the government. Some of these--especially changes to the PFCL--have partisan effects:
restrictions on campaign donations harm pro-business parties like the LDP more than they do pro-labor JSP/DPJ. Others--especially changes to the POEL--have broader pro-incumbent effects: restrictions on electioneering disproportionately harm challengers, who are less well-known than incumbents. The goal of the latter category is, as others have noted, to deter the entry of independent candidates. As the party system stabilized through the 1970s, the biggest threat or wild card to incumbents was the entry of new spoiler candidates. This concern was shared across the political spectrum; in general, POEL reforms were more likely to receive bi-partisan support (because they helped all incumbents) than PFCL changes (which split the LDP vs. JSP/DPJ). The most striking example of restricted electioneering was the gradual reduction in the number of legal campaign days, from 30 in 1950 to just 12 days by 1994.

McElwain, K. M. (2008). "Manipulating Electoral Rules to Manufacture Single Party Dominance." American Journal of Political Science 52(1): 32-47.

As Ellis Krauss and Robert Pekkanen write in their book, these reforms have had pretty big effects on the nature of election campaigning and party organization.
Koenkai are valuable precisely because their dominant activities are social networking and mobilization (permitted under the POEL) that were not tied to political persuasion (which is legally proscribed).
The value of the three crown jewels of
campaigning--jiban, kanban, kaban--are not unique to Japan, but geographical support bases and name recognition were particularly important because candidates can't rely on the campaign process to guarantee that their profiles and programs are sold to the electorate.

Kenneth McElwain
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