Elena Korshenko of the Free University, Berlin will give a brief lunchtime seminar entitled


The inherent unsustainability of new parties in Japan, 2005-2016.

All are welcome and registration is not required.



Time and place

Wednesday, March 20 at 12:15 p.m, Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo, Room 108 東大社研本館第一会議室（１０８号室）




Abstract


The Japanese party system has experienced continuous change over the last decades. New actors have emerged and gained legislative representation in each general election, even after the consolidation of a two/two-and-a-half-party system around the LDP and the DPJ in the early 2000s. Yet, none of the new parties proved sustainable in the long run. This project covers all electorally successful challengers that emerged between 2005 and 2016. It seeks to understand when and why they failed to survive in their initial form and re-organised or perished.

Building on a recent strand of research that stresses the link between new parties' strategic choices and their sustainability, I develop a theoretical framework for evaluating a party's capacity to distribute material and emotive benefits to its members by minimising the costs of their political activities, strengthening party organisation and creating an attractive party brand. Time-series Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) of an original dataset is used to identify distinctive types of new challengers and the paths that lead to a party's demise. The analysis demonstrates the limits of party agency in Japan. Over the period of observation, new parties served as short-term vehicles for cutting the costs of competition, but their ability to generate other benefits was constrained, impelling their members to defect or create yet newer platforms to pursue their goals. The results suggest that, in the absence of structural changes, partisan volatility will continue to be a chronic feature of Japanese politics.



Bio

Elena Korshenko is a PhD candidate at the Graduate School of East Asian Studies (GEAS), Freie Universität Berlin. She is currently a Japan Foundation pre-doctoral research fellow at the Institute of Social Science (ISS) at the University of Tokyo. She received her MA from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and a BA from the Moscow State University. Her research interests centre on party politics, political institutions and new political challengers, with a particular focus on Japan.