Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) (Japan) Japan's most established party of government was formed in 1955 as a congeries of centre and conservative groupings with the encouragement of business interests. In many respects, anxiety concerning the electoral potential of the newly united Socialist Party rather than any other common purpose created Japan's conservative consensus, but despite such beginnings the LDP was able to remain Japan's party in power for most of the postwar period.

One important consequence of the circumstances surrounding its birth has been that the LDP has resembled more an alliance of factions than a disciplined political party. Indeed, factionalism became a distinctive feature of the party. Between 1955 and 1993, it was reinforced by the convention that the party president also served as Prime Minister. Because the parliamentary party had a decisive role in the election for the party presidency, the recruitment of faction members from among the LDP's membership in the Diet, and the provision of adequate supplies of money to ensure their loyalty, became an increasing preoccupation for party leaders. On the other hand, this factionalism became a source of strength which allowed the LDP to accommodate a broad range of constituencies of support and political ideologies.

Opposing wings within the party have disagreed on even the most fundamental issues. This explains its confused policies, for example towards the Japanese constitution, which it first attempted to rewrite, during the 1950s and early 1960s, and then accepted as it was, despite continuing calls for reform from senior party members. While pursuing perhaps its most important policy goals of industrialization and high economic growth between 1955 and 1970, the LDP also managed to cast itself as an ally of farmers and small businessmen. In foreign affairs during the 1960s, one group within the party promoted calls for the recognition of Communist China, while party policy supported the nationalist regime in Taiwan.

No doubt such amorphousness gave the LDP flexibility during its period of continuous rule (1955–93). By virtue of the length of that rule, it has become well ensconced in its relationships with the bureaucracy and big business. While the label of ‘Japan Incorporated’ is too superficial, the linkages of this ‘iron triangle’ (party, business, and bureaucracy) have nevertheless been intimate. Nearly half of the men (seven of the fifteen) who occupied the premiership between 1955 and 1993 had a background in the bureaucracy. While the civil service provided much of the LDP's talent, business provided the financial resources necessary for success in Japanese elections. The expense entailed in winning an election to the Diet involved the LDP and its leaders in a number of highly publicized scandals such as the Black Mist, Lockheed, and Recruit affairs in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, respectively, while the party has rarely been free of less spectacular embarrassments.

For all the party's successes, there were periods where the LDP was vulnerable at the polls. Most ironically, between 1955 and 1976, when the party could claim credit for record levels of economic growth, its absolute share of the vote declined from 42 per cent in 1960 to 30 per cent in 1976. Indeed in every House of Representatives election between 1972 and 1983, more of the electorate voted for its opponents than voted for the government. Despite having only a wafer-thin majority after the 1976 Lower House election, the LDP government survived, thanks largely to the over-representation of the rural vote. The LDP recovered some of its former electoral position in the mid-1980s during an economic upturn and under the popular premiership of Nakasone Yasuhiro. Even so, the party's confidence was undermined with its first ever loss of a majority in the House of Councillors in 1989.

Fittingly, the LDP's period of uninterrupted rule was brought to an end by its own hands, when Ozawa Ichirô led his faction out of the LDP and helped pass a vote of no confidence in June 1993. One year later the LDP found itself back in power, although this time its government relied on an improbable but durable coalition with its old rival, the Japanese Socialist Party (JSP). Throughout the late 1990s the LDP was unsuccessful at dealing with the economic crisis which challenged Japan's economic model at its foundations. Led by Obuchi, it continued in power in a coalition, from 1998, with the Liberal Party and, from 1999, with New Kômeitô. However, the party leadership continued to be entangled in a series of corruption scandals, which came to a head in the short government of Yoshiro Mori (2000–2001), who became Japan's most unpopular Prime Minister since 1945. The LDP's fortunes were revived when the LDP chose the relative outsider, Koizumi, as its party leader. Koizumi confirmed his radical reputation when he appointed a number of women to his cabinet. When the most prominent women minister, Makiko Tanaka, resigned as Foreign Minister in 2002, her accusations of bullying and chauvinism against the party and the government damaged Koizumi's authority and reputation. Koizumi recovered, but he failed to transfer his personal popularity to his party, which gained a reduced majority at the 2003 elections.

http://www.jimin.jp

LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY

The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR; known as the LDPSU during the last months of the Soviet period) was created in the spring of 1990, with active participation of the authorities and special services, as a controllable alternative to the growing democratic movement. In the 1991 presidential elections, the liberal democratic leader, the political clown Vladimir Zhirinovsky, won a surprising 6.2 million votes (7.8%) and took third place after victorious Boris Yeltsin and the main Communist candidate Nikolai Ryzhkov. In the 1993 Duma elections, the victories of the LDPR became a sensation; Zhirinovsky alone, capitalizing on sentiments of protest, secured 12.3 million votes (22.9%). From there the LDPR was able to advance five candidates in single-mandate districts. Such resounding success—both on the party list and in the districts—would not befall the LDPR again, although in 1994 and 1995 Zhirinovsky stirred up considerable energy for party formation in the provinces. In the 1995 elections, the LDPR registered candidates in 187 districts (more than the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, or KPRF) but received only one mandate and half its previous vote: 7.7 million votes (11.2%, second to the KPRF). In the 1996 presidential elections, Zhirinovsky received 4.3 million votes (5.7%, fifth place). The LDPR held approximately fifty seats in the Duma from 1996 to 1999 which helped repay, with interest, the resources invested earlier in the party's publicity since, with the domination of the left in the Duma, these votes were able to tip the scales in favor of government initiatives. The LDPR turned into an extremely profitable political business project.

In the 1999 elections, the Central Electoral Commission played a cruel joke on the Liberal Democrats. The LDPR list, consisting of a large number of commercial positions, filled by quasi-criminal businessmen, was not registered. On the very eve of the elections, when Zhirinovsky, hurriedly assembling another list and registering as the "Zhirinovsky Bloc," launched the advertising campaign "The Zhirinovsky Bloc Is the LDPR," the Central Electoral Commission registered the LDPR, but without Zhirinovsky. The Liberal Democrats were saved from this fatal split (LDPR without Zhirinovsky as a rival of the Zhirinovsky Bloc) only by the intervention of the Presidium of the Supreme Court. In the 1999 elections, the Zhirinovsky Bloc received 6 percent of the vote and finished fifth; half a year later, in the 2000 presidential elections, Zhirinovsky himself finished fourth with 2.7 percent. The LDPR fraction in the Duma from 2000 to 2003 was the smallest; it began with 17 delegates and ended with 13. It was headed by Zhirinovsky's son Igor Lebedev, as the party's head had become vice-speaker of the Duma.

Actively exploiting the nostalgia for national greatness (and for the USSR with its powerful army and special services, but without "Party nomenklatura"), "enlightened nationalism," and anti-Western sentiments; castigating the "radical reformers" and denouncing efforts at breaking the country both from without and within, the LDPR enjoys significant support from surviving groups and strata that do not share the communist ideology. The populist brightness, spiritedness, and outstanding political and acting abilities of Zhirinovsky play an important role, bringing him into sharp contrast with ordinary Russian politicians. The LDRP has especially strong support among the military and those Russian citizens who lived in Russia's national republics and SNG (Union of Independent States) countries among residents of bordering nations. The LDPR had its greatest success in regional elections from 1996 to 1998, when its candidates won as governor in Pskov oblast, mayor in the capital Tuva, parliament in Krasnodar Krai, and the Novosibirsk city assembly; a LDPR candidate came close to victory in the presidential elections in the Mari Republic as well. The LDPR results in the 1999–2002 term were significantly weaker, but with the expansion of NATO, the war in Iraq, and so forth, the LDPR ratings rose again. At its reregistration in April 2002, the LDPR declared nineteen thousand members and fifty-five regional branches.

See also: constitution of 1993; zhirinovsky, vladimir volfovich

bibliography

McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia's Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

McFaul, Michael, and Markov, Sergei. (1993). The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and Programs. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press.

McFaul, Michael and Petrov, Nikolai, eds. (1995). Previewing Russia's 1995 Parliamentary Elections. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

McFaul, Michael; Petrov, Nikolai; and Ryabov, Andrei, eds. (1999). Primer on Russia's 1999 Duma Elections. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press.

Nikolai Petrov

Liberal Democratic Party (Japan) Japanese political party that has been the dominant party since World War II. Political alignments were slow to coalesce in postwar Japan, but in 1955 rival conservative groups combined to form the Liberal Democratic Party, which succeeded in holding power continuously until 1993. The Party's early leaders included KISHI NOBUSUKE, his brother SATO EISAKU, and TANAKA KAKUEI, who was forced to resign in 1974 as a result of a bribery scandal. Four leaders followed Kakuei in the space of eight years as the party's fortunes waned before some degree of recovery was achieved under the forceful leadership of NAKASONE YASUHIRO, who served as Prime Minister and LDP President from 1982 to 1987. The party developed close links with business and with interest groups such as fisheries and agriculture. A key feature has been its structure of internal factions, less concerned with policy than with patronage, electoral funding, and competition for party leadership. The party has also been involved in numerous financial and sexual scandals. Even so, it continued to appeal to a wide range of the electorate. The future of the party was threatened in 1992 by divisions arising from the uncovering of a further series of financial scandals. The LDP government lost a vote of confidence in 1993, lost the subsequent general election, and was ousted from office for the first time in its history. Two coalition governments collapsed and in 1994 the LDP joined the Social Democratic Party (SDP) of Japan and the Sakigake Party to form a coalition government. The SDP disbanded and the LDP formed a new coalition in 1996 and again in 1998.

Liberal Democratic party (LDP), Japanese political party. It began as the conservative Liberal party, which, under Shigeru Yoshida , became the dominant political force in Japan following World War II. In 1955 the Liberals merged with the newly created Democratic party. Retaining control of the Japanese government for 38 years, the LDP supported Japan's alliance with the United States and fostered close links between Japanese business and government. Following charges of corruption in Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa 's government, it lost its parliamentary majority in the 1993 elections, which put a coalition government in power. In spite of numerous defections by LDP members of parliament over the party's failure to enact political reform, it remained Japan's largest political party. From 1994, when the LDP returned to power, it was the senior partner in a series of coalition governments.

Ryutaro Hashimoto became LDP leader in 1995, assuming the post of deputy prime minister in Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama 's cabinet. Upon Murayama's resignation early in 1996, Hashimoto became prime minister; Keizo Obuchi succeeded Hashimoto as party leader and prime minister in 1998. When Obuchi was incapacitated by a severe stroke in 2000, Yoshiro Mori , secretary-general of the LDP, succeeded him as prime minister, but the unpopular Mori was replaced in less than a year by Junichiro Koizumi . Koizumi was succeeded as party leader by Shinzo Abe in 2006, Yasuo Fukuda in 2007, and Taro Aso in 2008. In 2009 the LDP's long dominance of postwar Japanese politics ended when the Japan Democratic party won the elections in a landslide and displaced the LDP as the largest party in the Diet. Aso resigned as party leader and was succeeded by Sadakazu Tanigaki, a former finance minister.

See also Postwar Japan under Japan .

Bibliography: See E. S. Krauss and R. J. Pekkanen, The Rise and Fall of Japan's LDP (2010).