From its founding in 1955 and for the next thirty-eight years, Japan's conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) won all but one national election and selected every prime minister and nearly every cabinet member. Other democracies have had similarly dominant parties, but none approaches the LDP for longevity in power and complete dominance of the political scene. Then, in 1993 a political earthquake transformed Japan from a country of unchanging one-party rule into a nation of ever-changing and free-flowing political coalitions. For the rest of the decade the LDP struggled to regain its...
From its founding in 1955 and for the next thirty-eight years, Japan's conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) won all but one national electio...
