The Costs of Intraparty Competition: SNTV and Money Politics in Japan

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Many scholars have argued that money politics in Japan has been driven in part by the imperatives of intra-party competition under the single, non-transferable vote system used for Lower House elections until 1994. However, to date no one has undertaken a systematic quantitative study of campaign expenditure in Japan. In this paper we exploit the intraelection reports - which are believed to be accurate accounts of spending during the brief official campaign - in order to investigate how Japanese candidates adapted their last-minute expenditures to SNTV. We show that candidates spent more when they faced more intraparty competition. Our results for Liberal Democratic candidates suggest that intra-party competition boosted campaign-period spending by something like 4 to 18 percent. We also find evidence that the spending appears to be reactive, with candidates increasing their expenditures to counter higher spending by other candidates, and especially by copartisans.