 Hello everybody, my name is Bryce Wakefield, I'm the National Executive Director of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, and welcome to another AA webinar if you've joined us here before, and if you haven't, well, welcome on board and we hope that you'll join us for more. Today we're talking about Japan, and Japan is an important partner for Australia, and when we talk about cooperation between Australia and Japan, we often invoke democratic values as a kind of binding glue that holds the relationship together. But how much do we know about Japanese democracy. Today to discuss that that important topic for the relationship between Australia and Japan, although not in those terms is our guest Amy Catalina, how are you Amy. I'm great thanks Bryce. Amy is an assistant professor at New York University. She works in the Department of Politics there. She has a PhD in politics from Harvard University. She spent five years in Japan researching Japanese politics. She's also spent some years in Australia at the Australian National University, and she is the author of electoral reform and national security in Japan. So to talk about how pork barrel politics holds Japan's ruling coalition together is Amy, so I'll pass it over to you now Amy. Thank you so much Bryce, and yeah thank you very much the AAIA for inviting me today. I'm really excited to be sharing some co-authored work that I've been working on recently with all of you, so I'm going to share my screen now so that you can see my slides prepared some slides today. So the sort of main title of my talk is how pork barrel politics holds Japan's governing coalition together. So I want to begin today by telling you about this by phenomenal I simply mean very successful governing coalition in Japan today. So as a lot of you may know Japan's governing coalition is comprised of two parties. One is called the Liberal Democratic Party and the other is called the Kormito. So that sort of roughly translates as the clean government party. Right so the LDP and the Kormito are unlikely be fellows. So ideologically the two parties really couldn't be more different and yet they've been in a coalition together since 1999. So just to give you a little bit of background the LDP was formed in 1955 it's a conservative nationalistic political party. In general it's economic this is Abe Shinzo here on the right I should say he's been the prime minister now since 2012. He so the LDP is a conservative nationalist party. It's pro the United States and in general it was founded in 1955 under this sort of notion that Japan needs to unshackle itself from the past. It needs to become a normal nation in the world that needs to realize constitutional revision and rearm. So in the short term it wants to sort of work toward Japan assuming more of an independent role within the US Japan Alliance with a potential view to getting rid of the bases. That the US has currently in Japan but in the long term you know being an equal partner with the United States. Very more recently it's been focused on reinterpreting a ban on collective self-defense that earlier LDP governments are passed. So the LDP I will just say that it is I think the most successful political party in any democratic country. It was formed in 1955 since 1955 up until now it has only been out of power for four years. It was out of power between 1993 and 1994 and then it was out of power again between 2009 and 2012. So Japan had one of the factors that facilitated the LDP for winning all of these to win all of these elections was in very unusual electoral system. And a lot of my research is focused on Japan's electoral system. In 1994 the electoral system was reformed under the new system which I'm going to tell you about today. The LDP found itself in need of a coalition partner and I'm going to explain that in a minute. So in 1999 it decided five years after the reform it was back in power back in government after having been knocked from government for a year between 1993 and 1994. It decided it needs to form a coalition and it selected the Kormito. So the Kormito could not be more different from the LDP. It is founded on the principles of pacifism social welfare and something called humanistic socialism. So in general it is opposed to the major core principles of the LDP being national security and constitutional revision. It is supported by a very large lay Buddhist sect called the Soka Gakkai. And it was sort of officially cut its ties with the Soka Gakkai in 1970, six years after it was formed. And that's because it was under a lot of criticism that the formation of the party in 1964 violated the constitutional separation of religion. And that like religious it said the article 20 of Japan's constitution says that religious organizations are not allowed to exercise political authority. So it's been since its formation it's been sort of criticized for being a religious organization and essentially you know being unconstitutional. So what I want to say the reason I'm sort of giving you this background is just to emphasize that the Kormito and the LDP have diametrically opposed preferences. The LDP supports constitutional revision and re-arming and many of you probably know that Japan has a pacifist constitution. It has article nine of the constitution. So the LDP would like to get rid of article nine so Japan can play a more active security role and be on an equal footing with other countries in the world. And the Kormito are opposed to this. So despite these differences they formed a coalition in 1999. And usually across the world we don't observe coalitions comprising partners with ideologically opposed preferences. So usually we observe coalitions of political parties and many democracies where their preferences are more aligned. So these two parties are not like minded. So now I want to switch to saying okay given they're not like minded then surely the coalition is not going to be very successful right. Well actually I hope you can see my screen. These two parties the coalition has been very, very dominant. Now I borrowed this graphic from a paper, a journal article written by a couple of my colleagues Adam Lyth and Paul Maeda. And over on the left here we have, I know it's difficult to see so I'm going to explain it to you. But since the coalition was formed in 1999 the first election here in the lower house on the left side was in 2000. And you can see here they won together in the year 2000. They won almost 60% of seats in the election. So since 2000 next election is 2003 also doing well 2005. In 2009 they actually failed to win a majority. Since 2009 the last three bars on the left hand side showed the 2012, 2014 and 2017 election. Now this is for the Japan's lower house which is more the more powerful house and on the right hand side here we have the other house. But my point here is to say that the court, the LDP call me to a coalition. They did okay in the year 2000 the election of 2000, 2003 and 2005 they did okay. Then they lost the 2009 election. But then they won the 2012 election and since 2012 have won every election at the national level by a landslide. So they are capturing in every election since 2012 are captured close to 70% of seats in the lower house. And as you can see here close to 60% between 50 and 60% of seats in the upper house. Now it's not an exaggeration to say right now that the opposition in Japan is totally, it's very, very weak at the moment. There is really no chance of the opposition in Japan winning the next election. So if you look at support rates for the opposition parties and also for the LDP and the Kormato, opposition parties support rates over the last say five years have ranged between 10 to 15%. The LDP in the Kormato governing coalition has a support rate of usually in the 40s. It's a little bit lower. It's even gone up to the 50s in the 60s. So the governing coalition is four times more popular than any opposition party right now. So by any stretch of the imagination, the LDP Kormato governing coalition has been very, very successful. So in this project, what I wanted to find out is was really what I was sort of motivated by was to better understand this governing coalition and how they can be so successful. But I also had another goal, which was to illuminate how parties can win elections under Japan's current electoral system, which is mixed member majoritarian. So I'm going to explain what mixed member majoritarian means in a minute. We can just call it MMM for the purposes of this presentation. I'm going to explain exactly how it works. But I thought that the way MMM works may be a clue to why the LDP and the Kormato have been so successful. So this is sort of my broad interest is in this electoral system and there's lots of countries. There's a lot of countries around the world that use this electoral system. But I wanted to test this theory on Japan and with my co-author who's a PhD candidate here in the Department of Politics, we both decided to work on this together. And one of our cases is Japan and one of our cases is Mexico, which is the country she's most familiar with, which also has the same electoral system. Now, before your eyes glaze over because you may find electoral systems a little bit dry. Hopefully I'm going to change your viewpoint on that in this presentation. So let me explain Japan's electoral system. So Japan has a mixed member system. Mixed member electoral systems are used in 38 countries around the world. 33% of voters worldwide choose members under a mixed member system. So mixed member systems typically consist of a district tier and a list tier. So by a district tier, that means that when you're a voter and you go to the polls in a mixed member system, you usually have two votes. First, you vote for your candidate in your district. And usually those districts are called what we call in political science, we call them single seat districts, which means you vote for someone and the person with the most votes wins. The person placing first out of all the candidates running is usually not that many candidates running. The person placing first wins. So that's one of your votes. It's for a candidate in the district. And the second vote is for a party in what's called a proportional representation tier. And I don't, I mean, I don't need to get into detail about what closed list proportional representation means. It just means that you have a vote for a candidate. The first vote, the district vote consists of a vote for a candidate in the district race. The second vote is a vote for a party in the proportional representation race. And that can be like a national race. There could just be like one district over the whole country and you choose your party and that translates into seats for that party. Or there can be different blocks of, there can be different districts for in this tier as well. So Japan's variant, the type of a mixed member system that Japan uses is called mixed member majority. This is actually a really commonly used system that it is the least well studied out of the mixed member systems. It's used in 30 countries around the world today. So in mixed member majority, and I'm going to just say any men. So in these systems, voters choose a candidate in what's typically a single seat district and a district race and a party in the PR race. So they usually cast two ballots. And then a party's seat share is the sum of the seats it wins in both tiers. So if you're a majority-seeking party and you want to control government and you have to win a majority of seats, then you compete in the first tier, the district tier by running candidates in all of these districts all over the country. And you also compete in the second tier. You want people to choose you when they have to write down the name of the party in the PR race. So you have to win in both tiers. Now, for some of you who may be familiar with mixed member systems, this is actually different in what's called mixed member proportional, which is the electoral system used in my native country, New Zealand. So in mixed member proportional, parties can just compete in PR and because the total number of seats a party wins is determined by the total number of seats it wins in the PR tier. So I'm not going to get into that, but I'll just say that under NNM systems like Japan and like Mexico, parties have to win seats in both tiers. So I want to switch now to explaining something called that we political scientists called pre-electoral coordination. This is a little bit of a fancy word. It simply means when parties get together and agree not to compete against each other in certain districts. We say parties are coordinating if they come up with agreements not to compete against each other. So I just want to walk you through why this, like why coordination happens. I want you to think about an electoral system in a country comprised of only single seat districts. So you've got a system, you only have single seat districts. So in an electoral system like that, large parties, if you're a large party and you want to win enough seats to govern, then you have to be capable of fielding enough candidates who can place first in as many districts as possible. But inevitably, you're going to have some candidates who are not going to be capable of placing first, or maybe they can just place first, but they only have 30% of support in the district where they really need more than that. So in a system where there's only single seat districts, it would be really nice for large parties if they could look at the districts where their candidates are relatively weak, and they could ask small parties not to run a candidate in those districts and ask their supporters to vote for the large parties candidate. So that would be really nice if large parties could do that, because then they can make sure that their weaker candidates also get enough votes to get over the finish line. The reason I'm asking you to think about this is because in this system, it's very unlikely that there are going to be small parties, because small parties by definition are not going to be competitive in single seat districts. So small parties typically are not going to have candidates who can win 50% of the votes plus one, which is necessary to win in a single seat district. But I gave you this example just so you can think about the fact that large parties, sometimes they want to coordinate with other parties based on the amount of support that the other parties have. Now let's switch to MMM, Japan's current system. So under MMM, you're going to have both small and large parties that exist, and that's because small parties can win seats via the proportional representation tier. They don't have to place first in a district. They don't have to be the most popular candidate in a district to get a seat. They can just get 10% of the votes from the whole country, and then that more or less will translate into 10% of the seats. So small parties are going to exist, but they're not going to be competitive in the districts. So then large parties who have to win a lot of districts and also PR seats, they can ask a small party to stand down in certain SSTs, in certain districts, and support their candidate. And what's really interesting about this electoral system is that large parties, they can get a small party candidate to stand down and ask, and the small party candidate asks their supporters to vote for them, and that's why they get over the finish line, but they can actually sweeten the deal by asking their supporters to cast their PR votes for the small party. So an MMM is an electoral system where there's really interesting forms of pre-electoral coordination are possible. So in Japanese elections, this is what goes on between the LDP and the Cormator. I think it's fascinating. So there are between 300 and 289 SSTs. It's kind of decreased over time. So in what I call LDP SSTs, so let's say there are 300 SSTs. The vast majority of these are what's called LDP SSTs. So in LDP SSTs, the Cormator does not run a candidate, it stands down. The Cormator asks its supporters to cast their district votes for the LDP candidate, and in return, the LDP candidate asks her supporters to cast their PR votes for the Cormator. So they are encouraged to switch their votes. So in Cormator SSTs, where the LDP candidate stands down, this is a very small proportion of the SSTs, the opposite is happening. So LDP supporters are not running a candidate, they're standing down. So they ask their supporters to vote for the Cormator's candidate in the SST. And in return, for getting all of those votes from LDP supporters, the Cormator candidate asks their supporters to vote for the LDP in PR. And the reason this happens, the reason why they want to do this, is because both parties, through this coordination, can win more seats than the otherwise would. So the LDP, it wants as many SSTs as possible, but it doesn't have candidates who can place first in all of these SSTs. By convincing the Cormator to stand down, it can get all the votes of those Cormator supporters, and who I mentioned before, are supported by this lay Buddhist organization, the Sokoga Kai. They can get all of these candidates, can win because of that. And the LDP in return can offer PR votes. So it is giving up the chance to win some PR seats, but it's gaining seats in the SSTs, and therefore it's gaining seats overall. So other people, other scholars of Japanese politics have looked at this and said that, you know, this is what's going on in Japan. Where the value added of our paper is, is that we sort of sat back and thought, hmm, convincing someone to switch their vote is pretty difficult, right? So if you're an LDP supporter, do you really want to cast one vote for the LDP and another vote for a party that you don't like? The LDP and the Cormator, as I explained before, are ideologically opposed, they actually fought elections against each other before they began this coordination. So convincing supporters to split your vote, cast one for one party, one for the other party is difficult. The LDP has a history of making government spending on municipalities contingent on how these municipalities perform in elections, and by perform I mean how many votes they return to the LDP. There's early work by Jim Saito on this, and recently actually it was just published this year, a paper I wrote with my co-authors is also about this. So we sat back, my co-author and I, and we thought, could the LDP call me to a governing coalition? Could they be instructing supporters how to cast their votes and then using government money to reward people who complied and penalize people who didn't comply? This is sort of the starting premise of this project. And how exactly would this work? So let me just say that obviously Japan is a democracy, and so the governing coalition can't observe how individuals are casting their votes. They don't know if an individual is voting for who the individual, because it's a secret ballot. So there's a secret ballot. But in Japanese elections, as they are, we discovered in many countries votes accounted at a sub-district level. So I'm really curious as to how votes accounted in Australia. That's probably you came to hear about Japan. You're not probably not that interested in talking about that. But in Japanese elections, votes accounted at the level of the municipality, and SSDs are made up of multiple municipalities. So one SSD could have 20 municipalities in it. The fact that votes accounted at the level of the municipality means that after an election, the candidate in the district can look at all of the municipalities in the district and can see how many people voted for them, and how many are relative to before, relative to other municipalities in the same district, et cetera. So also, there is plenty of discretionary funding available to Japanese municipalities. And the particular fund that we study in this project is called Kokkoshijitsuken. There's a discretionary transfers that the government has. They're called national treasury disbursements as the way they are translated in English. The Japanese government makes this fund available every year. Bureaucrats are in charge of the fund, and they award it to municipalities for projects that the municipalities have applied for. So the municipalities put together a project for like a dam or a new community centre or an improvement of a road in a particular place, and the bureaucrats said, yes, we'll fund that, or no, we're not going to fund that. So we developed these hypotheses. So we thought if you're an LDP candidate in a district and you want to know, you look at the electoral election results and you want to know if your supporters complied with instructions, and if callmate or supporters complied with their instructions, what might you do? And we reasoned that what they could do is look at overtime changes in vote shares. So if you're an LDP in an LDP SSD, if in a municipality, PR votes for the callmate are increased and PR votes for the LDP decreased relative to a prior election, then that is evidence that LDP supporters are doing what they're told and are switching their PR vote for the callmate. So we reasoned that in, that we look at three Japanese elections, 2003, 2005 and 2012. That was mostly due to data availability. We want to expand it beyond 2012. So municipalities that are located in LDP SSDs, I remember these are SSDs where the callmate or candidate has stood down. So in order to get the callmate or candidate's votes, the LDP candidate instructs their supporters to switch their PR votes from the LDP to the callmate or. We reasoned that municipalities in LDP SSDs will be rewarded with more money after elections when they increase PR votes for the callmate or and decrease them for the LDP. And we reasoned that the opposite would be occurring in callmate or SSDs because callmate or SSDs, the LDP candidate has stood down. So the LDP supporters are supposed to be voting for the callmate or candidate. And in return for that, the callmate or SSD candidate says to their supporters, you have to switch your PR votes from the callmate or to the LDP. So we reasoned that municipalities in callmate or SSDs will be rewarded with more money after elections when they increase PR votes for the LDP and decrease them for the callmate or. These are our hypotheses. Now, this is a big table. I will just sort of explain briefly what we did. We find really, really strong evidence for both hypotheses. So this is a graph. If you on the X-axis, if you increase the X-axis, I'm not going to go into this in great detail, but if you increase, if you move along to the right on the X-axis, that means decreases in votes for the LDP, decreases in LDP votes. So if you take the black dotted line here, you can see that the black dotted line is increasing. So this models what happens when in a municipality where PR votes, the PR vote share for the callmate or has increased as in municipalities where the PR vote for the callmate or has increased by 10% from the previous election, decreases in LDP vote share, gets you more transfers. So this black dotted line is positive. Whereas the other two are negative. So essentially in LDP SSDs, decreases in votes for the LDP as you move along the X-axis, decreases in votes for the LDP are associated with fewer transfers after the election when the callmate or PR vote share also declines, the gray solid line. It's also decreases in votes for the LDP are also associated with fewer transfers after the election when there's no change to callmate or vote share. That's the gray dotted line. But decreases in votes for the LDP are associated with more transfers after elections in places where the callmate or PR vote share has increased. That's the black dotted line. And I show that we show the exact opposite. So if you're interested in these tables, you see these stars here in the first row, you can see how this is positive. These are not negative numbers. These are positives and they have three stars. I mean, they're very significant, although we're not supposed to be very significant now. But over here you can see that the same, this graph shows you that the same coefficient is now negative. So what this means is this is the hypothesis too. So here is votes for, if you look at the black dotted line again, the opposite direction than what it was before. So municipalities where votes for the LDP decrease as you move along the right to the right on the X axis, the black dotted line means that decreases and votes for the LDP are associated with fewer transfers in places where the callmate or PR vote share increases by 10%. So just to summarize those findings, I'm really happy to talk about the empirics, but I think you're probably much than what I'm going to say next about the takeaways. Just to summarize these, within LDP SSDs, we find that municipalities that increased PR votes for the callmate or and decrease them for the LDP are rewarded. Within callmate or SSDs, municipalities that increased PR votes for the LDP and decreased PR votes for the callmate or are rewarded. So this is exactly consistent with what, with a strategy of encouraging your supporters to split your vote and then giving them more money afterward when they comply with your instructions. So it shows that the LDP coalition government, there's a typo on my slide, is paying, it should say it's paying supporters to cast their votes in ways that help them win the next election. So let's just go through the takeaways. And this seems kind of like an absurd, maybe this seems like an outlandish thing to say, that they're paying supporters, but it is difficult to explain these results in any other way. So let's just go through the takeaways. So in Japan, the judicious use of corporal politics by Japan's governing coalition is helping it win elections. So this is a new explanation for why opposition parties in Japan have struggled to gain a foothold. So if you go to Japan and you interview politicians, as I do, and you say, why is the LDP so strong? And they say, well, the LDP is so strong because the opposition is so weak. So that's one response you get. But if you talk to a different set of people, you say to those people, why is the LDP so strong? They'll say, well, the opposition, sorry, I've just lost my train of thought. So the point is that people think that the opposition are to blame. The opposition are inherently weak or there's some problem with the opposition. But if the LDP and the kormato are using government money to facilitate this coordination in ways that help them win elections, then it's possible that no opposition party could ever kind of get a foothold in Japanese elections because they just don't have the resources. They don't have access to government resources so they can't promise to do the same thing that the LDP is doing. So this is a new explanation for why opposition parties struggle to gain a foothold in Japanese elections. Another really important takeaway is that the LDP is not as strong as it looks. So what I mean by that is that many scholars look at the LDP and the kormato and they're like, well, the kormato only provides 9% to 11% of seats overall. So the LDP is providing 90% of the seats of the coalition so the LDP is really strong. So why does the LDP need the kormato to begin with? So what our findings suggest is that the LDP actually can't elect those 90% of seats without the kormato. The kormato's support is behind almost every one of the LDP's SSD candidates. Most of these LDP SSD candidates could not get elected without the kormato's support. So if you're interested in like how many seats the LDP brings to the coalition, it doesn't make sense to just look at the number of seats occupied by LDP members. So we shouldn't be relying on the vote share for the kormato or the vote share for the LDP in PR or in the districts to gauge the electoral strength of either party. So just to conclude the presentation, I want to say a little bit about what's next. So an area of research that I'm really interested in is the possibility that if the LDP kormato coalition are funneling money, using money in ways to encourage supporters to split their votes, then the coalition could also be using money to facilitate intra-coalition harmony. So what I mean by that is that it could be allocating. So say the kormato is really unhappy with some of the policies that the LDP wants to pass. The LDP could just give it more money. It could just pay off the kormato in terms of community spending. If they give them more money for their community, then maybe they can buy the support of the kormato for some policies that the kormato doesn't like. So if supporters have been paid for their votes and the coalition could simply allocate larger awards for policy, when policies are being passed that the other coalition partner doesn't like. Could the LDP be buying the support of the kormato? And I'm really happy to talk about there are policies that the LDP has passed and not passed due to opposition from the kormato. And I think there's a relationship here between this spending that's been used at the local level and the amount of money and the amount of support the coalition partners have for the policies. And then another area that I want to work on is why doesn't coordination always work. So in 2009, the LDP, the kormato lost. Why did coordination not work in the 2009 election? And then when the DPJ was in power between 2009 and 2012, why couldn't they replicate the LDP's strategy? And then there are lots of other cases of MMM around the world. There are another 28 countries using MMM around the world today. One of those is Mexico. We've already looked at Mexico, but we hope to look at them. So thank you all very much. It's in the evening over here. I've had a long day of 30 degree weather, but I'm really excited to hear your comments and if you have any questions for me. Great. Thank you, Amy. I don't know if you can see me. I can't see myself. I can't hear myself. There we go. OK, great. So not at all. The talk was extremely lucid, one of the clearest presentations we've had so far on a very interesting and involved topic. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So I have a question on... Well, there are a couple of questions that have come through already, and one is actually one that I had from Phil. And just for those of you out there, if you do have a question, please make sure you do ask it on the punch the Q&A button down the bottom of your screen. If you see a question that you like, you can also upvote it. So the popular, I guess, questions float to the top. So Phil asks whether pork barreling is seen as morally wrong in Japan, and I wonder if I can add a bit of context here. I mean, you have written a book about pork barreling not only as it existed in the current MMN period, but in the former electoral system, the single non-transferable vote in multi-member districts where LDP candidates were encouraged to run against each other and therefore couldn't rely on party funds, had to sort of amass their own funds, and pork barreling became a phenomenon in Japan that was well known. This electoral system was supposed to get rid of that. Yes. After a lot of pressure from the population to criticise the politicians and to move to a cleaner system, you seem to suggest, your research seemed to suggest that that has not happened. Is that because perhaps Japanese voters are used to pork barreling? Is pork barreling seen as a phenomenon that is marginally accepted in Japanese politics? Is it seen as a problem in Japan? So I am a little starter. I was a little startled when I got these results because they are so strong and because they show that pork barreling really still is alive and well and the LDP is essentially using its ability to pork barrel to maintain itself in power by a sort of this give and take with the kormator. So what I was startled about is I haven't observed in the Japanese press a lot of criticism of this. I haven't even really observed people talk about I don't know how commonly this is known in Japan. I certainly haven't read any newspaper articles or I've never read anything to suggest that the LDP and the kormator governing coalition are using pork barreling in the ways that I've suggested that we found in this project. So that could be evidence that it's not seen as morally wrong and it's kind of a given part of the system or it could be because Japanese voters are not aware. I've been working on this project for about a year and a half and I hope to write a book about it and I hope to delve more deeply into that. But traditionally, as Bryce mentioned, Japan had the prior electoral system generated enormous incentives to pork barrel just like it turns out this system. So in a sense Japanese voters are more used to pork barreling probably than they are in Australia and in New Zealand. And I have seen some polling but not recently, pollings from the 1980s that talked about how they expect politicians to be able to bring home goodies and projects for their communities. But that may not be very different from politicians in other countries. Well, that brings us, I guess, to another question and it's one that's asked by Anthony. If this is not regularly reported on in the press it's not a phenomenon that is recognised in public. How do Kometo and LDP voters know how to behave that way? It's not as if the LDP is going out on a stage and saying, you know, we endorse pork barrel politics and this is the result of the election if you vote for us. So is it, I don't know, do they notice it almost through a sort of, you know, simply they notice the differences in their hip pocket and there's something latent there or is there something more blatant than that? Yeah, so in the theory that we offer we actually make a big distinction, a distinction between voters and supporters. So we think this theory works through supporters. So LDP and Kometo supporters. Now we know Kometo supporters are extremely well organised. They are the first organisation that supports the Kometo. They have these sort of, these just groups of, I shouldn't say armies of people, but they have these voters who are really reliable who go out and mobilise votes in elections. So we think that's where the communication goes through with the Kometo. And in the LDP, the LDP has traditionally not had a lot of party supporters, but the candidates have had their own personal support organisations called Core Enchai. So we think that the communication to switch your vote, the average voter who doesn't like the LDP, because many Japanese voters probably are like, well, many Japanese voters either, they don't support any party in election. I think there are some who say they'll support the LDP, but the average voter is not going to be very co-operative when you say, excuse me, can you switch your vote like this? We don't think it's going through voters. We think it's going through supporters. We think candidates are cogently explaining to their supporters, I'm going to get all these votes from Kometo supporters and I'm going to win this election. And in return, I would like you to cast your PR votes for the Kometo. We actually know this happens. We have some cases of LDP candidates, one of whom I spent a long time within his district, actually. We know this actually does happen and it works through supporters. So sadly, I'm not sure about the role of ordinary voters in this story. So ordinary, the story that we're sort of carving out here in this project suggests that what ordinary voters think about the LDP and the Kometo doesn't really matter very much. Because if you have, say, 35% or 30% of support in a district by, through, like, LDP supporters and a few extra people, and then you can just get an extra 5% from the Kometo, that could be enough for you to place first. You don't have to worry about the opinions of ordinary voters in the district. And then if you bring projects to the district anyway, to reward people for voting, then that's going to have knock-on effects. Voters who are going to be happy with those projects. Okay, great. So we have a question now about, or several questions actually, about policy. You know, you've talked very effectively about how this might affect municipal policy in terms of book barreling, of course, but it doesn't have an effect on the national stage as well as the Kometo, an effective national player. So Zara Kimpton, who is our national vice president, hi, Zara, asks, are there any views or ideas of the Kometo which are included in current government policies, current national policies? I guess the implication is there. You've written a book on foreign policy, for example. Is that an area? Yes, so my interest sort of is actually kind of, my original interest in Japan was about Japanese foreign policy. So what's really interesting to me, and I'm not sure about how Bryce feels, maybe Bryce agrees with me on this, is that the LDP has pretty grand goals in terms of security policy. It wants to revise the constitution. It wants to sort of exercise collective self-defense. It wants to be more of an, on more of an equal footing within the United States. It's passed some policies, or sorry, it's announced some policies and passed sort of maybe one policy over the last 10 years to that effect. But these policies to me have really seemed to be, they've seemed to be watered down a little bit by what the Kometo, so there are some policies where it seems to me that the Kometo has watered them down, and in other policy areas in which the Kometo has seemed very unhappy with what the LDP is doing. So what I want to get into for the book is I want to examine this relationship between this community spending, this local spending to supporters, and the policies the coalition is passing. So if you can imagine a situation where the LDP really wants to pass, say, collective self-defense. It wants to get rid of the ban on collective self-defense so Japan can aid an ally or a friendly country that's under attack. The Kometo says no. The LDP can say, okay, we understand you're opposed, but we can just give you more money after the next election and your communities will be flourishing. You train station, and you'll have a new community centre. So we think there's a relationship between the size of the payoff that supporters receive after elections for casting their votes and the nature of the policies. The nature, like, we think that the LDP could be buying the support of the Kometo for its national security policies by rewarding with this community spending, if that makes sense. So we think that's going on, and we think it's going on in the security realm, and we want to explore that in future work. Is that clear? No, that makes sense. I do want to stick with this topic a little bit. As you know, I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to the Constitution of Japan. Now, Kometo has famously watered down some of the policies of the LDP and the security realm and in the constitutional revision and the representation realm. It is true that I think a lot of the kind of softening of Abe's position on collective self-defence was due to coalition politics. I've got a question here from Shannon Fraley who asks that the coalition has had a good run so far, but, I mean, how long can this horse-trading last, do you think, given that we are seeing the LDP pushing for changes to Article 9, especially with an increasingly severe, one might say, security environment in East Asia with the rise of China and geostrategic competition? So, I... You predict something, eh? Yeah, no, I feel like I'm not really well-equipped to predict things. I think Japan has really made it work for a long time. This current policy, it hasn't really made many changes. Like, if you look at the amount of just the nature of the security situation Japan finds itself in is so different sort of from 20 years ago. And the... I mean, 30 years ago. And the nature of Japan is really hasn't... it's... politicians now are paying a lot more attention to national security and there's been tweaking around the edges, definitely. But I don't... just the constitutional revision. I mean, they had a supermajority in about, I think it was two to three years there. They weren't able to revise the constitution. And now, the LDP is essentially given up on its desire to make really substantive changes to the constitution. And now it just wants to add a paragraph justifying the constitutionality of the self-defense forces. So, I think we're going to see more muddling through to be honest. And the LDP has an insurance policy in the Cormator. So, it can kind of blame things on the Cormator. It can say, oh, I can't do it because the Cormator said no. I can't do this thing because the Cormator said no. But they can also buy, we think, the support of the Cormator for policies that the Cormator doesn't like through the spending. So, I think it actually had, the LDP has positioned itself fairly well to make changes in security policy if it wants to. But I think we're going to see more muddling through. I don't know, maybe Bryce disagrees. No, I would fully agree with you on that. In fact, I have a paper or a chapter coming out in September which argues something similar. Okay. Use this opportunity though. Paul Midford's book. I can't remember the title, but in that space in September, we might actually have a webinar with Paul. Zara has just answered your question about Australia. We are able to track votes from every voting booth within an electorate. Oh, right. Okay. Wow. So, it could be. So, yeah. So, just quickly, we, I did have a question related to the Constitution, but I'll leave it there so that the Constitution doesn't dominate things. Phil asks, and this is an important question, I think. I mean, you're talking about a structural relationship here between a minor coalition party and the LDP. It seems to me that you haven't really, aside from noting that the LDP and the Cormato are different ideologically, you haven't really explained, I think, why the Cormato would choose to cooperate with the, sorry, the LDP would choose to cooperate with the Cormato rather than with another party that shared a similar ideology to the LDP. Yeah, that's a great question. So, it comes down to availability of small partners to coalition with, to form a coalition with. So, the Cormato was a really ideal party for the LDP to cooperate with. Two reasons. One is that the Cormato is very well organized. It has these sort of groups of supporters who can just be relied on to like mobilize these blocks of votes that can be guaranteed to deliver in every election. Very well organized is number one. The Cormato had actually sort of flaunted or advertised its ability to coordinate previous elections that had coordinated with other parties under Japan's old electoral system. The second reason the LDP chose the Cormato is they basically have complementary electoral support bases. So, the LDP is very strong in the countryside. It's quite strong with the agricultural interest. It's always prided itself on representing the interests of farmers as well as small and medium sized enterprises. So, it's very strong in rural areas and the Cormato is very strong in urban settings. So, the LDP, and so you can imagine if the Cormato is strong in urban settings, LDP urban SSD candidates are the weakest of the LDP's SSD candidates. So, it's exactly these candidates who need the votes of a smaller party to kind of push them over the edge so they can place first. And so, if there was a smaller party that was ideologically aligned with the LDP and could also be relied on in these districts then probably the LDP would have allied with that party. But the Cormato was really the only one that made sense for the LDP to ally with. And so, essentially we think, my co-author and I, we think that in other systems of MMM and these other, these dirty countries around the world that use MMM we suspect that there are sort of ideologically uncohesive coalitions in many of these countries. So, we looked at Mexico and we also found that the PRI and the PVM in Mexico, similar story to Japan's LDP and Cormato not ideologically aligned with that co-ordinate in elections and use money to facilitate co-ordination. Okay, great. So, I have a question and I'm going to wrap it up with another question in the feed from Svetlana Vasilyuk. I hope I pronounced that right. The, she asks, was the lack of coordination between the LDP and Cormato on votes putting responsible for the coalition's major loss in the 2009 House of Representatives election, the representatives elections if you could tell us a little bit about whether your theory explains that loss but I have a, I guess it's a broader question. I mean, we're talking about strategic voting here effectively and one could make the argument that the electoral system in Japan, whether under the old or the new electoral system encourages strategic voting. My question would be, why hasn't the opposition ever mastered strategic voting? If strategic voting is the is the key to winning elections, why hasn't the opposition got on board with this and I'd point you to a couple of efforts coordinated by intellectuals like Koichi Nakano and others which have tried to bring the opposition parties together in a similar vote sharing arrangement. I think with 2016 House of Counselors election was such an effort but I think there have been others as well. Why does it not work? So it's a really good question. What we think, so we're sort of the first scholars to look at this use of money, this judicious use of government money. Now if you're in the opposition, you have compelling reasons to coordinate, right? And if you want to unseat the LDP, you really have to coordinate with the other parties and you have to determine who's going to run which candidate, who's going to stand down, etc. So you have compelling reasons to coordinate but you lack money to make the coordination stick. Because you're not in control of government resources, you can't credibly commit to distributing those resources after the election to get people to vote the way you do. You've had a lot of money of your own resources, huge amounts of money, like one, like Japan's you know, political party, the DPJ was founded by a man with a lot of money hapoyama. If you had a lot of money, maybe you could do something like that with the money that you have but it's very likely to be dwarfed by however much money the government and coalition has to offer. So that's one of the reasons why historically and throughout the world, throughout the democratic world, opposition parties do tend to have a difficult time establishing coordination. They have reasons to do it, but they have a tough time establishing it. And we haven't sort of proved this, we don't have evidence of this, but I think it could be because maybe in more countries than just Japan and Mexico, the government coalition is using money in a way that makes it difficult for the opposition to make inroads. And specifically about 2009, we've just started analyzing this election. Closely, we're not really sure what happened in 2009 and we're also not sure why the DPJ it was coordinating a little bit with the Social Democratic Party. Why those two parties could not replicate what the LDP and the Cormator had done to keep themselves in power is another puzzle. And we think it might have something to do with the local politicians. We think they help the LDP and the Cormator facilitate the money distribution strategy. And local politicians are predominantly LDP-affiliated in Japan. So at the national level, even if you have the DPJ and the SDP, then maybe there's a problem with the court. They can't really get the money to the municipalities properly because they're floated by local politicians who are LDP. Okay, I'm going to go with a question that's a bit out of left field. From Lachlan Pitt does any of this explain the presence in the municipalities of political loudspeaker vans going around before the elections? Do you have any political marketing explanation for that? Yeah, so that's a feature of Japanese elections that we all love. I was just joking. Most of us find it frustrating about these political loudspeaker vans. So that's actually because of another feature of Japanese elections, which is the enormous, the constraints imposed on candidates and parties in what they're allowed to do in the election campaign. So election campaigns for the House of Representatives only 12 days long. There's all these restrictions on what candidates and parties are allowed to do. Candidates are only allowed to produce, I think, three different types of flyers. And they're only allowed to distribute them in certain locations. And they're only allowed to do particular types of speech meetings. And until like, I think it was until three years ago, the use of the internet was banned during campaigns. So candidates were not allowed to update their websites or their blogs or anything during campaigns. There are a lot of constraints. Something they're allowed to do is drive around the electoral district, chanting their names, which is what the political loudspeaker vans are. So because that's geared toward voters, we don't expect they will be announcing the projects they were able, the money they were able to bring to the municipality through the loudspeaker vans. That's just more like getting the candidates name out there. I'm going to end off with a question of my own. I'm afraid. So I have the thing that puzzles me, and I don't know if you've looked at this or not, is where does coalition bargaining take place? Or more precisely, when does coalition bargaining take place? So you say you're a native of New Zealand, as are certain other people here. In our system, I'm from New Zealand, there's generally an election. People look where the dice fall after the election, look at the relative distribution of power, and then the various parties get together and they negotiate. Does this happen in Japan or is it just a long span of negotiation across the process? Yeah, an interesting feature of, so most coalition governments are like New Zealand's where they get together after the results of the election. They look at the different distributions of electoral support and they work out, they form a coalition and that changes every election. We don't have Arden right now in New Zealand is with Peters. I mean that wasn't like a pre-ordained conclusion that happened after the results of the last election. So in Japan, because of the coordination actually requiring candidates to stand down in districts, we think it's actually very costly. Once you've got a coordination established between the LDP and the Kormato, it's not going to be easily changed, because you've actually arranged it. So some districts have Kormato people supporting them, representing them, and other districts you have LDP people supporting them. So it would be very costly for the Kormato to, for example, engage in coordination with the DPJ between 2009-2012, for example when it was possible, because the DPJ would have already had candidates in precisely those districts where the Kormato had candidates as well. So we think it's actually, this is why for the last like 20 years the LDP and the Kormato has just been the LDP and the Kormato. They haven't had chopping and changing. Okay, fantastic. Well, we are now just one minute before the hour and it's time to go. I will do a shout out to some of the other events that we are having here at the AWIA National Office coming up. I think it's June the 17th. We have an event on the European Union, Brexit and COVID-19. The week after that on June the 22nd, we have an event on Bureau 39 which is North Korea's North Korea's office which handles its international financial web. That's with Remko Darke, the professor from the University of Leiden who many of you might have seen on the Four Corners program here in Australia. And then that Wednesday we have an event with Lynn Kwok from the International Institute of Strategic Studies on Tensions in the South China Sea at the time of COVID-19. But today we've had a fascinating and extremely lucid talk by Amy Catalina from New York University and I thank you very much for being with us. Amy, it was really great. Thank you, thanks Bryce and thanks everyone else. What great questions I got. And indeed, thank you. It's been a pleasure having you and we hope to see you all again on another A-W-I-A webinar.