The LDP’s Path Back to Power

The 2012 election swept the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) back into power after only a little over three years in the political wilderness.^* The scale of the victory was staggering but due mainly to a rejection of the DPJ government, not the popularity of the LDP (Reed, Scheiner, Smith and Thies, this volume). That the LDP actually won fewer total votes in its “greatest victory” of 2012 than it had in its “worst loss” of 2009 is finely ironic-but entirely consistent with our analysis. The LDP did not engineer this great victory by reinventing the party that had ruled Japan from its 1955 inception to 2009, with the exception of a few months in 1993-1994, nor by picking the right issues or positions on which to run. Nevertheless, the party did put its time in the political woodshed to effective use. In this chapter, we will examine how the LDP changed during its second stint in opposition. We will discuss the LDP efforts at party organization reform, changes in its policy profile, its selection of party leader, the tactics it used to attack the DPJ government, and its election campaign. We find that the LDP changed very little and those changes do not seem strongly related to its historic victory. Instead the most successful strategies seem to have involved becoming a more effective opposition party; the LDP did create the conditions for their success without reforms, by contributing to and publicizing the failures of the DPJ.