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4 - Second Prize Is a Set of Steak Knives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2025

Amy Catalinac
Affiliation:
New York University
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Summary

This chapter asks how a politician can tie the amount of central government resources a group receives to the amount of electoral support it delivers. I argue that when a party is dominant, like Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), its members will be able to gain the most votes, conditional on resources delivered, by pitting groups against each other in a competition for resources. This part of the theory draws on prior work that introduces tournaments to political science. I explain that in such a competition, politicians create the perception that groups will be ranked according to their loyalty in the last election and prizes (in the form of resource allocations) will be awarded on the basis of rank. By structuring resources so that the highest-ranked group receives the largest prize, politicians can encourage competition for this position. This drives up their electoral support, in all groups with a chance of attaining this position. This chapter fleshes out the intuition behind a tournament, the mechanics of how tournaments can be pulled off in different settings, and elucidates their implications for longstanding questions of interest, including the sources of incumbency advantage and opposition weakness, the degree of congruence between policy preferences and vote choice, and whether all democratic competition is created equal.

Type
Chapter
Information
Dominance Through Division
Group-Based Clientelism in Japan
, pp. 108 - 136
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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