Right On? The LDP’s Drift to the Right and the Persistence of Particularism

Since Prime Minister Abe’s return to power in 2012, there has been an ongoing discussion about whether and if so to what extent the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) had drifted to the ‘right’. This article argues that it is important to distinguish between conservative and neoliberal policy appeals, as those two ideologies often clash with each other, despite being united under the casual ‘right’ banner. Using a newly coded, comprehensive database of LDP election platforms dating back to the 1950s, the analysis presented here shows that electoral reform alone cannot explain the development of these policy appeals since the 1990s. By comparing the LDP to its center-right counterparts in Western countries, I show that external shocks such as the Oil Crisis and the end of the Cold War have influenced neoliberal and conservative policy pledges in Japan and elsewhere. While these trends are similar, the LDP has placed a comparatively lower priority on conservative, and even more so neoliberal policy appeals. The article argues that this is due to the continued relevance of particularistic policy appeals, which are less important in the US, Germany or Great Britain.