Explaining Japan's Fragile Premierships in the Post-Koizumi Era

摘要

After Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's highly successful rule, Japan saw the five short-lived premierships – Shinzo Abe, Yasuo Fukuda, Taro Aso, Yukio Hatoyama, and Naoto Kan – over the period of five years (2006-11). This article aims to identify the causes of this unusually high frequency of Japan's leadership changes in recent times. Specifically, it finds that all post-Koizumi prime ministers lost power after a short tenure by following the same pattern of demise that was characterized by a rapid fall of approval rate in the media's polls. It argues that they fell into this pattern of failure for the same three reasons: their failure in economic policy; their poor leadership ability derived from the vanishing of the traditional career path to premiership; their unstable intraparty foothold caused by the transition from candidate-centered election to party-centered election. It argues that the politics under the Koizumi and post-Koizumi cabinets share important undercurrents despite their apparent differences.