 Relationships among Key Factions |
|
Factions Video Clip
Select
 in
the video control menuto see the clip in full-screen mode. |
|
Gerald L. Curtis :: So, what characterizes factions in Japanese politics is that they are organizations that try to get power for their particular group away from other groups within the same political party. Now in the Japanese political system, where only the LDP, the Liberal Democratic Party, was in power for so long, a lot of the competition was not between the Liberal Democrats and the Socialists, or the Liberal Democrats and other political parties, but between factions within the Liberal Democratic Party itself. So, if you study Japanese politics, you cannot only look at the relationship between the political parties, you have to look at the dynamic of the relationships among the factions within the political parties. Political factions in Japanese, political parties in Japanese politics, tend not to take strong ideological or policy positions. Again, especially in the case of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, what they are organizations that are fighting for political power, for the right to have more members in the cabinet than other factions do, and for other perks of office that come with political power. |
