Election triumph for the DPJ, but Japan's democratic advantage doesn't impress

At the time of going to press, it wasn't yet clear if Japan's opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) was going to win a remarkable two-thirds majority, or a simple majority in the electoral contest against the incumbent Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which finished Sunday. But two things were clear: the DPJ had secured a thumping victory after a half-century of almost unbroken rule by the LDP, and Japan's greatest advantage -- its 50-year experience of democracy -- is not being effectively deployed, in particular against its greatest rival, China.

Japan should have one massive advantage over China, namely the fact that it combines a first-world economy with the longest experience of democracy in the region. However, Japan shows few signs of reaping a 'democratic dividend'.

Over the past 50 years, it is not democracy that has driven the country's economic success. Rather, it is a system where a bureaucracy has dominated the economy through its understanding of the levers of power, while elected politicians have distributed the fruits of economic growth across the country. The business sector has both acquiesced to this system, and benefited from it; it took on the welfare role for its workers, and received state protection and subsidies in return.

The irony is that in the early years, the system worked very well in ensuring high standards of prosperity and equality. Despite the regular elections, it was not democratic in the Western sense of the word. It was more like the German system of worker protection, which was created by Germany's conservative and nationalistic 19th century chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. The aim was to outflank the rising workers' movement of the time. In Japan, the LDP ensured money was redistributed in a feudal way -- as handouts from above, rather than through a competitive system rewarding better ideas in both politics and business. In return for the handouts, politicians could rely on the slavish loyalty of their constituents.