 Coalitions among Factions |
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Gerald L. Curtis :: In the history of postwar Japanese politics, there's a lot of writing about how factional politics dominated the Japanese political system. And in the Liberal Democratic Party this involved factions dividing in effect into coalitions: a coalition that was in power, that was called the mainstream, and a coalition of factions that were out of power, although they were all within the same political party, that was the "anti-main stream." So a lot of the political competition in Japan involved the factions in the anti-mainstream trying to find a way to drive the mainstream factions out of office and replacing them themselves. So, this is very similar in some ways to politics as we've seen it in countries like Italy, but it's not like politics in the United States, where we don't have the kind of formal factional arrangements that exist in Japan. |
