Japan's One-Party Dominance

Quoting Fukui and Fukai, Ethan Scheiner noted that Japanese voters were lured at election time “mainly by the lure of pork barrel, only marginally by policy issues, and even less by ideals and visions.” (Ethan Scheiner, Democracy Without Competition in Japan: Opposition Failure in a One-Party Dominant State, Cambridge 2006)

As a pragmatic Asian voter, this makes perfect sense to me, and I wonder if all the discussion about Japan’s one-party dominance is not just a debate about form versus substance, i.e. having the external façade of democracy, defined as at least a functional two-party system, versus an all-embracing one party that is able to cater to the needs of its people.

In the case of Japan, even if a two-party system were to be attained, it’d probably be, as Scheiner had predicted, a breakaway from the LDP, and if so, can we expect the system to have competing views, visions and policies?