Explaining Japan’s Revolving Door Premiership: Applying the Leadership Capital Index

Abstract

The tenure of Japanese prime ministers is famously short. Between 2006 and 2012 Japan changed prime minister once a year. What factors can explain Japan's revolving-door premiership? To explore this puzzle, this article applies the Leadership Capital Index (LCI) developed by Bennister, 't Hart and Worthy (2015) to case studies of the nine Japanese prime ministers holding office between 2000 and 2015. Leadership capital is the aggregate of leaders' political resources: skills, relations and reputation. The LCI thus allows analysis of the interplay between individual capacities and contextual conditions in determining leaders' ability to gain, maintain and deploy power. The LCI is applied to answer two questions. Firstly, what accounts for the short tenure of many Japanese premiers? In which of the LCI's three leadership dimensions do Japanese leaders lack capital? Secondly, what forms of capital allow some prime ministers to retain office for longer than average (>2 years)? In particular, the article analyses the leadership of Junichiro Koizumi (2001Koizumi ( -2006 Japan's longest serving prime minister since the 1970s, and incumbent Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has held office for three years since December 2012. As well as utilising the LCI to comparatively analyse the tenure of Japan's prime ministers, this article tests the applicability of the Index beyond Western parliamentary democracies.

‘Dominance, defence and diminishing returns’? Theresa May’s Leadership Capital July 2016–July 2018

“…The Leadership Capital Index (LCI) offers a combination of ten quantitative and qualitative indicators to evaluate leadership capital built around skills, relations and reputation. This soft constructivist approach seeks to capture the interplay between individual abilities, structural constraints and contextual conditions (Weller 2018;Burrett 2016). The LCI works best when examining single leaders or comparing leadership within single country political systems, and it carries the imprint of its Westminster origins (see Brown 2018;Helms 2016;Helms 2017).…”

“…Such fluidity has allowed the Index to be adapted to new case studies. Helms (2017) for example found that communication skills so valued in Anglo-Saxon countries were less important in Germany, while Burrett (2016) applied the Index to Japanese leaders, testing its resilience in nonwestern contexts.. Similarly, the mixture of hard and soft measures, some static and others dynamic, offered different methodological approaches within a single index.…”

Understanding Political Leadership

“…Some have managed this in office such as Germany's Helmut Kohl, re-galvanized by the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification, or Bill Clinton, with his initial fall and subsequent rise to political dominance (p.10) (Helms 2016;Newman 2002;Shah et al 2002). Others have returned to office, such as Japan's Shinzo Abe, whose second go as prime minister was much more successful than his first (Burrett 2016). Though rare, these leaders serve as warning not to assume a fixed pattern of rise-peak-decline.…”

“…We believe it has the potential to stimulate and systematize a much-needed strand of comparative research on political leadership that taps into relational rather than competency-based notions of leadership, relates behavioral to perceptual approaches, and can help us examine the effects of variations in the institutional and situational contexts that leaders face. Although still in the early stages of its development following its launch by 't Hart (2014a) and Bennister et al (2015), the LCI has already generated further empirical work (see Helms 2016;Burrett 2016). This volume presents a series of LCI applications across a range of leaders and political systems, allowing us to assess its merits and limitations, and develop pathways for its further development.…”

Editorial: New Approaches to Political Leadership

“…Between 2006 and 2012 Japan changed prime minister once a year. Tina Burrett (2016) asks what factors explain Japan's revolving-door premiership? To explore this puzzle, the article applies the Leadership Capital Index (LCI) developed by Bennister, 't Hart and Worthy (2015) to case studies of the nine Japanese prime ministers holding office between 2000 and 2015.…”