Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to examine why and how the local parties founded by active local leaders rise throughout Japan, and get support in elections? In order to analyze the changes and continues in the local politics, I focused on two local elections in Nagoya city and Aichi prefecture in 2011. The local parties defeated the existing parties in a landslide on February. But only one month later, they fail to win a majority in the assembly election of Nagoya. These empirical analyses reveal that (1) local parties and leaders success an agenda setting: a tax reduction, assembly reform, and decentralization, (2) voters support these issues rather than leaders’ political style to set themselves against the assembly, (3) single - issue strategy by local party can’t work and let many voters return to the existing party in the local assembly election, and (4) local parties have poor organization is apt to fail to field candidates under the SNTV system. These results show the possibility, issues, and challenges of local parties to take responsibility of the decentralization.
