The outocomes of national elections in Tottori prefecture over the past three decades have indicated the pattern of the so-called "55 year regime," although there have been small changes in the urban areas where some parties other than Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Japan Socialist Party (JSP) have gradually increased their votes. The political culture of traditional Japanese society to which our human relations and political behaviors have been subject can still be taken to persist, while, superficially, the society has completely changed to a new one under the post-war Constitution and rapid urbanization. In other words, there is an interesting mixture of the modern system and traditional culture. Factional dynamics, which, among other things, typify party organization, must be understood in this context.
Aiming towards grasping an overall picture of how much political culture, of which regionalism in the most important component factor, dictates behaviors of local political leaders, we shall take up as a specific example the case of Tottori prefecture and try to extract valid generalizations from our survey research.
Our findings are as follows. In Chapter 2 our main point is that the social backgrounds of political leaders, whether they are national leaders or local ones,, are higher than those of citizens, as evidenced in the case of Tottori prefecture, whose tabulated figures presented will show this clearly.
The finding discussed in Chapter 3 is that non-political organizations inevitably have to shoulder the role of political recruitment in a region like Tottori prefecture where the party system is underdeveloped, remain. The organizations which have played this role have been and the residental communities and other non-political organizations in Japanese society such an the farmer's cooperatives, other business communities, labor unions and private clubs. In addition to this recruitment system, elected officials need the endorsement of these organizations in order to get elected or re-elected because these organizations have achieved the major roles in recruitment and as a voting machine, thus, political leaders who are endorsed by. residential communities or other organizatios mentioned above are obliged to work as the agent of them.
The finding presented in Chapter 4 is that residential communities in the rural areas have formed the political infrastructure of the conservative party. In fact, many non-partisan leaders and local leaders of the LDP have often been recruited from such communities with their endorsement. On the other hand, JSP has received much support mainly from labor unions and farmers. These two major parties have dominated almost the entirety of the political stratum in Tottori prefecture where regionalism and factinalism provide rigid political norms from which voters are not allowed to deviate, and where there may be no room for extraneous minor parties to intrude. Political leaders of both of the two major parties have organized well-known candidate support groups (koenkai) in order to keep voters witihin certain prescribed bounds on the basis of two norms.
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