The book adopts a two-pronged empirical strategy to test the theory. First, a deep dive into a country’s political institutions is required, to ascertain whether electoral districts meeting the conditions for group-based clientelism exist. Second, after these electoral districts have been identified, the researcher must gather data on voting behavior, resource allocations, and other confounding variables at the level of the administrative entity within (tournament-possible) electoral districts and devise stringent empirical tests capable of pitting the theory’s expectations against those of rival theories. This chapter implements the first prong of this empirical strategy, using information about Japan. It presents a detailed overview of how electoral district boundaries are drawn, how votes are counted, what the relevant lower-tier entities are (in Japan’s case, they are municipalities) and how these entities are funded. It explains that Japanese municipalities depend for large shares of their revenue on national treasury disbursements (NTD), which are allocated by bureaucrats but vulnerable to influence by politicians. It classifies the universe of electoral districts that have been used in Japan’s Lower House elections, 1980–2014, as tournament-possible (or not), and it presents evidence that election outcomes are qualitatively different across both sets of districts, in the direction expected by the theory.

Japan is the world’s fourth-largest economy and a close ally of the United States. Yet its politics are highly anomalous: It is a democracy in which one party, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), wins nearly every election. Even an electoral reform, expected to bring about alternations in power between two large parties, has. The chapter uses data on the outcomes of every Lower House election held since the LDP’s inception in 1955 and public opinion surveys to flesh out the puzzle of LDP dominance. It surveys three explanations for this. One emphasizes structural features of the electoral systems Japan has used and explains how they have translated into advantages for the LDP. The other two probe the reasons why voters vote for the LDP. One holds that voters vote for the LDP because they prefer its policy positions, ideological orientation, leaders, or reputation for competence. The other holds that voters vote for the LDP because of the access to central government resources its politicians enjoy. This chapter explains how over time, real-world events and empirical studies have chipped away at the explanatory power of each account. This warrants another look at this question.

Chapters 6–8 use a comprehensive new dataset on the universe of Japanese municipalities in existence between 1980 and 2014 to examine whether tournaments are being conducted within tournament-possible electoral districts. Using regression specifications designed to minimize the influence of confounders, weigh up evidence for rival theories, and take advantage of distinctive features of the two electoral systems Japan has used, I test two hypotheses. First, I show that LDP politicians make the amounts of money municipalities in their electoral districts receive after Lower House elections conditional on where each municipality places in a rank order of municipalities. Second, I show that the difference in amounts received by municipalities at different ranks is larger at higher ranks, which is also evidence of a tournament. In addition to regression analyses, I consider two of the theory’s microfoundations which are that LDP politicians are capable of lobbying bureaucrats and voters are aware money is tied to support, respectively. Case studies, anecdotes, interviews, election manifestos, and voter surveys offer evidence for these microfoundations. Finally, I use the logic of a tournament to explain why prior studies of the relationship between votes and money in Japan reached strikingly different conclusions.

In Chapter 3, the political playing fields of the postwar reform period in Norway and Germany are analyzed with a focus on the structural and organizational dimensions of cleavages. To shed light on the distribution of power resources, election results, government participation, financial resources, and membership numbers of the main actors are compared. Even though the Norwegian political left was somewhat more powerful, the differences in the distribution of power resources between the left and the right do not seem great enough to preclude a more similar political development in the two cases. The social base of the relevant political parties and teachers’ organizations is also examined. The analysis illustrates that many of the social groups organized by the Norwegian center parties, such as farmers, the rural population, and people with a strong Christian identity, including religious women, were found within the ranks of the CDU in Germany. Primary schoolteachers in Germany were divided into different organizations by denomination, while primary schoolteachers in Norway were more united. These findings are analyzed against the backdrop of the cleavage structures.