According to Ellis Krauss and Robert Pekkanen in their new and highly instructive analysis of the development of Japan's traditional ruling party, the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) is possibly the most successful party in any democracy. This is also a view shared by many party scholars, and it is not difficult to understand why. To come to power in 1955, and, with the exception of a brief ten-month inter-regnum, to rule continuously until 2009, when it suffered a major defeat, is an enviable record. Its closest rival is reckoned to be the Swedish Social Democrats, who ruled from 1932 to 1996, but who lost power from 1976 to 1982, and again from 1991 to 1993. Less often remarked in this context is the case of Fianna Fáil in Ireland, which governed, usually alone, from 1932 to 2011, albeit with more frequent gaps. When I was researching Fianna Fáil more than 20 years ago, I was once shown into what was then claimed to be the party archives, but which turned out to be little more than a big storage cupboard with accumulated junk. Amidst the detritus was one item that seemed to be carefully preserved and filed – an English-language bulletin published by the LDP. These parties were clearly birds of a feather. Indeed, two years after what Krauss and Pekkanen describe as the LDP's ‘overwhelming’ defeat in 2009 (this may be an exaggeration), Fianna Fáil was almost wiped out by an electorate angered at the sudden collapse of the economic boom. There would be a lot of added value to be gained by a systematic comparison of these two parties, with India's Congress party also perhaps being thrown into the mix. But in common with Irish scholars in the past, scholars of Japanese politics tend to have only a limited sense of the comparative perspective. ‘Considering that the organization and development of political parties should be at the heart of any study of democratic institutions and politics, systematic empirical studies focusing on these issues outside the United States have been surprisingly lacking, especially in parliamentary democracies’ note Krauss and Pekkanen on the first page of their study.

In fact, as most Europeanists like myself could point out, the literature is full of empirical studies of the organization and development of parties in parliamentary regimes, both single country studies and comparisons, but since these tend to be mainly based on European research they rarely come into focus in the American literature. This is a pity, since the scope for comparison between Japan and many of the European polities is ample, and still under-utilized. Krauss and Pekkanen's study is not about defeat, but survival, and it is this which they wish to explain. They do so by taking issue with more conventional and – their term – deductive interpretations of the LDP, and in particular by taking issue with those who loaded most of the explanation of the LDP's character and development on the nature of the SNTV MMD electoral system. This system was changed before the 1996 election, and hence the expectation was that the LDP would also change, and probably even fade away. The old electoral system was supposed to have sustained the party in its particular form, and hence the new electoral system would weaken or destroy it.

For Krauss and Pekkanen, this is not how things worked. To be sure, the electoral system helped the LDP, but they argue, very convincingly, that it is far from offering an adequate explanation of the LDP and of its organizational characteristics and development. Deductive theories misread the origins of the LDP institutions, they argue, and hence also misread what would change these institutions.

The key research question which they pose concerns how the most three important LDP institutions, the koenkai, the factions, and PARC developed under the original '55 system, and how they were affected by the electoral reform. They also look separately at the role of the LDP party leadership, and ask how this was also changed by the electoral reform. The answer they find, building on quite an exhaustive, detailed, and intelligent analysis, is that not much real change was evident. The koenkai after the reform were weaker than the koenkai before the reform, but were still vibrant. The factions after the reform were weaker than the factions before the reform, but were not eliminated. And PARC and the very distinctive policy-making machinery of the party was certainly disrupted and altered by the reform, but it was not broken. In other words, the electoral reform weakened and changed the LDP, but much less than would have been predicted by those theories which placed most of the weight on the electoral system.

In short, Krauss and Pekkanen take aim at most of the conventional literature on the LDP and score a palpable hit. This is a convincing and persuasive analysis. As they argue throughout the book, the LDP was not dependent on a particular institutional configuration, but, like most parties – and here briefly they do cite the examples from Ireland and New Zealand – it could adapt and prosper even within different institutional settings. They also quite deliberately focus attention on the party's own role in its success, both organizationally and in terms of leadership. That is, they look at ‘how the LDP qua party accomplished its governing dominance’ (p. 5). In this way they also seek to counter most of those accounts which emphasize the importance of exogenous and environmental factors. The LDP did it itself.

For Krauss and Pekkanen, any attempt to understand how a party works needs to take account of the evolution of the party and its institutions over time. Electoral rules matter, and the incentives they offer leaders matter, but so do other factors – power, ambition, policy, conflict – and because of these other factors, leaders end up by pursuing multiple goals at the same time. Theirs is an explicitly historical institutionalist approach, one that looks at the ‘actual process of institutional development and the motives, intent, and interests of the actors involved at the time they occurred’ (p. 26). Building on Paul Pierson's work, they emphasize the importance of institutional complementarity, whereby different institutions mutually reinforce one another, as well as the importance of path dependence and sequencing, and about knowing which action comes first. They then fill out this approach with deep-grained research and a highly impressive empirical analysis. I know too little of the literature on Japanese politics to know how novel their material and approach are, but, once again, a better knowledge of the European literature night have helped them build a more confident foundation in this regard. Within the traditions of party research established by scholars such as Rokkan and Daalder almost half a century ago, what is now seen as historical institutionalism was more or less the default option, and the accounts by Daalder and Rokkan and others, including their chapters in Dahl's classic Political Oppositions volume, offer an ideal template for work such as this. To my great regret, many European scholars are losing their ability to work in this way, and therefore even Europeanists can learn a lot through a close reading of Krauss and Pekkanen. It goes without question that any scholar interested in the workings of Japanese party politics will also clearly benefit from this book. It is a major achievement.