A vast scholarly literature addresses the question of why voters in certain electoral districts receive larger allocations of discretionary government resources than voters in others. When resource allocations are found to be positively correlated with electoral support for a ruling party across electoral districts, then it is presumed to favor core supporters. When resource allocations are found to be negatively correlated with support for a ruling party across electoral districts, then it is presumed to favor swing voters. The tournament theory offers an alternative explanation for why resource allocations can vary so substantially across electoral districts. When politicians use tournaments between the municipalities in their electoral districts to win elections, then across electoral districts, the size of a district’s resource allocation will be influenced by the relative sizes of municipalities therein. Moreover, this variable – district-level asymmetry – is expected to act on both electoral support and resource allocations: lowering lowers electoral support and increasing resource allocations. This chapter uses a host of regression specifications to test these two hypotheses using data from Japan, 1980–2014. In doing so, it provides an original account for why money is negatively correlated with support across electoral districts in Japan.

This chapter asks how a politician can tie the amount of central government resources a group receives to the amount of electoral support it delivers. I argue that when a party is dominant, like Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), its members will be able to gain the most votes, conditional on resources delivered, by pitting groups against each other in a competition for resources. This part of the theory draws on prior work that introduces tournaments to political science. I explain that in such a competition, politicians create the perception that groups will be ranked according to their loyalty in the last election and prizes (in the form of resource allocations) will be awarded on the basis of rank. By structuring resources so that the highest-ranked group receives the largest prize, politicians can encourage competition for this position. This drives up their electoral support, in all groups with a chance of attaining this position. This chapter fleshes out the intuition behind a tournament, the mechanics of how tournaments can be pulled off in different settings, and elucidates their implications for longstanding questions of interest, including the sources of incumbency advantage and opposition weakness, the degree of congruence between policy preferences and vote choice, and whether all democratic competition is created equal.

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.

This chapter summarizes the book’s main argument and places it in the broader context of the literatures on party building, electoral mobilization, and partisanship. It outlines the book’s broad theoretical approach that combines insights from social psychology (in particular, drawing on social identity and self-categorization theory) with a historical institutionalist framework.