The Making of a Democratic Political Tradition in Postwar Japan

The Japanese experience of democratization is considered to be one of the most successful cases of the development of democratic processes in the East. However, when it comes to the research on political regimes in non-European societies, the measuring democracy through the formal criteria suggested by political scientists and democracy theorists could appear to be insufficient to fully assess the democratic nature of one or another regime. This study aims to reveal the implicit features of the Japanese democratic tradition and how they are reflected in political space of contemporary Japan. We employ the key democracy theories to measure the political system of postwar Japan and the dynamics of its transformations during the second half of the 20th century, but we also will analyze historical documents, statistical data and secondary sources to identify the roots of the Japanese democracy and the main factors of its development.