Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia, Volume 13, No.2: 57-68 http://dx.doi.org/10.17477/jcea.2014.13.2.057 Party Organizations in Multiethnic and Homogenous Societies: Comparing India and Japan Vasabjit Banerjee 1 How do party organizations respond to newly evolving social groups? Research on Indian party organizations reveals that in multiethnic societies with uneven modernization between social groups, internally competitive parties respond better to newly evolving groups. Moreover, it is claimed: the same dynamic works vis-à-vis homogenous societies with cleavages based on eco- nomic differences; and, the pattern holds regardless of differences in electoral institutions. This study examines these claims by testing whether factional competition correlated with recruitment into Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party in 1972 and 1983. Japan had a single-nontransferable- vote system with multi-member districts, while the research on India assumes a first-past-the- post system with single-member districts. This study conducts a difference of means test on the population of new and old politicians in the LDP in 1972 and 1983 with a pooled variance ad- justment to account for differences in populations’ size. The findings show that intra-party com- petition and recruitment are not correlated in Japan, thus tentatively rejecting both claims. Keywords: Multiethnic, Party, Japan, India, Electoral Institutions Introduction Does a party’s organization affect its responsiveness to newly evolving social groups? This study attempts to test whether theories from differentially modernizing multi-ethnic societies apply to homogenous societies where the central political cleavages stem from economic interests. Kan- chan Chandra, in the article Elite Incorporation in Multiethnic Societies, explains how party or- ganization interacts with cleavage structures in differentially modernizing multi-ethnic societies (2000). This conception of how particular types of party organizations affect the degree of adapt- ability to changing social and economic cleavage structures is vital to comprehending the rela- tionship of party organization to social cleavages. Chandra argues that parties that allow for in- ternal competition are more responsive to new socioeconomic groups, as revealed by higher in- clusion of new candidates. Unlike other scholars, who implicitly and explicitly argue that the po- liticization of social cleavages is detrimental to democracy (Varshney, 2002; Wilkinson, 2006), 1 Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Public Administration, and Nonprofit Management, Universi- ty of Tennessee at Chattanooga; Research Associate, Department of Sociology, University of Pretoria.