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In the major literature on early modern Japan, the sakoku (closed country) edicts lurk in the background, and while scholars are generally aware of the major tenets of the policy, for example, the inability of Japanese to travel abroad or the clampdown on Christianity, the specifics of the edicts have yet to be studied in detail despite its potential to reveal much about this era of Japan's history. This work seeks to clarify the seventeen-article sakoku edicts of 1635 as well as to situate the edicts in the general foreign policy of seventeenth-century Edo Japan. This book will also examine a number of other policies that evolved in the first half of the seventeenth century to complete what...
This book gives an up to date reference on the state of the art in this highly important methodological area, which is central both to theoretical models of party competition and to empirical accounts, whether these are case studies or comparative analyses. It looks at subjects including tracking estimates of public opinion and party policy intentions in Britain and the USA; the policy space of party manifestos; and party platforms and voters' perceptions. Its panel of respected contributors reviews the refinements which have been made to established techniques as well as considering the potential and early successes of computer coding.
A close examination of the constitutional relationship between legislature and executive in parliamentary regimes.
Making and Breaking Governments offers a theoretical argument about how parliamentary parties form governments, deriving from the political and social context of such government formation its generic sequential process. Based on their policy preferences, and their beliefs about what policies will be forthcoming from different conceivable governments, parties behave strategically in the game in which government portfolios are allocated. The authors construct a mathematical model of allocation of ministerial portfolios, formulated as a noncooperative game, and derive equilibria. They also derive a number of empirical hypotheses about outcomes of this game, which they then test with data drawn from most of the postwar European parliamentary democracies. The book concludes with a number of observations about departmentalistic tendencies and centripetal forces in parliamentary regimes.
A new and wide-ranging empirical overview of party policy in 47 modern democracies, including all of the new democracies of Eastern Europe. It updates and radically extends Policy and Party Competition (1992), which established itself as a key mainstream data source for all political scientists exploring the policy positions of political parties. This essential text is divided into three clear parts: Part I introduces the study, themes and methodology Part II deals in depth with the wide range of issues involved in estimating and analyzing the policy positions of key political actors. Part III is the key data section that identifies key policy dimensions across the 47 countries, detailing their party positions and median legislators, and is complemented by graphical representations of each party system. This book is an invaluable reference for all political scientists, particularly those interested in party policy and comparative politics.
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Party competition for votes in free and fair elections involves complex interactions by multiple actors in political landscapes that are continuously evolving, yet classical theoretical approaches to the subject leave many important questions unanswered. Here Michael Laver and Ernest Sergenti offer the first comprehensive treatment of party competition using the computational techniques of agent-based modeling. This exciting new technology enables researchers to model competition between several different political parties for the support of voters with widely varying preferences on many different issues. Laver and Sergenti model party competition as a true dynamic process in which political...
Most theories of elections assume that voters and political actors are fully rational. This title provides a behavioral theory of elections based on the notion that all actors - politicians as well as voters - are only boundedly rational.
‘What had happened to the stolen islanders? Had any survived slavery?’ One day in 1863 a strange ship stopped at ‘Ata, a tiny island in the wild seas between Tonga and New Zealand, and sailed away with one hundred and forty-four men, women and children. The ‘Atans were never heard from again, and in Tonga their fate became the subject of legends and superstitions. Uncovering the tragedy of ‘Ata takes Scott Hamilton on a journey to the kava circles and caves of Tonga and back to the streets of Auckland. The Stolen Island is a twenty-first century true sea story revealing slavers, mutinies, castaways, pirates and a cruel streak in Pacific history that is often overlooked but not forgotten.
The history of German medicine has undergone intense scrutiny because of its indelible connection to Nazi crimes. What is less well known is that Meiji Japan adopted German medicine as its official model in 1869. In Doctors of Empire, Hoi-eun Kim recounts the story of the almost 1,200 Japanese medical students who rushed to German universities to learn cutting-edge knowledge from the world leaders in medicine, and of the dozen German physicians who were invited to Japan to transform the country’s medical institutions and education. Shifting fluently between German, English, and Japanese sources, Kim’s book uses the colourful lives of these men to examine the impact of German medicine in Japan from its arrival to the pinnacle of its influence and its abrupt but temporary collapse at the outbreak of the First World War. Transnational history at its finest, Doctors of Empire not only illuminates the German origins of modern medical science in Japan but also reinterprets the nature of German imperialism in East Asia.