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Common misconceptions about Japan begin with the notion that it is a "small" country (it's actually lager than Great Britain, Germany or Italy) and end with pronouncements that the Japanese think differently and have different values-they do things differently because that's the way they are. Steven Reed takes on the task of demystifying Japanese culture and behavior. Through examples that are familiar to an American audience and his own personal encounters with the Japanese, he argues that the apparent oddity of Japanese behavior flows quite naturally from certain objective conditions that are different from those in the United States. Mystical allegations about national character are less ...
Understanding corruption in Japanese politics -- Scandals in early postwar Japan, 1948-1978 -- Scandals and reform, 1979-2001 -- Scandals and reform, 2002-2016 -- Bureaucratic corruption and political scandals -- Sex and campaign finance scandals -- Election law violations as political corruption
Explores the politics and economics of the Abe government and evaluates major policies, such as Abenomics policy reforms.
"Book Abstract and Keywords: The study of Japanese politics has flourished over the past several decades. This Handbook provides a state-of-the-field overview for students and researchers of Japanese. The volume also serves to introduce Japanese politics to readers less familiar with Japan. In addition, the volume has a theme of "evaluating Japan's democracy." Taken as a whole, the volume provides a positive evaluation of the state of Japan's democracy. The volume is divided into two parts, roughly corresponding to domestic Japanese politics and Japan's international politics. Within the domestic politics part, there are four distinct sections: "Domestic Political Actors and Institutions," c...
This research explores one of the baffling mysteries in contemporary non-Western democracies. The conversion to a mixed system of the first-past-the-post system and proportional representation for the Japanese House of Representatives in 1994 has not realised the widely spread desire for recurrent changes of government, as the Liberal Democratic Party have maintained their grip. Dr Nagatomi monitors Japanese politics with the theories and methodologies of electoral geography. From a comparative perspective, the operation of the electoral system can mostly be explained by the geographical distributions of party supports, the arrangements of electoral constituencies and the candidacies of parties. Packed with a volume of the analyses unpublished elsewhere, this book will offer food for thought to political scientists, Asian watchers and broadly comparative researchers.
After holding power continuously from its inception in 1955 (with the exception of a ten-month hiatus in 1993–1994), Japan's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lost control of the national government decisively in September 2009. Despite its defeat, the LDP remains the most successful political party in a democracy in the post–World War II period. In The Rise and Fall of Japan's LDP, Ellis S. Krauss and Robert J. Pekkanen shed light on the puzzle of the LDP's long dominance and abrupt defeat. Several questions about institutional change in party politics are at the core of their investigation: What incentives do different electoral systems provide? How do politicians adapt to new incentives?...
This book makes the most comprehensive study of legislative debates thus far, looking at the politics of legislative debates in 33 liberal democracies in Europe, North America and Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. -- Résumé de l'éditeur.
No subject is more central to the study of politics than elections. Electoral systems--the rules about how voters' preferences are translated into election results--profoundly shape important political outcomes, including party systems, candidate selection, and policy choices. This volume provides an in-depth exploration of the origins and effects of electoral systems.
Elections lie at the heart of democracy, and this book seeks to understand how the rules governing those elections are chosen. Drawing on both broad comparisons and detailed case studies, it focuses upon the electoral rules that govern what sorts of preferences voters can express and how votes translate into seats in a legislature. Through detailed examination of electoral reform politics in four countries (France, Italy, Japan, and New Zealand), Alan Renwick shows how major electoral system changes in established democracies occur through two contrasting types of reform process. Renwick rejects the simple view that electoral systems always straightforwardly reflect the interests of the politicians in power. Politicians' motivations are complex; politicians are sometimes unable to pursue reforms they want; occasionally, they are forced to accept reforms they oppose. The Politics of Electoral Reform shows how voters and reform activists can have real power over electoral reform.
This work collects decades of the best published scholarship in English on the unequivocally most successful political party in Japanese history: the Liberal Democratic Party (the LDP). Governing Japan for almost the entirety of the post-war period, the LDP also has a claim to be the most successful political party in any post-war democracy. Seminal articles in this collection explore the key aspects of the LDP: the party’s evolution since its founding in 1955; key facets of the LDP’s internal organization including factions and koenkai; the LDP in policy-making, including its relationship with the bureaucracy and interest groups, as well as its policy-making committee apparatus; and, party leadership, including the premierships of Junichiro Koizumi and Shinzo Abe.