This paper analyzes the spatial characteristics of innovation policies in Japan and Korea, focusing on the decision-making process of the Technopolis in the 1980s, and the blurred boundary between industrial policy and welfare policy. A comparison between the innovation policies of East-Asian countries can provide new insights into the relationship between politics and public policy in the region.

This paper advances and tests the following hypothesis. The policy shift in Japan was from geographic concentration to dispersion, and the shift in Korea was from geographic concentration to dispersion and back to concentration. In Japanese economic policy, politicians and voters have a clientelistic relationship. The employment security entailed in such a policy is regarded as a special interest, and the target for support of industrial policy tends to be dispersed and serves as a functional equivalent of social policy. However, in Korea, which is based on a relatively programmatic relationship, the target for support tends to be concentrated, except for the period when employment security is regarded as a general interest.

This paper contributes to findings about the political dynamism through which innovation policy becomes the functional equivalent of social policy in East Asian countries.

This article offers a new historical interpretation of the British Conservative Party’s politics after post Thatcherism under the leadership of John Major. Much previous research on Major’s leadership has argued his party could not have cope with Thatcherite legacies, including socio-economic divisions.

To counter argue that general understanding, this article addresses the new political ideas suggested under the Major’s premiership, and the effects it had on gave public policies. The result of the analysis revealed that the concept of “Civic Conservatism” which was proposed by party intellectual David Willetts, and it reflected in “Citizen’s Charter”. This article argues that the Conservatives attempted to revive local institutions such as schools, hospitals, and municipalities to distance themselves from Thatcherite policies which was finally implemented as an internal policy.

This article tries to give an explanation of different media systems by focusing on government accountability in Western European democracies. One the one hand, typological studies comparing media systems have received more attention since the 1990s in the field of political communication, but there is still room for considering the dynamic relationships with political institutions. On the other hand, prior studies of governmental accountability focusing on behavior of political parties often lack a perspective of media as an important source of information and vehicle of communication with citizens. To fill the research gaps, I investigate pathways to achieve different media systems in Western European democracies using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). This study shows that multiple paths can be constructed by combined institutional conditions relating to government accountability. The major findings are: (1) a practice of accountability based on proportional representation and non-wholesale alternation in government would have an essential role to shape corporatist media systems; however (2) the mediated communication becomes more polarized when the government accountability fails. While the results highlight an importance of media systems that assist voter to assess government, it also suggests that the accountability failures force to media playing a different role.

The formal aspects of executive institutions (i.e., executive-legislative relations) are important not only in democracy but also in authoritarianism. However, attempts to classify authoritarian regimes have tended to focus only on their actual aspects (i.e., the organizational basis of the ruling elites). Therefore, this article seeks to fill this gap and capture the formal aspects across regimes by presenting a new dataset: “Constitutional Executive-Legislative Relations” (CELR). First, this article illustrates a set of institutional criteria for determining political regimes, a typology of executive–legislative relations based on the effectiveness and duality of the executive and a series of variables of constitutional authorities based on the different paths through which political actors exercise their authorities. Next, it proposes several ways in which CELR can be applied: in particular, to extend and limit the scope of relevant cases by using specific types of executive-legislative relations and specific variables of constitutional authorities, and to combine CELR’s constitutional data and V-Dem’s customary data to identify the extent to which the design and the practice of powers that can be exercised by political actors diverge. Finally, it concludes by discussing how the data of CELR can be extended in two respects.

How do governing parties control their coalition partners? Recent studies show that parties use control mechanisms (e.g., parliamentary committees, junior ministers) to oversight coalition partners’ ministers. This paper argues that written parliamentary questions serve as an additional monitoring mechanism in coalition governments. I test this argument by studying the Fine Gael-Labour government in Ireland between 2011 and 2016. I find that legislators in governing parties ask more questions to the ministers of a coalition partner. Moreover, quantitative text analysis focused on the Minister for Finance shows that such questions are used to obtain information on divisive policy issues rather than to appeal to their constituencies. These results suggest that parliamentary questions constrain “ministerial drift” and facilitate cooperative policy making in coalition governments.