This paper analyzes relationship between prime ministers and the House of Councilors in postwar Japanese politics. It takes into account that prime ministers act under two constraints in having cabinet sponsored bills approved in the Diet. The first is that the amount of time available for bill examination is much restricted. The second is that the House of Councilors is independent and cannot be dissolved. Because of this independence it is harder for prime ministers to gain support for bills from the House of Councilors than from the House of Representatives. Given the two constraints, prime ministers have secured support for bills prior to bill examination in the Houser of Councilors through various measures. Past research has often argued that the role of House of Councilors is marginal as it seldom amends, rejects, or tables bills sent from the House of Representatives, acting as if it were a “carbon copy” of Representatives. This paper shows that the House of Councilors has projected diverse influence in Japanese politics and that the high rate of approving bills only demonstrates that prime ministers have been successful in obtaining support from majority of the House of Councilors prior to bill examination.

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The British Conservative Party leadership contest of 2005 was the second to be decided by members of the party at large. This article examines how and why David Cameron (modernizer) was elected by the majority of the approximately 200, 000 ordinary members, and analyzes the significance of his success. However, a problem facing this study was that remarkably little was known about the political and social views of the party membership. In addition, the Conservative rank and file, as Stuart Ball suggests, has been curiously neglected in the study of modern British politics. Accordingly, this paper examined the political views of the chairpersons of the 20 local Conservative constituency associations in Great Britain who choose the party leader. It can be demonstrated that Cameron's victory over David Davis (traditionalist) in the membership ballot reflects great expectation of a change of government, or the new Conservative government after Blair/Brown (since 1997). In any case the Conservative leader, David Cameron is ‘Tory Blair’, and the first joint creation of the Parliamentary Party, the 2005 annual conference and mass media (a TV camera) in Tory history.

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This paper categorizes all of the articles published in the “Japanese Journal of Electoral Studies” and the“Review of Electoral Studies” to study the trend in electoral studies in Japan. In both journals, I found that over 60% of the articles published focused on Japanese politics, and that more than half of these articles on Japan used some kind of statistical technique (multiple regression for example) in their analyses. The use of statistical analysis in electoral studies increased from the 1980s to the 2000s. In the “Japanese Journal of Electoral Studies”, 39% of the articles it published used statistical technique; in the “Review of Electoral Studies”, 49% of the published articles used such techniques.

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In 1980's the electoral studies of Japan changed from the prewar literaturebased study to the empirical studies. However, in the process of the development stereotyped researches have increased under the overwhelming influence of American methods and “ efficiency” to produce achievements was given priority over the importance of the theme choice and the relevance of the political reform. Such themes as (1) the electoral system reform of House of Councilors after the one of the House of Representatives, (2) problems of the bicameral system, (3) problems of local election, and (4) the relations of the assembly and the chief of the executive branch at the local levels are understated. Quantitative analysis of the voting behavior increases outlandishly. We should go ahead with the electoral study of “the piecemeal social engineering”, such as the electoral system study of Karl Popper more strongly. It is necessary to reexamine resource allocation in the electoral study.

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In the Unified Local Elections 2007, DPJ changed the campaign strategy of the past Unified Local Elections. DPJ chose to compete with LDP in Local Elections, and put up candidates positively. In this article, I pay attention to the campaign strategy of the Japanese political parties in the local election and think about the meaning of the Unified Local Elections 2007. According to Schlesinger's indication, the political party has two faces. One face is ‘the officeseeker’, and another is ‘the benefit-seeker’. DPJ was‘the officeseeker’ in this time, because DPJ chose campaign strategy to gather the floating votes, and to compete with LDP. (IV type) But it is difficult to interpret the campaign strategy of LDP in this election. The reason is because there was the realignment of LDP local organization after the Municipal Mergers of the Heisei Era.

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In this paper, using municipallevel data, I examine whether electoral results at different levels and periods affected 2007 prefectural assembly elections in Japan. According to discussions of the midterm loss phenomenon, voters consider previous election results when they make their electoral choice. In the literature on Japanese voters, some researchers also suggested the existence of the strategic voter who does not choose straightticket voting. Based on these arguments, this paper tries to explain LDP vote margins from previous elections by two types of strategic voting. One is buffering strategy which is a negative response to LDP wins at previous elections. The other is balancing vote strategy which favors equilibrium between chief executive and assembly members. Using a simple OLS regression analysis, I find the buffering strategy occurs in ways that match the theory. But, in contrast, the balancing vote strategy appears in ways that do not match the expectation.

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The so-called Heisei Grand Amalgamation of local governments reduced the number of local councils and the number of local council menbers. The responsibility of local council menbers has considerably expanded. How did amalgamation change local councils? What kind of effects did amalgamation give to local council menbers? In order to answer these questions I have made researches on the influences and effects of amalgamation to local council menbers by sending quetionnaires. At first I sent questionnaires to Sasayama city council menbers in the spring of 2000. Sasayama city which established by amalgamating four small towns on April in 1999 was called a harbinger of Heisei Grand Amalgamation. Then, I sent questionnaires to 856 council menbers of 31 local councils of Kinki area which was amalgamated until November in 2005. The analysis of these questionnaires I collected shows several interesting findings. While most of council menbers agreed with amalgamation, they expressed lower evaluation on the effects of amalgamation. Also, they made severe evaluation on the activities of their councils. They admitted that the relationship between residents and mayor became more distant after the amalgamation, and that the relationship between residents and local council became distant, too.

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One of the important features of the 2006 Taipei City mayoral election is that there were three likely candidates. Each of them represented one of the major parties. The conventional wisdom states that the electorate may vote for their second preferred candidate if their most favorite one is not likely to win. However, scholars have seldom empirically examined how individuals rank their alternatives or candidates. We consider people's voting intention as a preference ordering and manage to examine its determinants. We set up choice-specific variables, such as winner anticipation, partisanship, and candidate evaluations, and individual-specific variables, such as ethnic background and nation identity, to account for people's preference ordering. Appling conditional logit model to a pre-election poll, we find that people rank their preferences according to their evaluations on candidates in order. Voter's winner anticipation and party identification prevailed in our model but they affect the voter's choice in different ways.

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Korea is important not only for supplementing one of the important missing links in the studies on mixed-member system in general, the political consequences of its SMD plural tier on party system in particular, but also for deepening our understanding of linkage failure in Duverger's law between the district and national levels. In the previous studies with the twotier model, it is impossible to tell where linkage failure lies in. With the introduction of the three-tier model with the second tier “region” in-between, it is only possible to distinguish the intra-regional linkage failure from the inter-regional linkage failure. Korea is best fit with such a model because there are significant differences in the patterns of the combination of candidates' party labels in different regions even when there are similarities in the number of candidates and how strong they are. In that case, intra-regional linkage is high while inter-regional linkage is low, resulting in linkage failure when aggregated at the national level.

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The purpose of this paper is to compare the political culture of Korea and Japan with particular reference to how the cultural characteristics affect the stability of the two political systems. The two countries are similar in many respects, including the geographical location, the historical background, the language structure, and even the DNA structure. Culturally, they have the common cultural heritage of Confucianism and Buddhism. More importantly and more relevantly, the two countries share the same political experiences as both of them were under the U.S. military government right after the World War Two, and were forced to embrace the Western democratic political system. This external imposition of the Western liberal democracy upon the two countries, of course, has resulted in many difficulties for the two political systems. Both of them are still in the process of internalizing the liberal democratic values and reconciling them with their traditional values. This struggle is manifested by the fact that the two countries have been almost constantly engaged in the discussion of political reforms and Constitutional amendments. Yet there are some important differences in the way Korea and Japan have tackled this problem of internalizing the Western democracy. Korea has gone through a series of political upheaval, thus creating political instability frequently, while Japan has been able to maintain political stability in relative terms. The focus of this paper is to explain this cross-national difference in terms of the characteristics of the two countries' political culture. More specifically, the paper examines several cultural variables that are related to the democratic political process, such as satisfaction with political system, fairness of electoral process, responsiveness of political parties and legislators, necessity for political parties, support for political parties, and party identification. In general, Japanese voters score higher than Korean voters in these cultural traits. It can be inferred from this finding that these cultural differences are responsible, at least partially, for the relative stability of the Japanese political system visavis the Korean political system.

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