This study provides an explanation for the conservative swing among Japanese legislators after the 1990s. I focus on effects of the electoral competition under the current electoral and party systems. In recent general elections, left-wing parties fielded many candidates who could hardly win and the New Komeito supported Liberal Democrats. A simple game-theoretic model predicts that these two factors give candidates of major parties an incentive to shift their policy positions toward more conservative ones. I show some empirical evidence that this did happen in the 2003 election analyzing an elite survey.

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In the Slavic Eurasian region, since the collapse of the socialist regime, Central-Eastern Europe (CEE) and the CIS region have taken divergent paths. While the democratic regime has been consolidated in CEE, the so-called “electoral authoritarianism” has been established in the CIS region. As a result, government changes occur frequently in CEE but rarely in the CIS region. In the 2000s, however, the so-called “electoral revolutions” took place in some countries in the CIS region, such as Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, where the government was forced to resign due to the large-scale demonstrations that erupted when the government attempted to forge the election results in order to stay in power. This article attempts to analyze the causes of these “electoral revolutions,” to examine whether these events indeed led to the democratization as had been expected by the Western governments and scholars, and to discuss the role and significance of elections and government changes in the Slavic Eurasian region.

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The 2006 Swedish election drew attention with a power shift after 12 years of Social Democratic rule. The chief factor in the Right-centers' victory was an unprecedented and elaborate cooperation strategy. This article discusses the following three points. Firstly, there appeared ‘contract parliamentarism’ under the Social Democratic administration in the 1990s. Under contract parliamentarism, parties sought a majority of votes not by formal coalition, but by some written policy agreements. Secondly contract parliamentarism compelled Right-center parties to cooperate with each other, and eventually resulted in ‘preelectoral coalition’. Thirdly, the result of the 2006 election, in turn, forced the left camp to adopt the same strategy. Further, this article points out that the present situation in which two camps compete with each other by showing their clear coalition-building plans has gone beyond the traditional ‘block politics’. Taking the changing nature of political parties and the trends of voters' behavior into consideration, this article suggests that a profound structural change has been under way in Sweden's electoral politics for a decade now.

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The case of Nosamo has already shown that voluntarily organized online voter groups can bypass party organization and can greatly affect party politics and electoral outcomes. Inspired by the success of Nosamo, political fan clubs that compete with each other have appeared and are triggering changes in the political process. The increased political use of ICTs has aroused controversies on whether they would strengthen or weaken representative democracy. This paper tries to analyze political fanclub's influence of the party politics in the perspective of party decline theory. This paper is organized as the following: first, organizational characteristics and functions of political fan clubs are analyzed; second, the impacts of political fan clubs on changes in the parties are presented.

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In Japan (1890-1945), the constituency system was often switched (to the single-seat constituency → the large-constituency → the single-seat constituency → the medium constituency). The main reasons of the constituency system changes were to elect valuable representatives from the national point of view. This article schematically traces a circle as below : 1) the aim of adapting the constituency system, 2) the analysis of the elected representatives in fact, 3) the evaluation of the system, 4) the emergence of debates on the issue of the constituency system reform. As a result, it is clear to say that the reformed system initially operated for the institutor's political advantage. However, in the longer term, that system transformed the representative's quality by grinded against society and quite often yielded perverse effects for the speculation of the institutor's political strategy.

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Interest groups tended to send their representatives to a nation-wide constituency to contest elections. While some groups retreated from this constituency, the elected representatives of the Izokukai continued to retain their seats despite a decrease in the number of bereaved families every year. This paper discusses why the Izokukai was able to survive under such tough conditions. It concludes by identifying the following two reasons. The more important reason is that the Izokukai raised the expectations of war windows on war pensions by the outstanding performance. In particular, from the 1960's windows actively collected votes on behalf of the Izokukai because they were responsible for bringing up their children after their husbands died, and once their children had grown up, they found themselves aging and commodity prices rising. The second reason is that the Izokukai involved the siblings of the war dead in their activities. Though the siblings were ineligible to receive a war pension, mourning events and other relevant ‘interests’ linked their attentions to the Izokukai.

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This article aims at examining causes of the low turnout rate in the elections for the Lower House of the Diet after 1996. The turnout rate fell rapidly between 1990 and 1996 and remained low through 2005. The authors point out that cohort factors may lower the turnout rate and analyze two data sets using the Bayesian age-period-cohort model: one from surveys of the turnout rates in elections for the Lower House of the Diet between 1969 and 2005 by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications and the other one from the sample surveys by the Association for Promoting Fair Elections. In the analyses, Japanese voters born after 1966 are found to have low cohort effects which accounts for the lower turnout rates after 1996.

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While the change or decline in voter turnout rate is of most concern, existing studies on voting participation have examined a descriptive and static question of “who vote,” leaving a question of “why people become more (or less) likely to vote.” They have difficulty explaining the temporal variation in voting turnout indirectly by the cross-sectional variation. To remedy the shortcomings in previous investigations, this study uses the recursive dyadic dominance method to construct annual “voter participation level” data by combining three time series of aggregate turnout data in elections for the House of Councillors, the House of Representatives and local assemblies. ARFIMA (Autoregressive Fractionally Integrated Moving Average) modeling with the Legendre time-varying parameters helps us understand the changing effects of independent variables such as CPI, unemployment rate, and competitiveness of elections.

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Upon the evaluation of an electoral reform, two often cited concerns are governability and proportionality. A new electoral system, whatever it is, should respond to the two concerns as best as possible. In Taiwan's changing from SNTV-MMD to MMM, however, reformers invariably accentuated the new system's attributes of enhancing stability of governance while ignoring the possible outcomes of disproportionality. Hence, as expected, the result of election in 2008 produces high governability and low proportionality. This article measures the degree of disproportionality by Loosemore-Hanby index from 1992 to 2008 and explains how disproportionality occurred.

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