It is an important and controversial topic whether voters can make reasonable choices or not. In this paper, I review the recent advancements on this topic in voting behavior. I first review literature until the late 90s and confirm the ignorance of voters and irrationality of their decision, which was presented in the American Voter, has been refuted. Next, I review the recent revision of voters' rationality based on the advancements of psychological research. In addition, I also review the applications of biological and neural sciences, which provides the scientific explanation of voters' emotional responses. Finally, I summarize the characteristics of the recent research movements and discuss the future of this research field.

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In this paper, I first survey a part of experimental literature on voting, where I restrict my argument to laboratory experiments conducted with multiple subjects who are given monetary payoffs from each voting outcome and make voting decisions under given voting rules. I classify such experiments according to whether voting is costly or not (participation) and whether the number of alternatives for subjects, such as candidates, is two or more (direction). Then I discuss some of the challenges and prospects in this research field, such as the role of laboratory experiments as wind tunnel experiments for designing new political institutions, the possibility of reproducing elections in the laboratory, and the effect of political context on the experimental outcomes.

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The empirical studies of political representation started in the late 1980's, and have recently developed as the comparative analysis of Western countries. Focusing on the research development characterized with the expansion of cases, the integration with the spatial theory, and the evolution of methodology, this paper specifically reviews the genealogy of the comparative macro-political analysis dealing with the government's political responsiveness to voters. In these studies, however, the case of postwar Japan has not been incorporated. Why does it happen? Further, why have been the studies tackling the linkage between political mass and elites dismissed in Japan? After considering these questions and introducing the respective macro studies of Japanese politics, I will emphasize the significance of the Japan's case and present the future tasks for the application.

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Party system literature has traditionally focused on the relationship between social cleavages and the formation and evolution of party systems. Though regionalism and the emergence of new parties have not been considered important components of the dynamics of party competition, recent studies have linked regionalism and the emergence of new parties to variations in party systems. This article examines these recent developments in the literature and introduces a new approach to analyze party systems --“party system institutionalization”-- which considers the effects of regionalism and the entry of new parties on party systems. Through the review of literature, the author indicates need to analyze the dynamic relationship between inter-party competition for elections at both national and local level.

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Kusunoki Seiichiro had published “Japan political history in electoral studies”, Japanese Journal of Electoral Studies No.14, 1999. Succeeding the achievements of Kusunoki, this article examines thenew trend of Japan political history in electoral studies. The purpose of this article is to survey research trend of it in the 1990s and to make clear research trend in 2000 and later. As a result, it points out the following. (1)Historical studies of the general elections and the local elections had increased and the foundation of study had thickened. (2)As a new wave of study, it had appeared that the studies which analyzes election poster in the general elections in early Showa era and describes the transformation of political culture and political society in the modern Japan by election irregularities.

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This article regulates research trends of political consciousness studies in Japanese social strata studies, and discuss the issues and prospects. In social strata studies, they not only argued about social strata, one of the analytical framework of social structure and change, but also discussed its impact of political change. So they analyzed the relation between social status variables and political consciousness variables. the conclusions obtained by the relation between social and political variables is the political consciousness reflects social strata structure with systematic slippage. That slippage occurs between political consciousness and political party or government, between the process subjective strata reflects objective strata. We should use this point not to increase complexity of the model, but to construct simple but interesting theory.

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The recent trend and prospect of media effects research is reviewed from the viewpoint of social psychology and communication research. In the former, transformation of mass media and its effects is discussed by focusing on the diversification of news content and outlets promoted by the rise of entertaining soft news, and the diffusion of Cable TV. Moreover, recent research on cognitive process in news exposure is introduced by focusing on the synthesizing trend of framing, agenda setting, and priming effects. In the latter, the possible ineffectiveness of traditional media effects theories and models is discussed in regards to the rapidly changing media environment through the diffusion of the Internet. Lastly, the emerging role of mobile phones and social media in political communication as well as methodological progress in media effects research is briefly reviewed.

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This paper offers an overview of methods for causal inference in electoral studies. We first summarize typical definitions of causality used by social scientists in Japan and then discuss their limitations in application. Next, we review a definition of causality based on potential outcomes and extend its principle to demonstrate the problems of a conventional method combining regression analysis and cross-sectional data for causal inference. Further, we introduce three sets of approaches for building a causal relationship and review their applications in electoral studies. Those approaches include an experimental method, a quasiexperimental method, and a statistical method.

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Political sophistication (PS) is key concept for explaining political attitudes and voting behavior. The standard approach for measuring PS is to combine several question items from survey data to generate an index. In this process, much information is lost, obscuring the interpretation of PS. In this paper, we expressly evaluate the questions items used to measure political sophistication by employing item response theory. We test the new index by examining its effect on the stability of political attitudes. The results suggest that higher PS produces higher stability of ideological position and in the sense of duty of voting participation. However, higher PS produces greater instability in the level of political efficacy.

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