Recently, candidate selection process has been democratized in Japan. Who can be a party's candidate, who can select candidate is expected to influence the relations between party leaders and other members / branches. This article investigates the candidate selection process of the 2010 Upper House election in which the LDP markedly opened their candidate selection process. From the point of party control over the process, I analyze the LDP's and the DPJ's “opened” candidate selection method and examine the characteristics of the candidates selected by such method. These analyses reveal that the LDP local organizations adopted not fully opened methods, while the DPJ's processes were considerably centralized. And the candidates selected by democratized methods prefer “reform” policy and attach more importance to themselves than their party in electoral campaign. These results suggest that democratization of candidate selection process will not increase the power of national party leaders.

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In September 2009, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) won office, ending more than a half-century rule by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Accordingly, DPJ legislators assumed important posts in the Cabinet and Diet. How does the DPJ assign legislative posts under the single-member district-centered system in order to pursue votes, office, and policies as compared to the LDP? This study finds that, similar to the LDP, the DPJ uses interfactional balancing and seniority rules because each can universally contribute to the maintenance of party unity. In contrast, in order to increase the votes, the DPJ allocates most key posts to electorally stronger members, whereas the LDP allocates posts to electorally vulnerable members since the DPJ has a party-centered electoral style, and the LDP has a candidate-centered style.

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Through a series of decentralization reforms and a merger of municipalities, cities have increased both the scale and extent of their authority. Mayoral elections have also continued to change. On the one hand, non-competitive elections (where the governing and opposition parties support the same candidate) have decreased, while an opposing trend in increased nonpartisanship has emerged. These changes have been identified in previous studies, but due to difficulties in data collection, an overall accurate representation of these trends is yet to be produced. This article aims not only to provide up to date, salient data on the participation of both the LDP and DPJ's involvement in mayoral elections, but also to accurately depict the qualities of this new data through comparison to studies conducted on mayoral elections under the 1955 system. Through the analytical methods used in this study, an attempt will be made to clarify the regularities that can be identified in the involvement of the major political parties in the mayoral election process.

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How does conservatism develop among citizens? Why are some theoretically inconsistent political attitudes tied in the name of conservatism? Both economic conservatism that pursues budget cuts for welfare programs and balanced budget and social conservatism that argues for the ban of abortion and same-sex marriage actually tend to be correlated in voters' attitudes in the United States, although they are not necessarily theoretically consistent. To solve the puzzle, this paper explores two factors, political party and traditional community, in the development of grassroots conservatism. The data analysis shows that Republicans and evangelicals, and citizens residing in Republican and Christian regions are more likely to have both economically and socially conservative attitudes, suggesting that partisanship and religious belief are a key to understanding ideological constraints in the United States.

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Using a national survey data set, this article examines the determinants of Americans' support for the War in Iraq at the time of the 2004 presidential election. It was found that party identification, religious affiliation, patriotism, and educational attainment had significant effects on the support for the war. Republicans were the most supportive of the war, while Democrats were the least supportive. As for religious affiliation, Baptists were the most supportive of the war, while Lutherans, Methodists, and the residual mixed group of small faith groups were the least supportive. Patriotism had a positive effect on the support for the war. Finally, Americans with high school and junior collegelevel education were most supportive of the war, while those with advanced degrees were least supportive. The reason why these variables exerted significant effects on the support for the war appears to be that these variables influenced Americans' critical evaluations of justification for the war.

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Political science has inherited a vast array of contested concepts which have been enthusiastically and frequently refined and redefined. Political conservatism has long served as one such contested concept, and it is often said that there is no definitive way to conceptualize political conservatism. However, I attempt to conceptualize political conservatism following what Gary Goertz calls a “realist approach,” deriving three established theories from political science that might explain the processes and patterns of long-term partisan change in American politics: (1) The theory of party activists; (2) critical realignment theory; and (3) the issue evolution model of partisan change. By applying those theories to the conservatization of the Republican Party, I develop three competing causal hypotheses that might explain the processes and patterns of long-term partisan change in American politics.

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Longitudinal trends in the decline of institutional trust are a worldwide concern, with implications that this may be a sign of less engaged democracies. However, no clear correlation has been observed between the 170 decline of institutional trust and shrinking political participation. The current study examined the relationship between trust and participation, using 13 country Asian Barometer survey data with Hierarchical Linear Models. The results show that trust leads to the decline of political participation, but no path was detected from the support of liberal democratic values to participation. On the other hand, distrusters (or critical democrats) who are interested in politics are inclined to participate. A cross-level interaction between aggregate country-level Asian values and trust shows an intervening effect in that trusters in high political involvement are more likely to participate under high paternalistic regions, while in harmony-oriented cultural regions trust decreased participation.

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Both Japan and Korea have a history of farm protectionism as a result of swift change in the comparative advantage due to rapid economic growth. Despite the similarities of industrial structures and the presence of well-organized rice farm lobbies, these two countries have taken differing policy paths. While Japan has been stuck in the status quo of its old-fashioned price fixing methods that combine acreage control and pork barrel, Korea has been initiating FTAs with the US and the EU by adjusting its protectionist policies to more programmatic direct payment. This results from differences in constitutional structures and the strength of party discipline, namely Japan's weak executive power in the presence of fragile party leadership and a divided bicameral parliament, as opposed to the Korean presidentialism where the president's policy initiative is facilitated by the electoral cycles.

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The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship between the acceptance of political decision and political trust, based on empirical analysis. In previous works, many scholars have explained simply political trust as a factor to promote cooperation with government and pointed out political trust makes democracy work grounded on such explanation. On the contrary, I demonstrate all political trust does not promote all cooperation. More specifically, first, I show not incumbent based political trust but regime or institution based political trust as the foundation of representative democracy encourages cooperation with government. Second, institutional trust facilitates not “active” but “passive” cooperation. Here “passive” cooperation means non-resist against government. In other words, the concept of cooperation with government is multidimensional concept which includes two different dimensions. The results of quantitative analysis using JABISS and JSS-GLOPE data, partially, reveal these hypotheses will be adopted.

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