Democracy in the modern age has been described and understood in association with its two distinct, and equally important, political processes: competition at the elite and representation at the mass level. Although they both are obvious ingredients for the working of democracy, many years’of academic research have not fully advanced our understanding of how these two processes interact. In this paper, we explore what goes on at the nexus of competition and representation, by systematically combining the elite-level and mass-level behavioral findings drawn from Japan. Descriptive statistics together with more elaborate statistical analyses suggest that organized groups’ efforts of reaching out to general voters affect the latter’s sense of political efficacy. Moreover, we find that the pattern of this behavioral synchronization between organized groups and voters is consistent over an extended period of time.

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The 2019 Unified Local Election is the first nationwide election after a new act for gender equality in politics was enforced in 2018, which calls for political parties and groups to strive for achieving equality “as much as possible” in terms of the number of male and female candidates in both national and local elections. This paper aims to examine how the participation of women in local assemblies was promoted and how political parties recruited women by analyzing the data of local assembly-member elections aggregated by sex, local government levels and parties. There is a slight increase of the percentages of female candidates and women elected in 2019 though it recorded the highest ever at every local government level. Why has the participation of women made steady, but small progress in local assemblies? By analyzing the data of prefectural assembly-membership elections in the 2015 and 2019 Unified Local Elections, where most of the candidates belong to political parties and fewer women are elected than at municipal assembly-membership elections, this paper found the following. First, there are increasing number and successful rate of female newcomer candidates while the number of newcomer male candidates are on the decrease. Second, women elected who get the most votes at their election districts increased in number in the 2019 election. Third, because all political parties did not recruit more newcomer female candidates, it led to a slight, not sharp, increase of women at the 2019 election.

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What, if any, impacts does voter turnout have on electoral outcomes? A widely held view in Japan regards organization and mobilization as major determinants of voter participation, stating that heavier turnout decreases vote shares of parties with organized support bases and benefits parties depending on independent and floating voters. This paper estimates partisan effects of turnout rate in the ten national elections held from 2001 to 2014. The results lend no support to the “common-sensical” view and suggest that organization and mobilization are at best a part of causal mechanisms of turnout effects. The findings include that turnout has different effects in upper- and lower-house elections. For instance, the effect on the Liberal Democratic Party’s vote share tends to be positive in the former and negative in the latter. This difference shows that turnout effects stem from a change in defection rate of partisans as well as a change in partisan composition of voters.

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This paper focuses on the voting system for voters with disabilities such as regarding voting in institutions, hospitals, and homes for the elderly, voting by post, proxy voting, and braille voting, and it also examines how the number of voters who can use these systems and procedures has changed, as well as how these changes affect participation in voting and violations of the Public Offices Election Act including interference in an election or electoral fraud. The paper also examines reasons why there have been no salient changes. The results indicate that the number of voters expected to use this system has been increasing, while there has been no increase in violations of the Public Offices Election Act. One reason for this is that the scope of voting was expanded from the viewpoint of “guaranteeing rights to vote,” but the procedures necessary for voting were tightened from the viewpoint of “fairness in elections.”

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A principle of ‘one person, one vote’ is not fully fulfilled in the Japanese National Diet elections. Do voters want their votes count equally? Or, do they allow the disparity in the relative weight of a vote? To approach this research question, I conducted a WEB survey in which half of respondents are presented a pros and cons of means to lessen the disparity. By analyzing this data, I reached following three conclusions. Firstly, only about one-third of voters are interested in the lawsuit to request a declaration of invalid election. Secondly, few voters really want their votes count equally, and more than half of voters allow the disparity of two to one. And finally, respondents who saw the information of how to realize a principle of ‘one person, one vote’ become to tolerate their view of this principle, because they recognize the difficulty of correcting disparity.

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Using the optimization model developed and used by Hotta (2015) to produce combined multi-member districts for prefectural assemblies, we identified optimal combined districts for the House of Councilors and evaluated the effects of the combined districts. For the object function of the optimization model, we used the maximum ratio of population per representative and α-divergence, which is an index used to measure the quasi-distance between one distribution and another; it is employed as an evaluation index founded on individual reductionism by Wada (2012, 2016). We loosened the limit of the number of combined districts and revealed the maximum ratio of the population per representative and distribution of the districts, which allowed us to verify possible combined districts. If we allow three combined districts, the maximum ratio is less than three, and if we allow eight combined districts, the maximum ratio is less than two.

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This article aims for understanding new legislative parties in Liechtenstein. The parliament based on two parties tends to fractionalize recently, while the European small state seems not necessary to form a multiparty system. Furthermore, conflicts between old and new parties can be institutionally less expected than other European countries because of the constitutional monarchy headed by the Prince of Liechtenstein who has an influential role as a ‘veto player’. It can call attention to the fact that Liechtenstein moves from the two-party system that has been continued throughout its postwar period. This article investigates the change from a perspective of party realignment via Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). The main findings are summarized as follows: The party system change can be explained through a conjunctional condition characterized by new social issues and changing the electoral threshold. This analysis also suggests that reshaping government and economic condition would have a combinational effect.

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