The formal decisions over the use of military force by the UN Security Council are believed to transmit useful information to foreign domestic audience. Scholars claim that this transmitted information brings a higher foreign support for the UNSC approved use of force. While a variety of the macro-level evidence exists to support the argument, I argue that the most critical test has not been done yet at the micro-level by using an experimental research design. To fully study the causal mechanisms that generate the foreign public support for the UNSC approved military actions, the author conducted multiple survey experiments and identified why and when they significantly change their support for the military actions started by the United States. In this particular study, it turns out that veto with a surprise --- negative vote from friendly, allied permanent member (i.e. UK and France) --- generates more information to the general public and thus changes their attitudes.

Lifting the ban on collective self-defense (CSD) allows Japan to provide military assistance in the event of armed attacks against its allies. The departure from the post-war defense strategy may inadvertently impact the security environment facing Japan. I analyze a game-theoretic model, in which Japan engages in peacetime diplomacy with a potential challenger in the first stage and, if a crisis arises between the U.S. and the challenger in the second stage, Japan must decide whether to intervene in a military conflict on the behalf of the U.S. The equilibrium shows that allowing for CSD decreases the risk that the challenger initiates a crisis, while it incentives Japan not to cooperate during peacetime, exacerbating the security dilemma, and the challenger to cooperate, ameliorating the dilemma. Key is that the shadow of a future crisis turns the peacetime cooperation problem into an opportunity for Japan to signal its resolve to intervene.

While revisionism of economic voting proclaims that sociotropic economic evaluation confoundedly affects government approval and voting decision due to the endogenous effect of partisanship, the differences in political contexts―e.g., a variety of partisanship strength―possibly prove that sociotropic assessment does have a causal effect on political support. Estimating the effect of sociotropic evaluation with instrumental variables whose exogeneity was produced by an online survey experiment, this paper demonstrates: (1) economic evaluation has more influence on government approval than ruling partisanship based on the estimation with instrumental variable, and (2) influences on voting decision though ruling partisanship are more likely to affect voting decision in Japan. Based on these results that differ from revisionism, within the Japanese politicoeconomic context, economic voting can be positioned as the core of voters’ political decision.

How can we handle the periodization when we conduct a quantitative analysis on long term policy changes and their causes? This article considers the question through the reanalysis of Japan’s Local Politics. Without the divisions of dataset by the periods, we introduce the method of capturing large changes, minute changes, and stabilized periods in a comprehensive way. We use the kurtosis to make the distinctions between incremental changes and “punctuated equilibrium” and the quantile regressions to reveal the independent variables which have the effect not on every policy changes but on any specific changes. This argument suggests that if we attend the whole aspects of the distribution of changes, we can obtain more detailed understandings of the political phenomenon which includes both the stabilizations and large scale changes.

So-called “progressive local governments” spread all over Japan in the 1960s and 1970s, although the national government remained conservative during this period. This article is an analysis of how the conservative Sato Eisaku administration confronted these progressive local governments, using political history analysis. The analysis focused specifically on two prefectural governors, Minobe Ryokichi of Tokyo and Yara Chobyo of Ryukyu/Okinawa, because the Sato administration was particularly focused on them. The analysis revealed following things: First, both the conservative and the progressive camps understood that the year 1970, when the Japan-US security treaty would be reconsidered, was a critical year. Second, both sides shared scientific politics and social development as common aims. Third, Sato treated progressive local governments as representatives for local residents when tackling crucial issues. Finally, the nature of progressive local governments changed from being simply local opposition parties to acting as reformists on behalf of their constituents after the year 1970.

This study attempts to examine causal effects of natural disasters on regime transitions by using the synthetic control method. This novel approach connects the quantitative and qualitative methods by selecting units of comparison in a systematic manner, and thereby allows for “precise quantitative inference in comparative case studies, without precluding qualitative approaches to the same data set” (Abadie, Diamond, and Hainmueller 2015: 495-496). Focusing on the case of the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake, I create a counterfactual Mexico, that would not experience this devastating event, and then compare the trends of democratization between the synthetic and actual cases. By so doing, this study demonstrates that the earthquake accelerated the pace of democratization in Mexico. This finding provides important implications for both comparative case studies and the field of regime transition.

Based on the results of neuro-political experiments, this paper discusses the validity and possibility of using the neuroscientific experimental method to deepen our understanding of political phenomena. Using a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) experiment about redistributive equality behind the veil of ignorance, we demonstrate that a cross-fertilization results from the collaboration between political science and neuroscience. The neuro-scientific method enables one to explore brain activity during the pursuance of equality, i.e., to project oneself mentally into the perspectives of others and into future situations. Accumulated knowledge in political science enables one to conduct an fMRI experiment that is highly relevant to understanding real human behavior in politics and society. We have devised an experiment that replicates a problem of income redistribution in society and quantified an individual’s attitude toward others by using a feeling thermometer to examine the neural correlate. The paper supports the cross-fertilization between political science and neuroscience.

The free-rider objection remains a dominant objection to the ‘right not to work’. According to Stuart White, living off the labour of fellow citizens without making a reciprocal productive contribution violates the principle of ‘justice as fair reciprocity’ and amounts to exploitation. Through an analysis of the concept of exploitation, this paper establishes that a relationship is exploitative when the procedures for determining the terms of social cooperation among the parties involved are unjust. Using Rawls’ liberty principle as the principle of social cooperation that can be agreed to by all persons under fair conditions as a reference point, the paper examines whether such an exploitative relationship applies between voluntary non-workers and working tax payers who support them. It finds that transferring resources from the latter to the former to the extent that it equalises both parties’ liberty can be justified.

Japanese conservative political leaders as well as people in the Foreign Office believed, by and large, at least until around the mid-1950s, that Japan would be able to request the U.S. government to replace the 1951 U.S.-Japan Security Treaty with a more mutual defense arrangement and to withdraw American forces from Japanese mainland, when Japan established its defense capabilities. Yet mutual defense treaties did neither inevitably carry military bases in contracting parties; nor the 1951 Security Treaty clarified the trade-offs between the stationing of U.S. forces in Japan and Japanese rearmament. This article explains Japanese leaders’ assumption on the relationships among military bases, Japanese rearmament, and “mutual defense” arrangements, by examining the process through which the 1951 Security Treaty was created and was ratified in the Japanese Diet. With particularly focusing on the fact that the 1951 Security Treaty stipulated arrangements on military bases and legal status of the bilateral security relationship as one package―completely different from many of other defense treaties in the West―and was concluded as a tentative agreement, the author argues the structure, legal meanings, and the interpretations of the treaty.

The effective number of candidates tends to be equal to the magnitude of the district plus one. This is an extension of Duverger’s law, called the “M + 1 rule.” The results of Lower House elections in Japan, with a single non-transferable voting system before 1994, prove the rule.

Because the number of seats contested in each constituency had been 3 to 5 in the past Lower House elections in Japan, earlier studies proved the rule in the range of 3 to 5. The number of seats in Prefectural Assembly elections has a broader range. This article widens the range of the application of the M + 1 rule using data from the Prefectural Assembly elections.

In addition, this article also focuses on the large sample size of the prefectural-level data and examines how conditions of electoral competition, such as urbanization and reapportionment, have affected the validity of the rule.

The aim of this paper is to clarify how the Privy Council of Japan “operate” their own organization and how the Cabinet responded to them, focusing on constitutional interpretation of the Privy Council and the control of councillor. This paper pointed out the following two points. Firstly, the background of the two major parties tried to avoid the Congress and deepened the conflict with the Privy Council was the ambiguity of the precedent of emergency edicts or constitutional interpretation, and there were differences in the strategies of the two major parties against the Privy Council. Secondly, Kuratomi and Hiranuma decided to keep the authority of the Privy Council and strict constitutional interpretation. They made decisions based on the official authority and precedents. But, the operation of the Privy Council was greatly upset by the control of councillor.

  In conclusion, the problems occurred on constitutional interpretation and difficulty in controlling the inside of the Privy Council.

This paper applies a method of citation analysis to research in political science history and raises new analytical methods and points. Here, citation analysis refers to a method of deriving knowledge from the accumulation of citation relationships among documents. Conventionally, in this field where qualitative analysis of text is the mainstream, issues remain that have not been fully considered from the viewpoint of the approach constraints. Therefore, to verify these points, we attempt the quantitative approach of citation analysis. In this paper, using citation data of 70 political science textbooks published after World War II, we examine the theory of Japanese political science history. According to previous studies, there were two transitions in the history of Japanese political science: these were the 1945 break during and after the war, and the shift due to the appearance of the Leviathan group in the 1980s. Our approach confirms these two transformations but reveals a major contrast between them. This result shows the effectiveness of citation analysis in political science history research.

Consensus formation is an important topic in empirical political science and the theory of deliberative democracy. I analyze the effect of the deliberation process on consensus formation by an agent based model in this study. Previous studies have investigated the relationship between dyadic deliberation and the resulting consensus level. However, the outcome of a group-level discussion, used in the actual deliberation polling, remains to be elucidated in research. The simulation outcomes showed that the accumulation of dyadic deliberation was more likely to lead to a consensus formation in comparison with a group-level deliberation. The results of this study can contribute to find a deliberation mechanism that helps us reach a consensus.