In recent year, reforms to improve the voting environment have been pushed forward to reduce the vote week. Some election management committees (EMC) in the depopulated area carry out support measures for people with limited access to the polling station. The aim of this paper is to clarify of the electoral administration of Japan using survey data for the EMC.

  According to our survey data, 13.1% of EMC carried it out in the 2016 election of House of Councilors. There is the concern of the EMC staff in the background of this. They who mind “cost” and “equitableness” are reluctant to introduce them. As a result of statistical analysis, we understood that it tended to be carried out in the municipalities with a high percentage of aged people which has experienced a merger. Support measures carried out at present have two characteristics. One is a transportation poor measure, another is an alternative corrective measure with the polling station decrease.

  In aged Japan, the vote week tends to increase. It is necessary for us to do research on substantive voting rights.

Japanese local governments have been allowed to post official campaign bulletins of local election since 2012. Not all of the local governments, however, have done it so far. Furthermore, the length of time during which people can get access to official campaign bulletins online varies from local government to local government. The purpose of this study is to examine what factors caused these variations. An analysis using survey data from the officials at the election administration commissions in Japanese local governments indicated that preference of local officials had a profound effect on the level of information dissemination by the local election administration commissions.

The 2016 Japanese Upper House election resulted in an overwhelming victory for the pro-constitutional amendment camp, with a two-thirds majority of seats. According to public opinion polls conducted before the election, however, citizens were not necessarily supportive of the amendment. Using an Internet survey, this study examines why the pro-constitutional amendment camp succeeded, despite general public disagreement on the issue, or why some anti-amendment citizens voted for the pro-amendment parties. The analysis shows that the anti-amendment citizens who do not know the leading Liberal Democratic Party’s position on the constitutional amendment issue were more likely to vote for the pro-amendment parties, and they were more likely to regret after the election, especially among those who did early voting. This implies that citizens have difficulty in exerting the substantive voting rights by not correctly perceiving party’s positions on issues.

Multi-national studies have investigated the relationship between organization of Electoral Management Body (EMB) and its performance. But it is hard to apply the multi-national framework to the U.S., one of the leading democracies in the world. Instead, this paper focuses on the state-level EMB in the U.S. by describing and explaining the variation and common characteristics.

  First, state EMBs are categorized into three: a single chief official (typically Secretary of State) is elected by voters: a single chief official is politically appointed: and a bipartisan commission system whose members are selected from major parties. Regression analyses weakly support the hypothesis that a state that more voters support Democrats tend to have a bipartisan commission. But more important determinants are political processes each election commission are created and its stability after the reform. Second, no state has nonpartisan EMB. It is also the case even in the recent call for such EMB. This paper argues that the very attention to the electoral governance stimulated the partisan battle over the organization of EMB. A case of Wisconsin supports this point that once created the nonpartisan election commission but later abandoned.

The electoral management in Italy has suffered from severe troubles such as vote-buying and lacked integrity since the beginning of the First Republic. The institutional design, nevertheless, has mostly unchanged. Why has such troubled management experienced no major reform? The paper explores the postwar development and current functions of electoral management. The author argues that notwithstanding the comparative evaluation of Italian electoral management into an administrative model, the actual institutions have been more plural and democratic. The complex balances of mixed parties such as the EMB in the administration, parliaments, political parties, judiciaries, and citizens, have given strong legitimacy to the Italian style of electoral management. Sufficiently pluralized and democratized, the Italian style has survived throughout postwar period.

This article argues the introduction of internet voting in Estonia as a political outcome in which nationalist and liberal political parties played key roles, and the nation-wide ID system with post-Soviet context was important. The re-voting scheme as an anti-coercion/vote buying measure was politicized in the process of amendments of the election laws, and experienced two presidential vetos and a judicial review. The rationale behind this political drama involving legislature, executive, and judiciary sectors was respective political parties’vote-maximization incentives. This article demonstrates political processes how and why the internet voting was introduced in Estonia, with parliament stenographic records, interviews, and press reports at the time.

This article investigates the effects of individual socioeconomic attributes on perceptions about the electoral system that support the dominant party rule in Singapore. We test the hypothesis that intergenerational differences, income gap, educational gap, and ethnicity affect the voters’ perceptions, based on the data of the Post-Election Surveys conducted in 2011 and 2015 by the Institute of Policy Studies Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. By using logistic and OLS models, we examine the effects of four variables (age, income, education and ethnicity) on voters’ assessment of the current electoral system. The results show that intergenerational differences and income gap affect their assessments of fairness of the system and their preferences for maintaining it. On the other hand, the effects of income are not robust, and ethnicity has only limited effects.

Discourse analysis of post-war Japanese prime ministers’ general policy speeches indicates that speeches made during the early post-war period include a high ratio of mental process clauses, representing experience as the internal processes of their perception and cognition (feeling, thinking). In the later post-war period, however, the ratio of material process clauses, by means of which PMs referred to experience of the external world and described the process of physical actions (doing), increased. In order to provide an explanation of why this change occured, multiple regression analysis was conducted. Our main findings suggest that (i) during the high economic growth period, the spread of the media was the most influential factor, followed by economic fluctuations; (ii) during the transition period, similarly, the impact of the media was strongest, and after that the economy; (iii) during the period of economic stagnation, along with the media as the most controlling factor, a surge in independent voters became a significant factor. This study offers empirical evidence that post-war Japanese PMs have come to exhibit a growing awareness of the need for accountability and the dissemination of the media has been the constantly dominant factor in this change.

How do parties prevent their legislators from defecting, which makes the collapse of government and the party? Existing research looked at party switching in terms of the backbenchers’ incentives to affiliate with parties. This article argues that party leaders make strategical choices of allocating resources to valuable legislators in order to persuade them to stay in their party.

  Using the original dataset of the Democratic Party of Japan’s dissent, this study confirms the ideological distance between legislators and a prime minister affects legislators’ defection, but this effect is conditioned by the electoral performance of the party in the constituency. The analysis of the cabinet post allocation also shows this interaction effect. This article offers significant contribution on the literature of party organization by showing that party switching is not only the consequences of backbenchers’ decision, but also those of party leaders’ strategic behavior.

Democracy is widely understood as rule by the people, but who are the people? How is the demos constituted? This is the boundary problem of democracy. While a decision to exclude people that are morally entitled to be members of the demos is made through actual procedures of democracy, a morally justified principle of democratic inclusion (e.g. the all-affected principle) does not determine a particular boundary of the demos. In this paper, I defend that a boundary of the demos is legitimate if and only if it would be reasonably acceptable to all qualified points of view, applying this acceptability requirement to itself. That is, reasonable ranges of permissible demos are constituted through a hypothetical procedure of democratic legitimacy.

The idea of “pre-distribution” has been discussed by politicians and researchers as a new approach to distributive policy after the 2008 global financial crisis. The gist of the idea is to realize social and economic equality through ex-ante distribution rather than through traditional tax-and-transfer model of distribution. The debate about pre-distribution concerns both practical policy-oriented questions of “what policies we should pursue” as well as more philosophical question of “what policies qualify as pre-distribution.” This paper critically examines the approach of pre-distribution touching on both these aspects. I would argue that the most promising way to understand the approach is to connect it to the normative visions of property-owning democracy and transitional theory articulated by John Rawls. It is shown that these philosophical frameworks are helpful in pursuing the approach of pre-distribution in a practically and normatively appealing way.