The change in ideological semantics and Diet members’ rightward shift, which the past studies argued, demand us to scrutinize ideological conflict among political elites in Japan. Furthermore, globalization, rising inequality, and electoral and administrative reforms should also have changed perceptions of equality and policy preferences among political elites. Utilizing the dataset of elite survey, which we conducted in 2018 by following the method by Miyake et al. (1985), this article aims at investigating ideology and perceptions as well as attitudes related to equality not only among Diet members but also among local politicians and leaders in business, labor unions, mass media and other organizations. Comparing the two surveys in the 1980’s and the 2010’s, we examine their ideological conflict and its relationship with perceptions of equality. Furthermore, how the change from “all middle-class society” to “an unequal society” for the past four decades has incorporated attitudes of equality into ideological semantics is analyzed.

This study investigates the transition of postwar Japanese public opinion on constitutional revision by comprehensively analyzing the results of opinion polls on the constitution conducted by seven major polling institutes. A “pooling the polls” method, derived from a dynamic linear model, allows us to estimate the latent approval and disapproval rates for constitutional revision in consideration of variations in question items and wording, house and mode effects, and sampling errors. The results imply that, while voters perceived “full revision” of the constitution as a political issue in the 1950s, they came to consider Article 9 as the most important problem by far after the 1960s. We also find that citizens became clearly aware of issues other than Article 9 in the 1990s and 2000s, and that they focused on the problem of Article 9 again, following the Koizumi administration. Moreover, the effects of question items and wording suggest that voters regard the second (but not the first) paragraph of Article 9 as a political issue, and that priming respondents with questions containing the word “war” increases the disapproval rate for the revisions in Article 9.

This paper examines, by combining survey experiments and text analysis, (1) whether policy information representing each political party is useful for inferring the ideological position of each political party, and (2) what role policy information plays in inferring the ideological position of the party. To solve the problems, we compared the results of the conventional numeric measurement and the text measurement.

  As a result of the analysis, we clarified that the ideology did not agree with the bunch of the issue attitude, because the existence of the “key policy” of the political party lowered the weight of other policies and distorted the judgment. For example, when a party advocates the support for the constitutional and moral education at the same time, voters change the interpretation of moral education and interpret the party as “liberal party”. This paper’s findings not only reaffirm the importance of the voter recognition process in issue voting, but also provide an answer to the puzzle of how political parties have maintained their popularity by advocating policies contrary to party ideology.

In this article, we analyze voting behavior in the 2019 Okinawan referendum on the reclamation for constructing a U.S. military base with a framework which captures the endogenous relationship between preference formation and expression. Situating hypotheses on the local context, we tested the effects of policy attitudes, views regarding direct democracy, and party cues by multinomial logit analysis. The result by and large confirmed our assumptions. First, voters who perceive negative about the U.S. bases in Okinawa, positive about direct democracy, and support a “All Okinawa” party coalition, were likely to vote for “disagree.” Second, voters who stand positive about U.S. bases, negative about direct democracy, and support LDP, tended to vote for “agree” or abstained. The propensity overlap between voting for “agree” and abstention reflects the endogenous decision-making on indifferent choices by those who support reclamation as a status-quo. Third, voters who are faced with an inconsistency between anti-U.S. base policy attitude and party support for LDP were pressured to vote either “agree” or “disagree.” The results suggest that the interaction between representative and direct democracy affects expressed voters’ decisions on national security policies in modern Japanese politics.

After the “Progressive (Kakushin)” side of the Japanese politics had almost disappeared in the 1990s, the wider “Conservative (Hoshu)” side has been divided into the “Conventional Conservative (Shukyu Hoshu) ” and the “Reformist Conservative (Kaikaku Hoshu).”

  The “Progressive” and “Reformist Conservative” are remarkably different in that, the former was inclined to social democratic ideals and the pacifist constitution, while the latter tried to dismantle sectors protected by the “Conventional Conservative” and strengthen the Japan-U.S. Alliance.

  However, both the “Progressive” and the “Reformist Conservative” set the old Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) as their common enemy, synchronized their attacks on the LDP’s distributive politics and the bureaucrat-oriented politics. In this aspect, the quasi neoliberal “Reformist Conservative” has substituted the quasi social democratic “Progressive” and become the major alternative to the conservative-led distributive politics since the 1990s.

  This paper examines this accidental and ironical resonance of the “Progressive” and the “Reform”, and reveals the multi-faced function performed by the “Reform” in the contemporary Japanese Politics.

The quantitative analysis of election platforms (manifestos) published by politicians or political parties enables us to gain an understanding of political fault lines. However, many analytical tools suffer from limited availability of data and a lack of comparability, making long-term and/or cross national research difficult. The Manifesto Research Group/Comparative Manifesto Project’s coding scheme has sought to alleviate these issues to some extent. The research presented here, has used this coding scheme to code the Lower House election platforms of major Japanese political parties from 1960 through 2014, and to compare them to parties in Germany, the US and the UK. We have placed party positions on a two-dimensional left-right scale. This study shows center-right parties increasingly embracing neoliberal (economic policy) positions, while center-left parties have moderated their positions. Our cross-national comparison shows that the LDP may sit on the right end of the policy spectrum in Japan, yet compared to other major center-right parties, the LDP’s policy positions have remained, literally speaking, center-right. Furthermore, we did observe centripetal tendencies in the election platforms of major parties not only in Japan, but also in the UK and Germany during the 2000s.

Once enacted, the policy is not easily terminated. To avoid unnecessary extension and stimulate the smooth expiration of a policy, the US state governments promoted the Sunset Laws (SLs), which indicates the expiration date of the policy. This study focuses on 208 SLs in Japan from 1947 to 2013, examining if they were terminated as originally planned. Descriptive analysis showed that about half of them have not been terminated and one of them has been reactivated as many as 12 times. Furthermore Event History Analyses (discrete-time logit model) showed that the SLs were rarely terminated if they were (1) submitted by the legislators of the House of Representatives, (2) categorized in the policy field of Regional Development, or (3) contain not budget but law subsidies. These results and a case study indicate that some SLs show a seemingly paradoxical circumstance where the SLs were submitted not to terminate a political interest but to extend it for years to come by periodically reminding residents of their interests and making them reelect a particular politician.

The DPJ [Democratic Party of Japan] Government has a reputation of its security policy as a disaster. On the one hand, the government attempted several International Peace Cooperation [IPC] efforts. For example, the government decided to dispatch the Japan Self-Defense Forces [JSDF] troops to two UNPKO missions, MINUSTAH and UNMISS, and started a military training around South East Asia. Moreover, the first overseas base of JSDF was established in the Republic of Djibouti.

  Despite these promotion of IPC activities during in power, DPJ strongly criticized the challenges by Liberal Democratic Party [LDP] towards strengthening Japan’s IPC under the concept of “Proactive Contribution to Peace” after December 2011. As a result, the significance of DPJ government in the IPC policy has rarely been analyzed.

  This article reconsiders the role of DPJ government in the history of IPC by focusing on the difference and the similarity in IPC policy between the DPJ government and the following LDP one.

  It analyzes that the DPJ government developed the basis for the challenges under the concept of “Proactive Contribution to Peace”. It also concludes the fundamental difference between those two parties’ IPC policy is a matter of Japan-US relations rather than IPC itself.

This paper examines the process of establishing the attendance regulations of the Diet, using its drafts including Kowashi Inoue’s document named “Goinbunko”. It reveals why the Diet gallery is divided several parts of seats and how to begin regulating clothes and behavior of the public, and how women are permitted to attend.

  This study makes clear the followings: 1) Regulation of clothes and behavior is from the draft made by the secretariat who visited the Western countries. 2) It is important for woman’s attendance that they adopt the method which only made a draft and the Diet had a decision-making authority. They considered the autonomy of the Diet. 3) There are conflict in secretariat groups about a way of prohibit woman’s attendance between by making a rule or not. Inoue, the secretary-general, thought that prohibition should not take the way by making a rule and it is too minutely that they divide the gallery seats. And Kaneko, the chief of commission that visited the Western countries, regarded the order and administration in the Diet as most important, and so did not oppose to prohibit by making a rule. 4) Too minutely regulation since Meiji era remains in the rules now.

The main object of this article is to examine Max Weber’s arguments about imperialism from various perspectives. In preceding studies, Max Weber’s argument about imperialism is regarded as being positioned an extension of “world politics” (pursuing presence of Germany as great power in Europe) which is one of axes in his international political thought. Weber, however, argued imperialism with a view to globalization which Germany in his lifetime faced in international political situation and he touched on imperialism after Germany could no longer hold “world politics.” He, moreover, insisted negative comment about German colonial territory, constraint against imperialism itself and abandonment of German imperialism. Examining Weber’s arguments from various perspectives, this article discovered his evaluation about economical and political merit/demerit of German imperialism including the view of globalization and his criticism against imperialism for pursuing international political existence of Germany in Europe. In addition, this article clarified pitfall of German nationalist Weber’s arguments about imperialism. That is, he had an absence of perspective against colonial domination or incursion of German imperialism despite his criticism against imperialism.

While conventional wisdom holds that popularly elected chief executives (i.e. presidents, governors, etc.) tend to find it hard to achieve their desired policies thorough legislation and likely to face institutional deadlock, recent studies on executive-legislative relations reveal that they can win legislative support by distributing pork to legislators. However, less scholarly attention has been paid to the impact of chief executives’ pre-electoral coalitions on their legislative strategy.

  Quantitative analysis utilizing data of local governments in Japan from 1991 to 2005 demonstrates that governors backed by larger pre-electoral coalitions spend more on pork targeted at legislators, which in turn reduces the probability of experiencing legislative defeat. Also, the result of causal mediation analysis indicates pork barreling mediates the causal relationship between pre-electoral coalitions of governors and their legislative success.

It is a common phenomenon that a constitutional court rules a dispute between a central government and a local government. Under these institutional designs, why and when does a central government sue a local government? This paper argues that a central government requests for constitutional review of legislation of local government as a negative campaign against a local government whose partisanship is not affiliated with the central government. To test these hypotheses, this study examines the case of the Italian Constitutional Court, with which the Italian central government filed many suits against regional governments although the chance of central government’s success is low. The time-series cross-section analyses show two findings. First, lawsuits against a local government are more likely when national-level opposition parties are in control of the local government. And second, lawsuits against a local government whose partisanship is not aligned with national government increase when local elections are close and, therefore, the influence of lawsuits on the elections are expected to be larger. These findings suggest, even when a constitutional court can exercise its legal power independently, a national government can use a constitutional court to its own advantage just by filing a lawsuit.

This article attempts to rethink central-local relationship in postwar Japan by focusing on field agencies. Although field agencies have been playing important roles in local governance, they seem missing chapter in public administration studies. Previous researches found out two aspects of their activities. One aspect is approaching to Kasumigaseki. Another aspect is approaching to local governments. However, previous studies could not explain that there were both aspects in real governance. Therefore, this article attempts to analyze about it. As a result, this article clarifies that institution design prompted field agencies to select styles of activity. The styles consist of “Central government-lead” and “Assistance to local government”. Former style mainly approaches to central government and occasionally approaches to local government. Latter style mainly approaches to local government and occasionally approaches to central government. Field agencies enjoy autonomy from governments by acting their styles. From this perspective, we could reconsider central-local relationship from a single track relationship to a double track relationship among Kasumigaseki, a field agency, and local governments.

In a representative democracy, how do politicians control unelected bureaucrats? This research argues that they use Shingikai (advisory councils in Japan) as instruments of political control by compelling bureaucrats to consult with it.

  Although Shingikai is an administrative organization established for democratization, a criticism that it only confirms a bureaucrats’ policy so never contributes to democratization is deeply rooted. In contrast, this research demonstrates that politicians intend to control bureaucrats by making a law which compels bureaucrats to consult with Shingikai (we call such laws “procedural instructions”).

  Then, under what conditions do politicians make procedural instructions? This research sets up hypotheses with a game theoretic approach and tests them with a quantitative analysis using an original dataset of all Shingikai in 2002.

  As a result, we find that politicians tend to make more procedural instructions when (1) politicians’ ideal points of policy are more different from those of bureaucrats, (2) Shingikai is less authoritative, (3) politicians’ ideal points of policy are closer to those of Shingikai, and (4) politicians are more dissatisfied with a status quo. This result implies that bureaucrats are strategically compelled to consult with Shingikai by politicians so Shingikai can be used as instruments of political control.

This paper provides the evidence of the Youth political preferences formation in Japan. We conducted a field experiment designed before and after the 24th upper house election for analyzing the voting behavior of the new voters. (This is the timing of the first national election when the voting age was lowered to 18). Basic results support for the effects of the social contexts on the formation of their political preferences, including political concerns and voting behavior. Surprisingly here, those effects can be significantly induced simply by having the opportunity to see the distributed flyers (poster leaflets) or not before the election. Further, communication with their families (especially their parents) and their personal characteristics (ex. extraversion) are essential for conditioning those political preferences making.

The single non-transferable vote (SNTV) system has been widely adopted in the post-war Japan from the national elections to the local ones. Some studies argued that the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP) kept its majority in the House of Representatives because of this unique electoral system during most of the entire period from its foundation in 1955 to its break-up in 1993. Other studies pointed out that the SNTV is disadvantageous to large parties and analyzed whether the LDP was able to overcome the difficulty in the electoral strategy for running candidates given its vote share in a district. However, these studies overlooked an important perspective that vote share itself is affected by the electoral system. I analyze how party vote shares were affected by the SNTV and how they were reflected in the number of legislative seats won. I show that the number of seats the LDP lost due to the SNTV was only half of what its competitor, the Japan Socialist Party (JSP), did. These results imply that the SNTV favored the LDP as a result of the big disadvantage for the second largest party, the JSP.

Theories of international institutions have assumed that states use international institutions basically for achieving international cooperation. However, it has been argued that states have used many ineffective international institutions that scarcely change state behavior. Why do states use ineffective international institutions? Existing literature presents some explanations, such as the difficulty of building effective institutions, path dependence, and the miscalculation of policymakers. Nevertheless, there is a group of cases in which these factors were nonexistent and ineffective institutions were used. This paper argues that even institutions that do not change state behavior internationally have a domestic political utility and are used by governments for domestic purposes. In particular, this paper hypothesizes that a government can use an ineffective international institution to avoid blame from domestic actors that have conflicting preferences. The hypothesis is verified by process tracing of the case in which the United States used the International Monetary Fund to designate China as a currency manipulator. This case is suitable for testing the hypothesis because it deviates from existing literature and is also the least-likely case of this paper’s argument.