The founders of Public Choice Society have fulfilled the critical view towards the standard or established economics in the mainstream academy in the USA at that days. They criticized the hypothesis that the system or framework should be treated as a given data. They clarified the structural bias in many government’s decision makings distorted by many interest groups. The Great East Japan Earthquake caused the rethinking of both our standard in the academy and the life value or style for the people. The people had fullfledged social capital in the community. Afterwards the volunteerism has been vitalized. The activity sphere has been expanded to the bridging or network social capital. The future Public Choice should positively treat these new aspects.

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Noting a stark albeit subtle difference in frequency bands between business and election cycles, this paper utilizes a band - pass filter approach to disentangle Japanese public investment into several underlying components. To the extent that Japan is concerned, we find that public investment strongly exhibits the oft - alleged counter - cyclical pattern and latent political noise possibly weakens the government’s counter - cyclical stance. In particular, it is suggested that in the period from 1974:Q1 to 2001:Q1 (from the first oil crisis to the start of the Koizumi administration), the House of Councilors elections generally influenced the government to manipulate (increase) public investment, thereby overriding (diminishing) the otherwise strong counter - cyclical pattern of public investment.

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The purpose of this paper is to examine why and how the local parties founded by active local leaders rise throughout Japan, and get support in elections? In order to analyze the changes and continues in the local politics, I focused on two local elections in Nagoya city and Aichi prefecture in 2011. The local parties defeated the existing parties in a landslide on February. But only one month later, they fail to win a majority in the assembly election of Nagoya. These empirical analyses reveal that (1) local parties and leaders success an agenda setting: a tax reduction, assembly reform, and decentralization, (2) voters support these issues rather than leaders’ political style to set themselves against the assembly, (3) single - issue strategy by local party can’t work and let many voters return to the existing party in the local assembly election, and (4) local parties have poor organization is apt to fail to field candidates under the SNTV system. These results show the possibility, issues, and challenges of local parties to take responsibility of the decentralization.

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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of regional revitalization and new social capital formation by the introduction of the contemporary art project into unfavorable area. Some of the results of questionnaire survey of residents indicate that Echigo-Tsumari Art field affects the changes in activities of community and individuals that leads to“ bonding” and “ bridging” social capital formation.

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The empirical studies to the median voter hypothesis have been done all over the world widely. And some previous studies intended for Japanese case. Those previous studies have some points. The first point is that the estimation was intended for two or more annual expenditures. The second point is that they compared the mean income voter with the average income voter. However, these assumptions in the previous works don’t adjust to the setting of the median voter hypothesis. It is thought that an additional test is necessary to clarify the approval of the median voter hypothesis. This paper uses the variable to reflect the regional income distribution. If the median voter hypothesis is approval, the variable will not be significant. We estimate for total expenditure that aggregates voter’s preference for public goods. The result of the paper is that the income distribution variables are significant and interpretability of the estimated result of the average income person data was higher. This result shows that the median voter hypothesis is not approval unlike the previous works.

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Democratic theories assume that voters are rational in that they have a transitive preference over alternatives and make choices accordingly. A sizeable amount of literature, however, has shown that most voters are actually irrational, lacking the political knowledge necessary for rational preference formation and choice. Under what conditions can voters make a rational choice? In this paper, we test to what extent voters are capable of rational choice and what the determinants of rational choice are by using original questions in a survey conducted in August 2010 in Japan. First, in the survey, respondents were asked which of three characteristics of old age pension systems they preferred pairwisely to determine whether they have transitive preferences. Second, respondents were asked which of two old age pension systems they preferred to determine if they make choices consistent with their preferences. Finally, we explore the determinants of rational preference formation and choice.

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