Numerous researchers have studied the determinants of legislative productivity of a government. However, previous studies have primarily focused on two cases: (1) the U.S. Congress that is dominated by two-party system under presidentialism and (2) European parliaments that include multiparty system under parliamentarism and semi-presidentialism. Thus, the central research interest has focused on their institutional settings. In that sense, the theory and evidence of the previous studies need to be tested further in other contexts.

　In this study, using the panel data of 47 Japanese prefectures from 1967 to 2006, we examine the generalizability of such an existing theory on legislative productivity. Local Japanese politics could be a good example of the unique institutional combination of a presidential system and one-party dominant system. Thus, we observe that the seat share of governors'par ties in an assembly increases the passage rate of governors'bills, while the effective number of governors'parties as a partisan veto player decreases the number of new local government ordinances. The results support a partial generalizability of the existing theory in the context of local Japanese politics.

This paper discusses the change in the concept of theory in international relations (IR)studies that has been promoted by the prevalence of formal approaches in the field since the 1990s. The first two sections present the developments from the public choice theory perspective. The third section reviews the various arguments pertaining to this change by researchers specializing in qualitative approaches. While this paper agrees with the critics on some minor points, it argues that the critics'central claims are unacceptable. The fourth section discusses arguments pertaining to the change by IR academic organizations around the world. The concluding section relates the change in IR studies to broader social contexts.

In his book, the Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, Olson (1965) argues that, in a small group composed of heterogeneous members, a member who places the highest value to a pure public good tends to bear a disproportionate share of the burden of providing the good. Olson and Zeckhauser (1966) apply this so-called exploitation hypothesis to an analysis of burden sharing among NATO members, thereby initiating the field of economics of alliances.

The current article provides a short survey of the literature on the field. It contains six primary sections. Following the very brief introductory section, Section 2 reviews Olson and Zeckhauser (1966) and the exploitation hypothesis. The joint product model, which generalizes Olson and Zeckhauser’s pure public good model, is discussed in Section 3. NATO burden sharing in the post-Cold War era is examined in Section 4. The application of the economic theory of alliances on UN peacekeeping is the topic of Section 5. Finally, some concluding remarks are given in Section 6.

In this essay, I demonstrate the effectiveness and impact of Agent Based Simulation (ABS) approach to support the restructuring of some research fields of social science as represented by economics, political science and international politics. ABS is a one of the methods of computer aided simulations which has a significant advantage to analyze complex phenomena or systems.

After the Cold War, global community has come to grips with global issues, for example, frequent outbreaks of regional conflicts or global terrorisms, instability of global economic system, cyber-attacks and so on. To resolve the problems of these issues and also to seek a way to rebuild global order is a new mission to social science. But, we will soon find the fact that analytical methods in the mainstream economics or political science are difficult to complete this mission because of the existence of built-in complex dynamisms which come from both issue linkage and diversity of agents among these global issues. It is hope that ABS is the method to break the neck of these methodological difficulties.

I review recent studies on determination of public debt policy through political processes and propose directions of future research. First, I introduce studies which investigate the relationship between amounts of public debt and fiscal stances in developed countries. In those studies, we can observe various patterns of fiscal stances. The divergence among the countries can be explained by political processes. Second, I review recent studies which analyze how to determine size of government spending, tax revenue, and issuance of public debt through political processes. In one stream, researchers investigate how an intra-generational conflict affects voting on fiscal policy. In another stream, we analyze how an inter-generational conflict does. Lastly, I raise some directions of future research about determination of public debt policy through political processes.

Many of existing studies discuss why several voters split their tickets. The main stream argument which explains this phenomenon is rational choice model. This model assumed split ticket voter expect to achieve their ideal policies or to divided the power into different political blanches vote for different party in President and Congress election. However, under the mixed electoral system with bicameral system, it is difficult to explain the split ticket is the result of the rational and strategic choice of voters. The reason is that strategic voter in Japan split their ticket into HoR and HoC to keep the balance of policy outcome and political balance.

The main finding of this paper is that Japanese voter split their ticket when(1) for ruling party supporters, the evaluation of ruling party performances is low,(2) for opposition party supporters, the evaluation of ruling party performances is high. The empirical analysis supported our expectations.