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The paper examines the reinforcing effect of mixed electoral systems on the linkage between electoral districts. The paper analyzes the linkage from the view of ideological constellation using survey data from Germany, New Zealand, and Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Second World War killed approximately fifty million people, while it led policies and institutions to improve people’s health. This paper will ask why and how these events occur ironically at the same time and rethink the development of health insurance policy. This paper will also examine how war mobilization formed and consolidated the Japanese and American health insurance systems. It is through an examination of the Japanese war experience, the fifteen-year war, that we understand how and why Japan reached a nearly comprehensive national health insurance system with a unique structure. On the other hand, the American war experience, what people call "Big One," largely shaped the subsequent policy path that relied largely on the private health insurance. This paper takes the United Kingdom and Germany as shadow cases to illuminate the Japan-US comparison. Richard Titmuss pointed out a half century ago that total war would lead to the development of social welfare policy. More recently, Jytte Klausen argues that war creates a new notion of what the state can and should do in economic and social policy (see also Kasza, Kryder, Skocpol, and Sparrow). However, historical and comparative political scientists have made only limited efforts to theorize the effect of war experiences on welfare state development. War, like any other single variable, cannot explain such development alone. Nonetheless, war prompts the state to intervene in promoting policies and institutions to improve people’s health. Most simply, state leaders who seek victory at the international level must attempt to improve people’s health to produce good soldiers and good munitions and to control or stabilize social demands. Titmuss saw how the events in the United Kingdom and its war experiences led to the expansion of social policies, including the Beveridge Report released in 1942 and the establishment of the National Health Insurance in 1946. However, his work did not prompt further comparative study as scholars turned their attention to other variables in the discussion of welfare state development, such as industrialization, labor power, culture, and policy and institutional path dependence. When scholars do study the impact of war, they tend to treat it as a simple and identical exogenous shock and do not address how variations in war experiences affect policies and institutions. In contrast, this paper puts forward an argument about how a war’s duration, depth of mobilization, casualties, battle sequence, and war-fighting regime influence health policy development. Thus, this paper seeks to contribute to an understanding of those factors that influence the formation and the consolidation of health insurance systems in various countries by incorporating the Japanese and American cases into comparative study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the impact of public opinion on presidential decision-making in foreign policy. Although a good deal of research looks at this general question, beyond the broad distinction between crisis and non-crisis decisions, the literature is largely inconclusive. We begin from this central distinction, utilizing the International Crisis Behavior Project’s criteria as the starting point for case selection. To observe in detail how differing patterns of public attentiveness influence foreign policymaking, we compare four cases: the 1991 Gulf War; the 1999 U.S. intervention in Kosovo; the U.S. response to Ethiopian famine in the mid-1980s; and U.S.-Japanese economic relations between 1988-1992. To move beyond the broad question of “public opinion and foreign policy,” we propose a more precisely specified analytical model, conceptualizing foreign policy decision making as a five-stage process: problem representation, option generation, policy selection, implementation, and policy review. At each decision stage, the question is asked: How influential was public opinion on a president’s decision? The model generates several testable hypotheses. For instance, foreign policy crises tend to produce a public that is highly attentive throughout all stages of the decision process. While strategic imperatives often overwhelm domestic political considerations in the early stages of a crisis, the relative importance of public opinion as a decision premise tends to increase during later stages, with presidents apt to sacrifice strategic effectiveness to pacify a highly attentive domestic audience during the implementation phase. Conversely, salient non-crisis foreign policies produce a selectively attentive public, whose greatest influence is likely to be on the president’s selection of policy rather than the manner in which that policy is implemented. Freed from the constraints of an attentive public, presidents are afforded considerable autonomy in implementing non-crisis policy in a manner consistent with their vision of the national interest, even if the general public does not share that same vision. This paper outlines the model and provides a brief overview of each of the cases, then assembles data on aggregate public opinion from a wide range of surveys and polls, and analyzes the resulting time series to compare the pattern of public involvement to the model’s predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question "what are the similarities and differences between U.S. trade frictions with China, Japan, and South Korea that account for different U.S. retaliation patterns?" This paper develops six independent variables and their relative measurements from U.S.-Japan and U.S.-South Korea cases and the literature, and examines their impact on U.S. retaliation to China. Our results indicate that four out of six independent variables have decreased the probability of U.S. retaliation since 2001. Furthermore, the U.S. has lost the necessary political, economic, and military leverage to retaliate to China, although it has had two of the three "motivations" to do so. This paper suggests that U.S. leverage over China has deteriorated for two major reasons: (1) U.S.' "illusion" of the latter party's ability/willingness for cooperation and of its own capabilities to retaliate; and (2) China's accumulation of relative gains at an unprecedented rate after 2001. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Japan?s decisions to go to war against China in the 1930s and the US in 1941 cannot be primarily explained by the Great Depression, the worldwide increase in protection, or the collapse of international trade in the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a comparison of Japanese koenkai and American political machines in order to build an analytical framework with which to better understand reciprocal relationships between those in power and their constituents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Besides risking escalation of armed conflict, territorial disputes can influence normalized bilateral relations among states both negatively and positively. This paper examines whether issue linkage exists between territorial disputes and other bilateral issues. The main argument is that the level of interdependence between states effects whether they will escalate a territorial dispute and the likelihood of de-escalation in a timely manner. I examine a territorial dispute between China and Japan and their interaction between 1978 and 2001. Findings show that high levels of trade and cooperation on other bilateral issues (non-territorial) are positively correlated with the likelihood of non-military action by both China and Japan, negatively correlated with the likelihood of the initiation of a MID by China, and positively correlated with the likelihood of de-escalation in a timely manner by both China and Japan. These findings indicate that interdependence does not prevent escalatory behavior short of military action and that it influences the decision by leaders to de-escalate rather than escalate the dispute further to armed conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades, the number of women serving as parliamentarians has increased markedly in the established democracies. Despite these gains, however, there is still great variation in women’s representation across this set of countries – currently ranging from a high of 45.3 percent in Sweden to a low of 7.3 percent in Japan (IPU Website 2003). Scholars have investigated the causes of this cross-national gap in women’s representation, and a persuasive amount of evidence has accumulated that suggests that political institutions play a vital role in determining the level of women’s representation in post-industrial democracies (e.g., Bohrer et al. 2002, Siaroff 2000, Lijphart 1999 and 1994 ). In 1994 and 1999, for example, Lijphart reported that consensus democracies – those based on power-sharing institutions such as PR electoral laws, bicameralism and coalition governments – produce higher levels of women’s representation than more power-concentrating majoritarian systems. Lijphart’s classification scheme of consensus versus majoritarian democracy, however, is limited by the fact that it is a dichotomy based on long-term averages. The dichotomous structure of the scheme is arbitrary, artificial, and inappropriate for a continuous concept, and because the scheme is based on long-term averages, it lacks the dynamic capability to keep pace with the shifts in women’s representation levels occurring over the last 20 years. Further, some of the components of the dichotomy have been shown to have substantial effects upon women’s representation independently, PR electoral laws most strongly. In this paper we therefore develop a more sensitive categorization tool – the index of inclusion – and apply it to an examination of the effect of the level of institutional inclusion on women’s representation. Using data from 21 post-industrial systems for the years 1979-2001, we are able to determine if a continuous measure produces the same positive impact for inclusive institutional structures on women’s representation. We are also able to determine if the combination of institutional features as a whole contributes to differences in women’s representation or if other factors alone, such as electoral laws, are driving these different outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan?s new electoral system for the Lower House eliminated the necessity of intraparty competition at the election stage, which many political reformers and scholars hope will make money less necessary to ?buy? votes. In addition, new campaign finance regulations were adopted to make the flow of money more transparent. However, elections may not have become any less expensive because candidates appear to be spending considerable sums to boost their vote shares in the single-member districts. For this reason, money and votes should be positively correlated in Japan?s new system. In this paper, I examine the empirical relationship between campaign spending and vote shares for politicians in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). I uncover a strong and positive correlation between candidates? expenditures and vote shares, which underscores the continued importance of money for election campaigns in Japan?s Lower House. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges traditional studies on Japan’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) policy making, which assumed Diet or Prime Minister as a key ODA decision-maker and argued Japan’s motive in increasing the amount of the foreign aid spending was subject to politicians’ interests (i.e., the studies generally argued that the politicians’ interests in ODA decision making changed from pursuing Japan’s commercial interests in 1960s-1980s to accommodating foreign pressure or humanitarian needs of developing countries in 1990s). In other words, applying Charmers Johnson’s perspective that “ (in Japan) it is the bureaucrats who actually initiate and draft virtually all important legislation (Japan: Who Governs?: 123), the author argues that primary ODA decision-making power in Japan has resided not in the politicians but in the bureaucracy. The author’s study identifies the four primary actors (ministries) of Japan’s ODA policy making (until 1990s), which had different ODA motives (i.e., Ministry of Foreign Affairs: security concern and Japan’s image in other donors; Ministry of International Trade and Industries: commercial interest; Ministry of Finance: stringent as budget distributor; and Economic Planning Agency: various interests co-existing), and sees those actors as interests maximizers in the decision making (i.e., it understands the decision making situation as an interministrial “turf battle,” in which ministries pursue their interests). According to the author’s data analysis (quantitative – percentage of ODA budget by ministries, transition of grants and loans etc- and qualitative data- various interviews with bureaucrats in the agencies done during the summer of 2003 in Tokyo, Japan) the historical trend of Japan’s ODA expenditure pattern reflects the ups and downs of ministries’ power in the decision making (e.g., MITI’s diminishing power vs. MOFA’s increasing influence), which was caused by the interministrial battle over the foreign aid policy. In addition, the author tries to find out the differences of Japan’s interministrial ODA decision making pattern before and after the Hashimoto Cabinet’s administrative reform in January 2001, which decreased formerly four primary decision makers (ministries) into three disorganizing Economic Planning Agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tests three democratic peace theory hypotheses for East Asian political cooperation and a fourth commercial exchange hypothesis. H1 suggests that like regimes will have excellent bilateral relations, H2 suggests that unlike regimes will have poor bilateral relations, and H3 draws on Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder to say that democracies will have poor bilateral relations with nondemocracies. Finally, H4 suggests that there is a positive correlation between two regimes' economic ties and their bilateral relations. A robust test of the respective hypotheses (using a pool of nineteen bi-national East Asian dyads that includes China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) provides the most durable support for H4. Economic linkages are defined via a mathematical formula that incorporates the volume of cross-national trade and the base 10 logarithm of each regime’s GDP. Political contestation is defined via a score that incorporates Polity IV data and a measure of Internet openness from the OpenNet Initiative. This test finds H4 is the most convincing explanation for the variation in bilateral relations among the dyads; in addition, the relationship is considerably more robust when the China-Taiwan dyad is excluded. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of local politicians in affecting national-level election outcomes, by focusing on recent municipal mergers in Japan. Specifically, we argue that the political party relying most extensively on local politicians' efforts for electoral mobilization and monitoring will suffer an electoral slump as municipalities are merged and the number of municipal politicians is swiftly reduced. Empirically, we show that municipalities with a history of recent mergers exhibit significantly lower voter turnout and obtain a smaller vote share for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in national elections when compared to other municipalities without recent experience of mergers. This result indicates that municipal politicians are indeed indispensable human resources for LDP candidates running for the national parliament. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to show that there is stronger correlation between the level of economic development, rather than propensity of government, and openness of foreign policy. It has been known that a general rule of nations’ reaction in terms of foreign relations is difficult to materialize due to contextual particularities of each society. However, it is crucial to examine the society as a body of diverse interests and modes of projecting such interests that leads to the formation of particular foreign policies. Specific interests will be noted along with coinciding interests shared by the losers of the economic reform and the level of openness within a given society. Level of economic reform and democracyâ€"independent variableâ€"and the openness of foreign policyâ€"dependent variableâ€"or willingness to cooperate and dependency towards transnational institutions will be examined. This, as a result, will show that the level of economic development and the concomitant national pride promotes cooperation among nations, thus enabling the formation of regional communities. Some aspects of NATO will be noted in to draw positive conclusions about the prospects of security community formation within North East Asia. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global community is currently facing a resurgence in the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Given the horrors experienced by the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the dropping of the bomb in 1945, it is difficult to understand why nuclear weapons have not been eradicated entirely. In this paper, the authors explore the history and rational behind nuclear armament. Highlighting South Africa as an example, they explain a success story of voluntary nuclear disarmament. In addition, the authors outline a global plan as well as a citizen’s action guide for attaining global nuclear weapons disarmament. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the global community, from UNESCO to NGOs, is committed to promoting the status of women in science, engineering and technology, despite the long-held prejudice or lack of role models. From the late 1990s, governments in Britain and Japan began collaborating with various bodies, including higher education institutes. The paper underscores the importance of the reputation of women's universities embedded in the institutional foundations, by explaining how female scientific communities take shape in different national contexts. Britain, as a primary example of the neoliberal welfare regime, promoted its policy under the auspices of the Department of Trade and Industry, while Japan, as a conservative welfare regime with strong emphasis on the male-breadwinner model, carefully treated this matter from the perspective of 'equal participation of both men and women', rather than that of 'equality'. In this trend, women's universities, with their tradition of encouraging to become a 'good wife, wise mother' were regarded as legitimate and effective players to reverse the low ratio of women in scientific research (12.6 percent as of 2007, in contrast to 39.2 percent in Britain). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much research has been focused on the inability of the Socialist Party of Japan to become a viable opposition party to compete against the LDP from 1955-1993 (Scheiner 2003, Christensen 2000). However, many scholars have neglected the electoral cycles before the Liberal-Democratic Party merger (1949-1955). As Kohno (1997) points out, in the first election after World War 2 the Socialist Party had control of the government before they split into Right and Left factions in 1952. Thus, the questions posed in this paper are twofold; (1) Why did the Socialist Party split? and (2) Why did the Right Socialist Party win elections at its inception, but fail at the polls in subsequent elections? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many countries use U.S. insider trading doctrine as a model, in part as a result of historical and political factors and in part because the United States is seen as a market leader--an early adopter with a well developed, disaggregated, public securities market. Yet, despite these convergent beginnings and a general agreement on the nature of the regulated conduct (i.e., prohibiting securities trading by insiders possessing material nonpublic information), operative insider trading rules in the United States (as a rule originator) have evolved to protect different interests and regulate different specific market activities than insider trading rules in other countries. Using existing insider trading law and regulation in the United States, Germany, and Japan, this paper (a) identifies the common roots and divergent evolution of insider trading doctrine in these nations, (b) articulates ways in which differences in current insider trading doctrine may be meaningful, and (c) isolates possible reasons for the existence and persistence of the observed doctrinal divergence. Divergent political, economic, and societal histories, and differences in legal systems and traditions, are at issue in the analysis. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I investigate the trends in political inheritance in Japan from 1947-1993, the postwar time period during which Japan employed the single non-transferable vote (SNTV) electoral system. While SNTV did not allow for the transfer of votes, a great deal of transfers of political resources occurred between generations of politicians. I first address the determinants of political transfer between one politician and another, and when such transfers are likely to occur between family members. Second, I investigate whether the resource advantages that led hereditary candidates to run for their predecessors' seats actually resulted in greater electoral success. I find that the predominance of hereditary politicians in Japan under SNTV was largely the result of supply and demand incentives in the recruitment process, and that hereditary candidates were especially likely to be nominated when they were succeeding politicians who served many terms, were hereditary candidates themselves, or died in office. My research greatly improves upon previous work done on hereditary politicians in Japan by including data on all candidates, all related and non-related transfers, and expanded control variables. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does how people behave affect how much they can get from the government? If it does, what political factors matter? This paper tries to answer the questions with evidence from Japanese politics after the electoral reform. The new mixed-member electoral system produced strategic voting. That is, some voters cast ballots to two different parties at the same election in order to maximize their utility. It enables a politician to count the number of voters who really support his party and that of those who vote for him merely by strategic calculation. This situation gives us an opportunity to examine the long-lasting debate in the literature of distributive politics: the core versus swing debate. Does either type of voters get more than the other? If it does, which type does Japanese government favor? I analyze four general elections of the Lower House held under the new system and show that there exists the difference of fiscal allocations across these two type. Unlike most studies of Japanese electoral politics, I use a local municipality as the unit of analysis, because it is the unit to which the budgets are allocated. This study would reveal how political institutions affect the distribution of governmental expenditure. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change has generally been framed as a global problem warranting an international policy response. But the growing reality of climate policy development suggests enormous variation among nations and surprisingly large roles for sub-national units. Ironically, both Canada and the United States took similar bargaining positions into Kyoto but only the former ratified this treaty. However, Canadian emissions growth has far exceeded American trends and neither its federal nor provincial levels have been active in policy development. In contrast, individual states and regional clusters have taken an ever-expanding role in this area. This paper examines key factors that explain this divergent pattern, considers whether provinces are beginning to engage in policy learning with neighboring states, and explores early signs of formal collaboration that cross the 49th parallel. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can nations coerce adversaries by threatening their access to oil? When is oil coercion most likely to compel a target state to change its policies? I argue that oil coercion affords great potential leverage over states, not because of oil's economic importance as many assume, but because of the devastating effect cutoffs can have on the target's military power. I hypothesize three variables that determine how vulnerable a state is to oil coercion: the percent of total oil imported, the number of supply sources it has, and the number of oil transportation routes. However, I expect potentially vulnerable states, acting strategically, to recognize the danger of oil cutoff and take anticipatory measures to avert it, including preventive war. I expect to see few cases of successful oil coercion, because preventive conflict breaks out before coercive threats are made, particularly in those cases where states are most vulnerable to cutoff and thus coercion is most likely to be effective. Selection effects will therefore bias the historical record against cases of success. The paper examines empirical evidence from a number of cases, including an in-depth look at how oil factored into Japan's surrender in WWII. It concludes by examining the key implication of my theory: that the fear of oil cutoff can sometimes spur states into preventive wars. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests that it is not Japan's crude unwillingness but its traumatic memory of the War and post-war identity that makes it difficult to address its Asian neighbours' criticisms. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the case of the bilateral trade imbalance between the United States and Japan in order to explain why Japan complied with the demands of the U.S. that foreign and domestic economic policies be adjusted for U.S. accommodation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of radical leftist labor activism and Japan and Turkey. In particular, I examine how radical labor activism shaped eduring changes in public policy, political party platforms, and the policing of protest. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines different labour market deregulation policies in Italy and Japan based on the political factors such as the labour policymaking structure, the political power of labour unions, and the partisanship of the government. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pattern of government expenditure on education in Japan has changed over the years. This paper tries to discover the impacts of this change on the performance level of secondary school students in Japan’s 47 prefectures. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Korea reached a settlement on the Korea-U.S FTA which expected heavy loss, yet did not conclude Korea-Japan FTA talks which expected to be relatively less severe. This paper shows that ‘consensus’ plays a significant role in explaining this paradox. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine changes in institutional rules governing the relationship between actors in the legislature by comparing the experience of Japan and the US in the early 1990s. In both cases, reform-minded governments replaced very long-lived parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars pointed out the weakness of environmental movements in Japan without enough evidence. This study will show the plausible factors which draw the "weak" perception, and provide empirical data on Japanese environmental NPOs since 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can the trade relationship between Japan and China be measured? What are the strengths/weakness of existing models? Is there a more accurate model that can describe trade relations between nations? If so, what is it? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I endogenize path dependence by reformulating international institutions as standards of cooperation. Japan's effort to secure a leadership role in the Bretton Woods institutions provides a useful case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes a new explanation for the dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan. Mori's low ratings in 2000 were especially low and Koizumi's popularity in 2001 was impressively high. Yet the ways in which the LDP managed those two years are consistent with a more general strategy of calibration. The Mori cabinet was frequently reshuffled to raise public support for the prime minister and his party. When those efforts failed, Mori stepped down, after less than a year on the job. Koizumi, in contrast, managed to serve a year and half in office before juggling the cabinet. Though he sometimes irritated fellow LDP politicians by challenging party norms, they tolerated the changes in exchange for greater public support for the party.

Preferences over campaign disclosure requirements in Japan were altered by the adoption of a single-member district dominated electoral system, which has increased the electoral costs associated with the former, more opaque disclosure regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the behavior and outputs of Japanese local governments are affected both by the logic of presidentialism and by that of parliamentarism, Japanese local governments have significant policy changes under independent governors, with relatively stable support from partisan legislators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic voting plays a central role when one theories about the direct links between economic conditions and the political decisions of voters. In the research of developed democratic countries, such as in Western Europe and the United States, economic voting is used to predict the voting behavior of citizens. Unfortunately, scholars tend to pay less attention to newly emerging democratic countries, e.g. Latin America, Eastern Europe and East Asia. The research generally avoids using democratization as an explanation for the emergence of economic voting. Among these countries, the relatively consolidated and stable democratization in Eastern Asia provides an essential case for examining the emergence of economic voting. There is insufficient research about economic voting in this field, so some scholars conclude that there is no economic voting in East Asia. Therefore, I assume democratization will lead to economic voting, especially in Japan, Korea and Taiwan; because all these countries went through a similar democratization process—shift of power followed by economic transformation. Overall, this research will contribute to going generalization about democratic theory and economic voting and how they compare with other Third-Wave democracies. According to the above hypotheses, I will use a cross-national method in my research. Moreover, the observed cases will focus on the important national election outcomes in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan before and after the transfer of power in these countries. In addition, I will especially observe the short-term voting behavior changes, and demonstrate whether significant economic events reinforce economic voting. The dependent variable is the difference in percentage of votes for the incumbent party and for the challenging party. I want to observe if bad economic conditions will punish incumbents and reward challengers. The independent variables in the research include economic evaluation, social cleavage and partisanship. Multivariable regression will be used in the research to estimate the effect of independent variables on the percentage of the vote. In addition, we use some demographic data as control, such as education, gender and age and so on. I have chosen the data of voting percentage results from the statistical electoral data in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan as my dependent variables. As for the independent variables, I employed the database of the East Asia Barometer for this research. It includes updated data for my cases and contains both complete economic evaluations and partisanship questions in the questionnaire. I will use the results of the survey for analysis in this research. The ultimate goal is to acquire an understanding of the relationship between democratization and economic voting, and then determine whether East Asian democratization leads to economic voting. It will become the foundation to research the emergence of economic voting in all newly emerging democratic countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Japan has begun the arduous task of transforming its vast economic leverage in the international community into political leverage, the nature of Japanese foreign policy in Southeast and East Asia has undergone significant changes. We will examine three areas within which evidence suggests Japan is searching for the means by which it will achieve a leadership position in Asia and perhaps, eventually, in the international community. Japan has been a driving force behind the development of multilateral organizations which have sought, if not always successfully, to crystallize regionalization in Southeast and East Asia. In addition, Japan has sought to compliment multilateral diplomatic efforts through a series of bilateral arrangements with nations in Southeast and East Asia. The aim of these bilateral arrangements is to provide for its security through regional stability and cooperation. We shall see that these bilateral agreements have established a ?safety net? within which the nations of the region of Southeast and East Asia have come to deal with one and other. Throughout the ongoing development of these trends, the role Japan?s military capability has been constantly changing to keep pace with new policy interests in the region. Japan, while not always successfully, has increased its position with which to lead the developing regions of Southeast and East Asia. Furthermore, it has been doing this in a way that is marginally independent of the aims of the US. While Japan may not be the world leader or the rival superpower to US hegemony that some may purport, it is well on the path to becoming a regional leader in Southeast and East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IR theorists typically explain the development of intellectual property rights (IPR) regimes in developing countries as a result of coercive diplomacy on the part of economically developed states seeking to protect the interests of business constituents. We find this model theoretically flawed and suggest an alternative political economy model, derived from the New Institutional Economics literature, that takes account of the internal dynamics of developing states. As those states develop economically, indigenous entrepreneurs make greater demands for IPR protection. Only after developing states are capable of enforcing IPR are they responsive to diplomacy. We demonstrate that domestic factors are statistically significant in the development of IPR regimes in Japan, Korea and the Republic of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tests the theory of the contamination effect according to which, in a mixed-member electoral system, small parties obtain additional PR votes by nominating candidates in SMD. Some studies show the substantial size of the effect, and attribute the inflated number of parties in the SMD contests that contradicts Duverger's law to the contamination effect. In contrast, Maeda (2008) recently shows that the contamination effect was negligible in Japan with the Heckman's treatment-effects model. This article shows that those studies obtained inconsistent results primarily because they estimated different estimands. I employ the genetic matching approach (Sekhon forthcoming) for the Japanese electoral data, and indicate that a small party clearly gained more PR vote-share in the districts where the candidates were nominated, though a substantial impact of the effect is questionable. This article indicates the importance of elaborating the concept to choose appropriate estimands and statistical approaches. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The comfort women case in South Korea has been a polemic issue in the context of inherited responsibility. The Japanese government who emphasizes on state as an agent for taking the responsibility tends either to deny collective responsibility of historic wrongdoings or to limit the scope of its roles to superficial ways such as reparation. Meanwhile South Korea demands not only reparation but official apology, emotional compassion, and material compensation on the ground that nation, not state, should be accountable for historic injustice, but this claim still encounters a difficulty of application to cases originated in multinational countries. Based on these observations, we will develop two arguments: (1) that reciprocal nondomination conceptualized with civic responsibility will better the comfort women case in the context of inherited responsibility because this contains full ground of deliberation in which those who come from regardless of state or nation can participate; (2) that reciprocal nondomination embodied with civic responsibility can be operated as a regulative principle which prompts both victims and wrongdoers to have their deliberative stances and to reach an agreement conducive to transitional justice. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in the OECD has played a significant financial role in providing foreign aid for AIDS. In accounting for the convergence in AIDS funding, constructivists would claim that the norms of global response to AIDS motivate foreign aid for AIDS by reshaping and redefining donors' identity and preferences. More interestingly, the countries vary in the timing of initial funding decision and the size of funding as well as the pattern that the norms are transferred into domestic arena. The variations, I argue, are based upon distinctive domestic structure and domestic norms. I will examine the case of Japan which posed a lagged pattern of global AIDS funding in terms of its initiation and increase of funding. When it comes to public awareness and perception on HIV/AIDS, basically Japanese people were not aware of what AIDS was and how they should respond. In addition, foreign perception was so strongly intensified that even risk groups such as homosexuals did not change their sexual behavioral pattern. In terms of civil society and domestic structure, Japanese government has a rigid structure that has strong bureaucracy at the top of the society with weak civil society. The bureaucracy was not responsive to the new demands of society under the situation that civil society did not play active roles in encouraging government to respond to the need by adopting new agenda in its priority. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government is responsible for the peace and safety of citizens in its territory, and is thus interested in deaths by cause. Similar to other countries, Japanese government has collected death data from autopsy documents, which have been analyzed by epidemiologists. .x000d.However, most analyses have focused on heredity, lifestyle, and exposure to viruses and germs. They tend to downplay how governmental policy affects death rates. For example, in a prefecture where there are free or subsidized health checkups, there may be fewer deaths from diabetes or breast cancer. There may be other prefectures that have developed superior social security systems and thus have more deaths from old age, which is preferable to premature death..x000d.In addition to the results of epidemiology, I am interested in how political economic factors influence the rates of each cause of death. .x000d.To achieve this purpose, I combined the number of deaths, population, and potential factors that may affect death rates in Japan. Although in a seminal stage, I have found tuberculosis and viral hepatitis C are higher in Tokyo and Osaka. This could be a result of patient migration, climactic conditions, and unfavorable local policy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Why did Japan respond with diplomacy and money in the first Gulf War and diplomacy and troops in the second?" I argue that the demise of an ideological opposition party was structurally significant for making changed policies possible. This political realignment widened the parameters of viable policy options. Utilizing the concept of schema, I argue that how decision-makers thought about international events also mattered. In 1990, five categories of schemata existed amongst decision-makers that prioritized a variety of, sometimes mutually exclusive, policy options. Due to the lessons learned from the traumatic experience of the Gulf War, best captured in the phrase "too little, too late," schemata converged around the idea that monetary contributions are not enough and that Japanese policies need to address issues as a responsible member of the global community. Changes in both the political structure and decision-makers account for the differences in Japan's security-related foreign policies. My findings are based on over 100 interviews with Japanese decision-makers during the Kaifu and Koizumi Administrations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a new categorization of international organizations to account for the fact that within multilateral international organizations, states may engage in "bribery," in order to advance their policy preferences. Thus, to the traditional multilateral/bilateral categorizations we substitute a hard multilateral/soft multilateral and reciprocal bilateral/bilateral taxonomy. For illustration purposes, we use the well-known case study of Japan and the International Whaling Commission (IWC). Using a modified gravity model to analyze Japan's Official Development Assistance from 1973-2005, we find that Japan has a very traditional - and generous - assistance policy broadly defined, but when it comes to the IWC, some of the general principles driving the aid policy are put aside to possibly influence vote outcomes. Given this finding, we conclude that the IWC is best categorized as a soft multilateral organization. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how immigrant political rights have evolved in Japan, discussing the case of immigrant voting right in local elections. The recent increase of international immigrants has been accompanied by immigrant rights claims in Japan. International human rights and the local level of immigration politics have contributed to ameliorate human, civil, and cultural rights for immigrants in Japan. With the new debate on the immigrant right to vote in local elections, however, immigrant political identities and the national level of immigration politics (in the Diet), which have been overlooked thus far, have come on the central stage of immigration politics. The debate on immigrant voting rights issues began with a 1990 lawsuit filed by eleven Korean immigrants from Osaka, Japan. This lawsuit could be seen as an extension of a series of lawsuits that had previously been filed by members of the 'resident' Korean identity groups against various instances of discrimination. This legal struggle by the new Korean resident identity, which is different from North Korean diasporic identityâ??rejecting the voting rightâ??and South Korean transnational identityâ??appropriating the voting right as 'Korean' right, produced an opportunity structure in which various organizations, opposition parties, and local governments come together in their common struggle for immigrant voting rights. The 1995 ruling of the Japanese Supreme Court, an interpretation of law based on legal positivism, shifted its location of the decision from the Court to the Diet by stating that the voting right can be granted if it is passed through appropriate legislative processes. Finally, the Diet, dominated by the Liberal Democratic Party, turned down bills for the immigrant right to vote for local elections in 2000, showing that the final instance to decide the political rights for (old and new) immigrants is still in the hand of nationalist politicians in the LDP. In conclusion, this study suggests three potential developments of the post-war immigration politics in Japan, according to political positions on the issue of the voting rights and immigrant identities. The 'no voting right for foreigners' position will preserve the notion of the post-war Japanese nation attached to the ideas of citizenship and state, while maintaining political exclusion of all immigrants. The 'voting rights only for South Koreans (Taiwanese)' position would bring the pre-war empire back into the picture by selectively including immigrants, while excluding various new immigrant groups as well as North Koreans. Finally, this study argues that the 'voting rights for all foreigners' position, based on human/civil rights and Jumin consciousness, will facilitate the building of a broad incorporationist coalition among old and new immigrants, human right activists, immigrant advocacy groups, local governments, and political parties, This final option would provide the pivotal basis for the beginnings of post-national politics in Japan ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project aims to form a theoretical model of the U.S.-Japanese conflict in the early twentieth century, and link the model to empirical cases (15 cases). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My project examines the efforts of the Chinese government, particularly in education and propaganda, and its effects on nationalism and anti-Japanese sentiments in youth. Is nationalism a result of independent mobilization and thinking on the part of the ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I develop a model of status stratification in the international system and demonstrate the implications of the model in the case studies of Turkey and Japan, and their common inability to deal with past crimes. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fortunes of political parties wax and wane with the number of candidates they can attract to their label and get elected in national contests. On one hand, successful parties are those that can attract a growing number of candidates, or at a minimum, maintain a stable number of competitive candidates to ensure an ongoing level of representation for their supporters. On the other hand there are parties that are unsuccessful in that erstwhile members decide to abandon the party label and seek office with the assistance of another party organization, leading to a decline of that party’s ability to represent its supporters in the electorate. There are times when the exit of members occurs gradually over rather long periods of time, but there are also case where the exit of members ensues rapidly. The SDPJ of Japan and the DC of Italy are interesting cases of the latter and their experience raises interesting questions about what explains the decisions of members to abandon the ‘voice’ option and ‘exit’ their respective organizations. This paper will look at the decision to exit a political party, in an attempt to determine whether the opportunity cost of remaining with a party plays a significant roll in determining when a member will exit the organization, and defect to an alternative party. It is believed that as the fortune of a party decline, and the affluence of a rival party (which holds a similar ideological platform as the previous party) increases, that members of the waning party will leave the organization and join the waxing party. This paper will build upon the work of Kato, which examined the effect of the organizational structures of the parties in question, and how these relate to members choosing the ‘exit’ option. Specifically, this paper maintains that a better picture of exit can be depicted if one looks not only at the party in which those faced with the choice of using their ‘exit’ option belong, but also at the fortunes of the alternative parties in the system. Using the cases of the SDPJ in Japan and the DC in Italy, this paper will show that the choice to ‘exit’ a party is due to the existence of an alternative party which offers office seekers a viable alternative to pursue office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies comparative consumer bankruptcy in the context of the relations between consumer bankruptcy and social policy in South Korea and Japan. South Korea and Japan have faced a rapid increase of consumer debt after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The weak welfare system failed to mitigate the low-class’s income reduction due to economic crisis. As a result, a lot of people went into bankruptcy in East Asia. Through an empirical analysis on insolvency system, this paper examines the pattern of East Asian model which can be distinguished from continental European and North American approaches to bankruptcy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effect of the 1994 electoral reform on the distribution of inter-governmental transfers from the central government to municipal governments in Japan. The 1994 reform changed Japan’s electoral system from a semi-proportional to a majoritarian one. This change is hypothesized to make the distribution of the transfer less egalitarian because political parties under the majoritarian system would have incentive to allocate benefits in favor of swing constituencies, instead of providing them equally across districts and voters. The paper consists of three analyses. First, it focuses on the variance in the inter-governmental transfer across and within electoral districts over time and examines whether it has significantly changed after the electoral reform. Second, it provides qualitative analyses to scrutinize how the ruling party’s and legislators’ incentives for the strategic use of the inter-governmental transfer changed after the reform. Third, it constructs a panel dataset and examines whether and to what extent the transfer is allocated in favor of swing districts in the post-1994 period. The paper hopes to enhance our understandings of the distributive consequences of institutional changes. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]