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AbstractPolitical parties' behavior in coalition formation is commonly explained by their policy-, vote-, and office-seeking incentives. From these perspectives, the 20-year partnership of Japan's ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its pacifistic Komeito junior coalition partner is an anomalous case. The longevity, closeness, and nature of their unlikely partnership challenges core assumptions in existing theories of coalition politics. LDP–Komeito cooperation has sustained for two decades despite vastly different support bases and ideological differences on fundamental policy issues. LDP leaders also show no signs of abandoning the much smaller Komeito despite enjoying a single-party majority. We argue that the remarkable durability of this puzzling partnership results primarily from the two parties' electoral incentives and what has effectively become codependence under Japan's mixed electoral system. Our analysis also demonstrates that being in a coalition can induce significant policy compromises, even from a much larger senior partner. Beyond theoretical implications, these phenomena yield important real-world consequences for Japanese politics: especially, a far less dominant LDP than the party's Diet seat total suggests, and Komeito's remarkable ability to punch significantly above its weight and constrain its far larger senior partner, even on the latter's major national security policy priorities.

Empirical studies on mixed electoral systems have shown that parties obtain additional PR votes by nominating many SMD candidates (contamination effect). I argue that the existing studies suffer from a methodological problem that stems from the nature of candidate nomination. That is, parties tend to nominate SMD candidates in areas where they are strong, which makes the impact of running candidates look larger than it actually is. This study employs the treatment-effects model that corrects the endogeneity bias and analyzes the results of recent general elections in Japan. Contrary to the accepted view, no statistical evidence is found that supports the existence of the contamination effect, implying that Japan's party system may converge to a two-party competition. [Copyright 2008 Elsevier Ltd.]

Elections are a socio-political institution, during which holding it is determined what the nature of the reforms will be in the next few years. It is important that the legitimacy of the electoral process is high and that key reforms are determined by competent government officials. The basic element of elections is a high level of competition, which should exist not only between various political entities that exercise eligibility to vote and right to be elected but also within such structures fighting for power.

The paper contains an analysis concerning the issue on the functioning of the proportional vote distribution institute. According to the election results, it is necessary to determine how many seats will go to a certain party, which, according to the proportional system, has overcome the percentage barrier. In world practice, there is a whole range of proportional distribution methods that form two large groups: the largest remainder methods and the dividers methods. There are discussions on this parameter, and each country has adopted its own methodology. In Russia, with a proportional distribution of seats, one of the largest remainder methods is used, namely, the Hare method. The study will reflect the analysis of the functioning of proportional distribution systems in Russia and in the world.

This article tests Duverger's law through an analysis of the Hungarian parliamentary elections of 2014 which were held under the new compensatory mixed electoral system. The results show that while a strategic voting had a tendency to grow under Hungarian supermixed system in the period 1990-2010, in the elections of 2014 strategic voting was not a universal phenomenon under the plurality rule, as indicated by many violations of Duverger's law in Hungarian singlemember districts. Our research confirmed that the effect of electoral institutions (institutional structure) is contingent and at the district level inhibited by country-specific conditions. However, as a new Hungarian compensatory mixed electoral system distributes seats not only by plurality rule in SMDs (nominal tier), but also via proportional representation (list tier), a further research should pay attention to crosscontamination of both tiers of electoral system, as a potential factor which moves Hungarian electoral competition substantially away from Duvergerian predictions.