Suchergebnisse

An exploration of Japan's party system focuses on the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which dominated politics between 1946 & 1993. The postwar evolution of the party system is traced through five periods: 1946-1955 (conservative dominance, frequent changes in party names/composition, formation of the LDP); 1955-1993 (conservative hegemony under the LDP); 1993-1994 (LDP defectors form new parties or join the existing Japan New Party); 1994-1996 (merger of the Japan New Party & other parties to form the New Frontier Party); 1996-present (formation of three new parties). Political movements that have influenced postwar elections are the conservatives (the LDP after 1955), the socialists (Social Democrats after 1994), & the communists. Examination of the nature & structure of the LDP focuses on how its long role as the largest party affected its organizational characteristics, as well as its flexibility & effective mixture of formal organs & informal groups. Problems related to pluralism & internal cleavages/conflicts are discussed, maintaining that the LDP survived multiple crises & retained its institutional integrity because of its coalitional nature. 1 Table. J. Lindroth

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974

In this follow up to Daddy Smarts: A Guide for Rookie Dads, best-selling author and veteran father of three, Bradley Richardson tells you everything you need to know regarding your baby, your wife, and your life as a dad through the terrible twos-all from an entertaining and informative male perspective

In this new analysis of democracy in Japan, Bradley Richardson refutes the widely accepted hypothesis that postwar Japan has been a semiauthoritarian and consensual state, heavily influenced by corporations and led by the government bureaucracy. On the contrary, Richardson's extensive newspaper and documentary research shows that Japanese political life has been extremely fragmented and discordant at all levels - in the bureaucracy, legislatures, parties, and interest groups and in business and industry.

The likelihood that party loyalties reflect the characteristics of parties and political competition within specific political environments was generally ignored in critiques of party identification abroad. In this article, I identify substantial frequencies of stable partisan ties among British, Dutch, and German voters in the 1960s through the 1980s. Stable party loyalists in turn usually vote for their preferred party in subsequent elections. Long-term partisan ties are most common among supporters of traditional cleavage parties. These long-term party loyalties reflect the effects of both long-standing hostilities toward opposing parties and well-developed party principles. Since partisan responses are internally consistent and subsume ideational as well as affective components, these feelings resemble social psychology's affect-laden schemata.

Most studies of Japanese elections have seen constituency candidates and their campaigns as the major factor in electoral mobilization. In order to explore the effects of candidate campaigns and voters' images of candidates, as well as party identifications, party images, partisan issue opinions, and past voting, I develop models portraying these effects upon the vote, both separately and together, and test the models using survey data. The results show that partisan attitudes are the dominant force in Japanese parliamentary voting. The most plausible explanation for the importance of partisan factors lies in the electorate's being exposed regularly to information about parties but only intermittently to information about candidates. The plausibility of an information-based explanation of the importance of robust partisan attitudes in Japan suggests in turn that comparative differences in voting may reflect systemic variations in information processes.

Party identification has been shown to be comparatively weak and volatile in Japan. A search for alternative elements of continuity in partisan behavior indicates that many Japanese vote regularly for the same party, and for roughly one-fifth of the electorate this is done in the absence of a stable party identification. Following earlier work by Ivor Crewe, these nonidentifiers who still vote regularly for the same party are termed habitual voters. Habitual voters are less involved in issues, have fewer party images and have fewer ties to external groups that support their party than stable party identifiers. What makes the habitual voters stand out most is their absence of emotional commitments to the party they vote for regularly in elections and lack of negative feelings toward the parties they do not support. Habitual voting thus reflects one of the dominant traits of Japan's political culture, which is a strong tendency toward affective neutrality. Habitual voters are a new type of nonaffective partisan not anticipated in traditional political behavior theories, and as such their presence in Japan should be of interest to students of comparative political behavior.

Research has shown that place of residence (urban-rural) has an ambiguous influence on political participation. Japan is one of several major nations in which rural people participate politically more than their urban counterparts. An analysis of urban-rural political attitudes in Japan shows some of the roots of the tendencies in participation. While urban residents are more psychologically involved in national politics, they also tend toward greater pessimism and have lower feelings of the vote being a duty than do their rural counterparts. In contrast, rural voters are highly dutiful in orientation, as well as being strongly involved in local politics and more concerned than urban residents about having their political needs represented. A Coleman effect parameter analysis of the urban-rural attitudes and political participation shows that the attitudes do in fact account for differences in political participation in local politics. But the attitudinal tendencies are less important for national political participation, and it is possible that the older social influence interpretation of Japanese urban-rural differences is most applicable to sectoral trends in this case.