Benjamin Nyblade

Electoral Incentives in Mixed-Member Systems: Party, Posts, and Zombie Politicians in Japan

How do electoral incentives affect legislative organization? Through an analysis of Japans mixed-member electoral system, we demonstrate that legislative organization is strongly influenced not only by the individual legislators reelection incentives but also by their interest in their party gaining power and maintaining a strong party label. Electorally vulnerable legislators are given choice legislative positions to enhance their prospects at the polls, whereas (potential) party leaders disproportionately receive posts with greater influence on the partys overall reputation. Members of Parliament elected from proportional representation (PR) lists and in single member districts also receive different types of posts, reflecting their distinct electoral incentives. Even small variations in electoral rules can have important consequences for legislative organization. In contrast to Germanys compensatory mixed-member system, Japans parallel system (combined with a “best loser” or “zombie” provision) generates incentives for the party to allocate posts relating to the distribution of particularistic goods to those elected in PR.

‘Presidentialization’ in Japan? The Prime Minister, Media and Elections in Japan

Both academics and journalists have given increasing attention to the rising importance of prime ministers – a phenomenon often referred to ‘presidentialization’. Although many commentators use the term differently, and the term blurs the line between the very different institutional contexts of a parliamentary and presidential system, one careful definition of the term is ‘the movement over time away from collective to personalized government, movement away from a pattern of governmental and electoral politics dominated by the political party towards one where the party leader becomes a more autonomous political force.’ This phenomenon has been observed primarily in Britain and in West European parliamentary democracies – no one has ever described the Japanese parliamentary system as even remotely ‘presidentialized’. In fact, the Japanese prime minister has not been the subject of much academic research, and even the Japanese press often used to ignore the prime minister. Despite being the leader of a majority party in a centralized political system, the Japanese prime minister was almost universally described as weak and uninteresting, with both academic and popular discourse focusing on the powerful bureaucracy and factional politics within the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). However, recent political changes, most prominently the selection and popularity of Junichirō Koizumi as Japans prime minister in the spring of 2001, have led to a surge of interest in the prime minister.

Japan: The Prime Minister and the Japanese Diet

Traditionally, executive leadership has been considered weak and largely irrelevant in Japanese politics. The prime minister from 1955 to 1993 was selected from the dominant Liberal Democratic Party and was constrained by the strong internecine factional conflict in his party and, for much of the 1970s and early 1980s, a razor-thin parliamentary majority. Since 1993, coalition politics have become the norm. While most scholars suggest that coalition politics would constrain the executive even further, the decline of factionalism and increased efficacy of ‘going public’ has allowed a greater potential for executive leadership in Japan.

Government Formation in Parliamentary Democracies

In parliamentary democracies, governments are based on bargains among politicians and parties. These bargains, both implicit and explicit, have profound implications not only for who gets into government, but how they govern, how long they endure, and how voters respond. This chapter examines the development and testing of bargaining models of government formation, following its evolution from simple abstract models that rest on strong assumptions to examine more nuanced and complex models of government formation. It focuses in particular on recent theoretical and empirical developments that aim to better capturing the diverse nature of the actors involved in government formation and their various goals, as well as better specify the nature and variation in bargaining processes and bargaining context.

Social Media Data and the Dynamics of Thai Protests

Traditional techniques used to study political engagement—interviews, ethnographic research, surveys—rely on collection of data at a single or a few points in time and/or from a small sample of political actors. They lead to a tendency in the literature to focus on “snapshots” of political engagement (as in the analysis of a single survey) or draw from a very limited set of sources (as in most small group ethnographic work and interviewing). Studying political engagement through analysis of social media data allows scholars to better understand the political engagement of millions of people by examining individuals’ views on politics in their own voices. While social media analysis has important limitations, it provides the opportunity to see detailed “video” of political engagement over time that provides an important complement to traditional methods. We illustrate this point by drawing on social media data analysis of the protests and election in Thailand from October 2013 through February 2014.

Peacekeeping for profit? The scope and limits of ‘mercenary’ UN peacekeeping

Developing states furnish the vast majority of UN peacekeeping troops, a fact academics and policymakers often attribute (at least partly) to developing states’ supposed ability to derive a profit from UN peacekeeping reimbursements. In this article, we argue that this ‘peacekeeping for profit’ narrative has been vastly overstated. The conditions for significantly profiting from UN peacekeeping are in fact highly restrictive, even for developing states. We begin by highlighting two potent reasons for re-examining the peacekeeping for profit narrative: developing states emerged as the UN’s principal troop contributors in a period of stagnant reimbursement rates when UN peacekeeping was becoming less financially attractive; and the quantitative evidence scholars have presented as supporting the peacekeeping for profit narrative is flawed. We then identify the scope conditions within which peacekeeping for profit provides a plausible explanation for a developing state’s UN troop contributions. First, the deployment and its attendant reimbursements must be significant not only in absolute and per-soldier terms but also in relation to the state’s total armed forces and military expenditure. Second, the state must have an exceptional ability, compared with other troop contributors, to benefit from UN reimbursements. The scope for generalized profit-making from either equipment or personnel contributions is limited by intense political pressure against reimbursement rate increases. Individual states can nevertheless make a profit if they (1) invest in inexpensive and old but functional equipment, especially if deployed with usage restrictions, and/or (2) limit the deployment allowances (rather than salaries) they pay their peacekeepers. We establish that only a limited subset of developing states meets the plausibility conditions for the peacekeeping for profit narrative – and many top UN troop contributors do not.

Japanese Party Politics at a Crossroads

In 2009, the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) of Japan, which had successfully formed governments either alone or as the largest partner in a coalition government for all but a single year since 1955, suffered a devastating electoral defeat when the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) won nearly two-thirds of the seats available in the House of Representatives. The landslide DPJ victory was seen by many commentators and academics as the culmination of a decade-long trend toward two-party politics, driven in large part by party and voter adaptation to the electoral reforms of the 1990s, which introduced single-member districts as the means for electing a majority of members of parliament. The three books reviewed in this essay were written primarily in the two years following the 2009 DPJ victory, and each attempts, in quite distinct ways, to update our accounts of electoral and party politics and policymaking in Japan to account for the changes in Japanese politics in the first decade of the twenty-first century.