Michael F. Thies

A Comparative Theory of Electoral Incentives Representing the Unorganized Under PR, Plurality and Mixed-Member Electoral Systems

We expand Denzau and Munger’s 1986 model of ‘How Unorganized Interests Get Represented’ to address cross-national differences in electoral systems. We look at how individual legislators allocate their efforts to serving unorganized constituents versus organized groups. Our model shows how the optimal allocation of effort is affected by differences in nominating processes and electoral rules. Our findings include the following: (1) Closed-list proportional representation (PR) makes legislators generally more responsive to interest groups and less responsive to unorganized voters than single-member districts (SMD). (2) This difference becomes smaller as the personal component of the SMD vote diminishes. (3) Legislators elected via lists in a mixed system may be even less responsive to the unorganized than legislators in a pure list system.

The Cost of Intraparty Competition The Single, Nontransferable Vote and Money Politics in Japan

Many scholars have argued that money politics in Japan has been driven in part by the imperatives of intraparty competition under the single, nontransferable vote (SNTV) system used for lower house elections until 1994. However, to date, no one has undertaken a systematic, quantitative study of campaign expenditure in Japan. In this article, the authors exploit the intraelection reports—which are believed to be accurate accounts of spending during the brief official campaign—to investigate how Japanese candidates adapted their last-minute expenditures to SNTV. The authors show that candidates spent more when they faced more intraparty competition. The results for Liberal Democratic Party candidates suggest that intraparty competition boosted campaign-period spending by approximately 4% to 18%. The authors also find evidence that the spending appears to be reactive, with candidates increasing their expenditures to counter higher spending by other candidates and especially spending by copartisans.

The Importance of Concurrence: The Impact of Bicameralism on Government Formation and Duration

Recent research on parliamentary government demonstrates that institutions play a critical role in determining which governments form and how long governments endure. For example, investiture requirements, the head of states powers, and legislative decision rules all affect cabinet formation. Surprisingly, virtually no work has explored the impact of bicameralism on coalitional politics, despite a burgeoning interest in the study of bicameral legislatures. This may be the case because the cabinets survival almost never depends on formal upper chamber approval. However, Hammond and Miller (1987), Tsebelis and Money (1997), Heller (1997, 2001), and others have demonstrated that bicameralism fundamentally shapes policy outcomes. One implication of this finding is that coalition builders in bicameral systems will be induced to obtain concurrent majorities in both chambers, to ensure that government policies pass into law. Another is that governments with upper chamber majority support should survive longer than those without, other things equal. In this paper, we examine data from 202 governments in ten European countries. We find little evidence of bicameral effects on government formation, but strong support for the duration hypothesis - governments with upper chamber majorities last substantially longer than those without. Further, we show that this result holds even in the face of variation in the constitutional powers, and ideological and partisan compositions of upper chambers. The implication is that work on parliamentary government can no longer ignore the larger institutional context of bicameralism.

How Much Does Money Matter

Japanese elections are notorious for the money that flows between contributors, politicians, and voters. To date, however, nobody has estimated statistically the impact of this money on electoral outcomes. Students of American politics have discovered that this question is difficult to answer because, although performance may depend on spending, spending may also depend on expected performance. In this article, the authors specify a two-stage least squares model that explains the vote shares of Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) candidates as a function of their own spending, spending by other candidates, and a battery of control variables. The multiple-candidate nature of Japanese elections means that district-level demographic variables are largely unrelated to any particular LDP candidates vote share, so that these variables can be used to create instruments for campaign spending. The authors find that the marginal dollar of campaign spending buys the spender a great deal more in Japan than is true in the United States.

The End of LDP Dominance and the Rise of Party-Oriented Politics in Japan

The loss of power by the Liberal Democratic Party after more than half a century of dominance was the most obvious outcome of Japan’s 2009 election, but together the 2005 and 2009 elections demonstrate significant shifts in both the foundations of party support and the importance of national swings in support for one party or another. Since 2005, urban-rural differences in the foundations of the leading parties have changed dramatically, and Japan has moved from a system dominated by locally based, individual candidacies toward a two-party system in which both party popularity and personal characteristics influence electoral success or failure.

Mobilization, Social Networks, and Turnout: Evidence from Japan

The strategic elites model of turnout argues that elites mobilize more when the probability of their effort deciding the electoral outcome is greater. Although the literature assumes that this probability depends solely on how close the election is, logically it depends jointly on how many votes are needed to affect the outcome (closeness) and on how many additional votes elite efforts are likely to garner (vote yield). Because the vote yield of mobilizational effort varies with the social capital of the district that elites face, the level of elite mobilizational effort (hence turnout) should depend interactively on closeness and social capital. The authors test their predictions using data from Japanese lower house elections for the years 1967-90. Japan is an interesting test case both because its (former) electoral system differs from that for which the model was first developed and because the literature clearly stresses the role of elite mobilization through social networks but does not examine the particular hypotheses advanced here.

Influence Without Confidence: Upper Chambers and Government Formation

In most parliamentary democracies, governments must maintain the confidence of a single legislative chamber only. But in bicameral parliaments, upper chambers can affect the fortunes of government policy proposals. Recent work shows that parliamentary governments that lack control over the upper house also tend to collapse sooner than those with upper-house majorities. In this article, we show that coalition builders anticipate the importance of upper-chamber status (majority or minority) in making their formation decisions. After controlling for a host of “usual suspect” variables concerning the institutional, ideological, and partisan context of coalition building, and examining 15,590 potential governments in 129 bargaining situations, we found that potential coalitions that control upper-house majorities are significantly more likely to form than are those with upper-house minorities. Our findings are important for students of bicameralism, government formation, institutions, and, perhaps most significantly, for those who study policymaking in parliamentary democracies.

The 2017 Election Results: An Earthquake, a Typhoon, and Another Landslide

The 2017 general election played out in very similar ways to 2014. Turnout remained low, and the coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Kōmeitō retained its two-thirds majority. The big story of the election was a schism within the opposition and the formation of two new parties, the Party of Hope and the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDP), divided primarily on the issue of constitutional revision. We examine how these new parties fared in terms of votes and seats, and across districts of varying population density. Our analysis suggests that even perfect opposition coordination would not have defeated the governing coalition, which dominated across all regions. The best showing on the opposition side was by the CDP, but whether it can pose a credible threat to the LDP going forward is still uncertain.

The 2012 Election Results: The LDP Wins Big by Default

On 16 December 2012, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which had been swept from power in August 2009 after more than half a century of dominance, roared back with a landslide of its own. Entering the election with only 118 of 480 seats in the House of Representatives (HR), the lower house of the National Diet, the LDP emerged with a stomping majority of 294. Moreover, the LDP and its long-time coalition partner, Komeito, jointly surpassed the two-thirds threshold needed to override vetoes from the upper house, the House of Councillors (HC), where the coalition lacks a majority—at least until the 2013 HC election. The incumbent Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which had taken power with an even more impressive 308 seats in 2009, retained only 57 seats this time, just barely managing second place after three difficult years in government.

Rationality and the Foundations of Positive Political Theory

Unlike other poets who wrote headnotes for each major division of their epics, Herman Melville offers little in the way of interpretive aids for readers of his 1876 epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. This guide provides readers an interpretive summary of each of Clarel’s 150 cantos, highlighting the major themes of Melville’s poem.