Comparative Political Studies on Party Factions

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

While party faction has been regarded as an important factor to refer to Japanese politics, its nature,structure or political function has not been fully and systematically studied. Parts of the reason to this situation can be actually be found in the fact that not only party factions but factions themselves have been considered to be by-products of premodern social structure and the fact that faction politics has been seen as pathological phenomenon of the party system from the perspective that competitive two-party system is natural and proper in most Western conceptions of democracy. As knowledge on party politics in non-Western countries has been increasing and some alternative models to angro-american democracy have been developed, obstructing factors for studying all party factions become attenuated.Under such a better disciplinary condition, out co-operative research seeked to draw an inventory of propositions on factionalism or party factions by inquiring into important case st … More udies of some countries, to apply critical theoretical fruits drwan from neighboring disciplines like sociology or cultural anthropology to political party factions and to build middle-range theories on the structure and function of factions. More concretely speaking, this research aimed to study party faction comparatively not as an dependent variable but as an important independent variable in the political processes.As we regarded historical factors and socio structural factors as important in the formation of political factions to ask fheir structures and functions, we tried to collect empirical data as much as possible, to compare them each other and to make important concepts of factions oprational on the basis of data. On the other hand, we seeked to inquire into the pattern of party faction's structure and function by focusing on its relation to predominant party system and clientelism. Finally we picked up japanese party system and political process as analytical sites to which we should apply our findings from foregoing studies. Less