Neo-Institutionalist Research on the Partisan Competition and the Diet Management Practice in the System of 1955

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1. During the period under grant, I reviewed the domestic and foreign literature on Japan's electoral systems and gave a paper at the Comparative Legislative Research Conference, the University of Iowa April 16-18, 1998. One approach is concerned with the difference in the district magnitude employed by various Japanese systems as well as other accompanying features. Researchers of medium-sized district system (MDS) tend to treat the party as the dependent variable and focuses on how MDS has affected candidates and parties. Another approach treats Japan's MDS as a single non-transferable vote system (SNTV), and contrasts SNTV with other popular electoral systems such as majoritarian and PR systems. Building upon the rational choice approach, researchers regard SNTV as a rule of the game, which imposes constraints on self-interested political actors. Incentives and strategies of actors are analyzed and outcomes are explained as an equilibrium. Researchers tend to evaluate parties' abili … More ty highly and claim that parties are successful in coping with the problems.2. I also wrote a paper in English on the interfactional balancing and seniority rule for the appointment for important positions in the government and the Liberal Democratic Party, and presented it at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting September 3-6, 1998.3. In order to analyze how the legislative process evolved during the system of 1955, I focused on the change in the number of the introduction and passage of private member bills. I collected various information on all private member bills during the and the 31st Diet sessions in a machine readable form. The finding of the data analysis is that the decline in the late 1950s in the number of private member bills introduced by the governing LDP members was closely related to the evolution of the bill introduction process in which government bills requiring budgetary action had been presented to the relevant section of the LDP's Policy Affairs Research Council before introduction. I talked about this work at a few private research meetings. I am preparing to write a paper on it. Less