Evolution of the Japanese Political Scene: Toward a Non-Issue-Oriented Two-Party System?

This article examines the nature of the two-party system in Japan. The electoral reform of 1994 has finally led to an alternation of power, but contrary to the predictions of the reformers, the competition between two major Japanese parties is not based on any substantial differences in their political programs. The Liberal Democratic Party and the Democratic Party of Japan are mixtures of various groups rather than coherent parties and the main axes of struggle on the Japanese political scene run across party divisions. Both major parties are internally divided with regard to economic as well as defense policy. The most important factor of Democratic Party of Japan's identity has been the goal of achieving an alternation of power and abolishing the Liberal Democratic Party style of policymaking. Nevertheless, the discourse on political renewal has been undertaken also by the Liberal Democratic Party. While the struggle between the partisans and the opponents of Koizumi reforms continues in the Liberal Democratic Party, the Democratic Party of Japan is torn apart between the proponents of ‘big’ and ‘small’ government.     

Stuck in transition: electoral processes in Zambia 1991–2001

Zambia has held three multiparty elections since its restoration of democracy in 1991. This peaceful transition raised expectations of a smooth process towards democratic consolidation. But similar to experiences in other African countries and Eastern Europe, the Zambian democratic process has remained stuck in a ‘transitional zone’ between actual democracy and authoritarian systems. This article argues that Zambian elections fall short of the expectations of a democratic process due to the institutional uncertainty surrounding elections and the weakness of the Zambian Electoral Commission in particular. The continued uncertainty – of the rules and regulations guiding elections and electoral administration – has maintained the same party in power through three consecutive elections, despite an alarming economic record.     

Making them pay: Using the norm of honesty to generate costs for political lies

Recent literature finds that, although lies politicians spread to achieve partisan goals can be corrected, politicians who spread misinformation rarely pay a price for lying. We argue that the cost of lying should be greater when the norm of honesty is salient. Using three survey experiments that feature both a well-known politician (Donald Trump) and a fictitious member of Congress, we examine the cost politicians pay when they are caught in a lie. We find that many citizens, regardless of partisanship, will recognize a lie when one has been told. And although citizens punish unknown politicians for lying, they do not punish Trump similarly unless the norm of honesty is made salient. This effect, however, is limited to the narrower measure of situational approval; individual lies do not affect overall measures of job approval regardless of honesty salience. These results demonstrate the difficulty of getting citizens to update their views on well-known politicians, even when those politicians are caught in an obvious lie. Yet our findings suggest fruitful paths toward creating a disincentive for politicians to distort the truth.     

Coattails and spillover-effects: Quasi-experimental evidence from concurrent executive and legislative elections

Concurrent elections are widely used to increase turnout. We theorize and show empirically how concurrency affects electoral outcomes. First, concurrency increases turnout and thereby the participation of peripheral voters. Second, in combined elections, one electoral arena affects the other. In our case of majoritarian executive elections concurrent to proportional representation (PR) legislative elections, the centripetal tendency of majoritarian elections colors off to the concurrent PR race. Third, concurrency also entails spillovers of the incumbency advantage of executive officeholders to the concurrent legislative race. Drawing on quasi-random variation in local election timing in Germany, we show that concurrency increases turnout as well as council votes for the incumbent mayor's party and centrist parties more generally, with slightly more pronounced gains for the political left. As a consequence, concurrent elections consolidate party systems and political power by leading to less fragmented municipal councils and more unified local governments.     

Coalition incentives and party bias in Chile

This article revisits the debate over Chile's binomial electoral rules and its consequences and examines how the new electoral system conceived by a democratic congress altered political competition. It utilizes a seat-vote model of multiparty competition to analyze party bias under the binomial rule. This approach differs substantively from prior studies of the Chilean case that focused primarily on the disproportionality of aggregate results. In contrast to earlier analyses, the findings reveal that the allocation of the seats under the binominal resulted in significant party bias benefiting the main parties of the right. This bias, however, was eliminated after the electoral reform. The new rule continues to provide majoritarian benefits to parties receiving larger shares of votes, but this effect is less pronounced than before. It is now easier for small parties to gain seats, which has increased party fragmentation. However, we show that coalition incentives, which were heralded as one of the main advantages of the binomial rule, are also significant under the new rule in use since 2017.     

The 2020 presidential election and beliefs about fraud: Continuity or change?

The 2020 presidential campaign was plagued by charges of voter fraud both before and after the election took place. While past literature finds that electoral losers are most likely to express misgivings about election integrity, little else is known about the characteristics of individuals who exhibit these beliefs or how the beliefs have changed over time. Employing national surveys from 2012, 2016, 2018, and 2020, we examine the levels of pre-election expectations of fraud in the event of an electoral loss over time, as well as the individual-level correlates of beliefs in a range of election-related conspiracy theories prominent in 2020. Our analysis reveals that beliefs in election fraud are common and stable across time, and only occasionally relate to partisanship. Moreover, we find that, even accounting for the influence of partisan motivated reasoning, several psychological orientations––conspiracy thinking, anomie, dark triad personality traits, and denialism––play a unique role in promoting perceptions of voter fraud.     

The Impact of Prejudice Screening Procedures on Racial Bias in the Courtroom

The current study examines the impact of the challenge for cause procedure and its effectiveness in curbing racial prejudice in trials involving Black defendants. Participants were provided with a trial summary of a defendant charged with either drug trafficking or embezzlement. The race of the defendant was either White or Black, with participants in the Black defendant condition receiving (prior to the trial presentation) either no challenge, a close-ended standard challenge, or a modified reflective pretrial questioning strategy. Overall, the results revealed an anti-Black bias in judgments. While the closed ended challenge did little to reduce this bias, the reflective format demonstrated a reduction in racial bias. Theoretical and applied implications of these findings are discussed.

国际冲突中调停者的偏向与调停效果

在国际调停领域,人们普遍认为,调停者的公正和中立有利于冲突的解决。然而近期学界有新的观点,认为若调停者偏向冲突中的某一方,将更有利于缓解冲突。对这两种相互对立的说法,作者认为调停者的偏向会影响冲突双方的心理预期,进而影响最终结果。若冲突双方中一方有极度不安全感,且处于收益框架,认为谈判会有收获,此时调停者偏向不安全感强的一方的效果要比不偏不倚的调停效果好。若弱势一方处于损失框架,担心参与调停会危害国家生存,此时调停者偏向不安全感强的一方的调停效果未必更好。在朝核危机六方会谈中,中国偏向朝鲜的立场可以使朝鲜信任中国,进而参与六方会谈,显然中国对六方会谈发挥了重大作用。然而,中国的偏向立场虽然使朝鲜乐意参与谈判,但对朝核危机的彻底解决却难以取得成效,由于中国偏向朝鲜,朝鲜认为中国的支持是不会改变的,反而使朝鲜有恃无恐,美朝双方针锋相对,各不相让,最终致使六方会谈难有进展。因此,调停者的偏向立场有利于推动冲突双方参与谈判,但不一定有利于冲突的最终解决。     

Comparisons among electoral systems: Distinguishing between localism and candidate-centered politics

Carey and Shugart (1995) offer a four component composite index of “incentives to cultivate a personal vote.” We argue that this index, while tapping important aspects of electoral system choice, is best regarded as encompassing two distinct dimensions: degree of party-centeredness of the electoral system, on the one hand, and incentives for “parochial” behavior on the part of legislators, on the other. Also, while we have no problem with the three indicators used by Carey and Shugart to measure party-centeredness; to measure parochial incentives we prefer to use a new measure, E (Grofman, 1999a) of the size of a legislator's electoral constituency, rather than using district magnitude, m, as a proxy for a the size of a legislator's geographic constituency, as Carey and Shugart do. In the conclusion to the paper we argue that the degree of similarity between any two electoral systems will depend upon the research question at issue, and that the expected degree of proportionality of election results is only one of the many political consequences of electoral laws to which we ought to be paying attention.     

The Preference for Indirect Harm

We presented subjects pairs of hypothetical scenarios. The action in each scenario harmed some people in order to aid others. In one member of the pair, the harm was a direct result of the action. In the other member, it was an indirect byproduct. Subjects preferred the indirect harm to the direct harm. This result could not be fully explained in terms of differences in judgments about which option was more active, more intentional, more likely to cause harm, or more subject to the disapproval of others. Taken together, these findings provide evidence for a new bias in judgment, a tendency to favor indirectly harmful options over directly harmful alternatives, irrespective of the associated outcomes, intentions, or self-presentational concerns. We speculate that this bias could originate from the use of a typical but somewhat unreliable property of harmful acts, their directness, as a cue to moral evaluation. We discuss the implications of the bias for a range of social issues, including the distinction between passive and active euthanasia, legal deterrence, and the rhetoric of affirmative action.