Campaigning for the Japanese Diet Haruhiro Fukui; Shigeko N. Fukai
Elections in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan under the Single Non-Transferable Vote,
09/2010
Book Chapter
Until 1994, Japan was nearly unique in the contemporary world, and unique among advanced industrial nations, in electing most members of its national legislature, known as the Diet, and its ...prefectural and municipal legislatures, known as local assemblies, from low-magnitude multiple-member constituencies (three to five per constituency) by the single non-transferable vote (SNTV) formula. The uniqueness is even more impressive when it is realized that the system was in place nearly continuously in its contemporary form for well over two-thirds of a century, since the mid-1920s, and in only a marginally modified form for nearly a century since 1900 (Woodall,
Why should one study elite recruitment and political leadership in Japan? Because, our answer would go, we live in a world of ever deepening interdependence among nations where the peace, security, ...and prosperity of each is greatly influenced by policies and actions of another. This is particularly true when the latter is an economic superpower like Japan, the largest creditor nation and aid donor in the world of the early 1990s with a gross national product equal to about fifteen per cent of the world's total. Who makes Japanese domestic and foreign policies and how they are made has important implications for the welfare of other nations, including the United States, which maintains what a former American ambassador to Japan, Mike Mansfield, called the “most important bilateral relationship” in the world. “Elite” and “leadership” are two concepts that help us identify and analyze those who play central roles in a nation's policymaking process. Commonplace as they are in the vocabulary of both modern political science and the mass media, these words are often used ambiguously and interchangeably. They are, however, etymologically distinctive words that can serve us as useful analytical tools only if they are clearly and distinctively defined. In the discussion that follows, we use “elite” to refer to a group of individuals who hold privileged positions in society or organizations and “leadership” to refer to the exercise of power, broadly defined, to lead others in collective action. As William Welsh has suggested, elites are thus “set apart from the rest of society by their preeminence in political and governmental hierarchies,” while leadership means “ability to mobilize human resources in pursuit of specific goals.”
Feldman, Valenty, and their contributors present state-of-the-art evaluations of linkages between personality, motivation, decision making, leadership style, and behavior among political leaders ...across divergent cultures. Leading scholars in the field examine the application of theoretical approaches and research methods used to evaluate these important relationships. They effectively illustrate the concomitant role of cultural and political context, historical circumstance, environmental factors, and socialization agents affecting political leadership and performance.Contributors evaluate methods currently in use by scholars in political science, psychology, political psychology, social psychology, and history, including psychodiagnostic and psychobiographical approaches, and the application of these methods in profiling the personalities of political leaders. Each chapter presents a unique case study evaluating a political leader or leaders including such major figures as Mao Zedong, Tony Blair, Seyyed Mohammed Khatami, Helmut Kohl, and Stalin, Yeltsin, and Putin.
The article examines Japan's diplomatic style and rhetoric, actual policies, and underlying attitudes toward North-South problems, focusing on her reactions to demands for a New International ...Economic Order (NIEO) by the LDCs. The conventional classification of Japan as “right-wing conservative” is shown to be misleading. Her policies are often less conservative than her rhetoric. As a result of her success as a recently developed country, her close observation of the industrialization of Asia's newly industrializing countries, and her status as a still growing latecomer—experienced in “structural adjustments” for her own benefit and faced by growing protectionist pressure from other developed countries—Japan is perhaps the most realistically optimistic of the states concerned about the prospect of the NIEO demands for a “new division of labor” and “structural change.” It is possible that Japan will assume some activist role as a mediator in the North-South dialogue, perhaps in the quiet areas of negotiation and policy formulation rather than in the arena of public diplomacy such as summit meetings.
