The 21st Century Japanese Prime Minister : An Unusually Precarious Perch

The nature and rapidity of turnover of prime ministers in Japan in recent years (2006-2010) is nearly unprecedented both historically in Japan and in comparison to other developed parliamentary democracies. This paper contextualizes the recent high degree of turnover in the post of prime minister both in historical and comparative perspective. The central argument of the paper is that the recent rapid turnover in the post of the prime minister is a perverse consequence of the increased prominence and influence of the post and the greater electoral importance of the party label in a time of great electoral volatility and voter dissatisfactio

Playing with Fire: Pre-Electoral Fiscal Manipulation and the Risk of a Speculative Attack

Conventional wisdom holds that voters in developing countries fail to punish pervasive pre-electoral fiscal manipulation. However, we argue that governments are unlikely to engage in pre-electoral fiscal manipulation when facing a high risk of speculative currency attacks. In particular, under fixed exchange rates, governments are less likely to engage in fiscal electioneering when either their real exchange rate is highly appreciated or their foreign exchange reserves are low. In contrast, under a flexible exchange rate, neither a country's real exchange rate nor its reserves affects governments' decision to engage in fiscal manipulation. Our argument receives support through a quantitative analysis of government budget balances in 97 developing countries from 1975 to 2005

Multiparty government and economic policy-making : Coalition agreements, prime ministerial power and spending in Western European Cabinets

Multiparty government has often been associated with poor economic policy-making, with distortions like lower growth rates and high budget deficits. One proposed reason for such distortions is that coalition governments face more severe ‘common pool problems’ since parties use their control over specific ministries to advance their specific spending priorities rather than practice budgetary discipline. We suggest that this view of multiparty government is incomplete and that we need to take into account that coalitions may have established certain control mechanisms to deal with such problems. One such mechanism is the drafting of a coalition agreement. Our results, when focusing on the spending behavior of cabinets formed in 17 Western European countries (1970–1998), support our claim that coalition agreements matter for the performance of multiparty cabinets in economic policy-making. More specifically, we find clear support for an original conditional hypothesis suggesting that coalition agreements significantly reduce the negative effect of government fragmentation on government spending in those institutional contexts where prime ministerial power is low