When do interest groups contact bureaucrats rather than politicians? Evidence on fire alarms and smoke detectors from Japan

What determines whether interest groups choose to contact politicians or bureaucrats? Despite the importance of this question for policymaking, democracy, and some prominent principal-agent understandings of politics, it is relatively unexplored in the literature. We argue that government stability plays a major part in interest groups' decisions. That is, central to interest groups' decisions is their assessment of the likelihood that politicians currently in power will continue to be in the future. We deduce logical, but totally contrasting hypotheses, about how interest groups lobby under such conditions of uncertainty and then test these using a heteroskedastic probit model that we apply to a unique longitudinal survey of interest groups in Japan. We find that when it is unclear if the party controlling the government will maintain power in the future, interest groups are more likely to contact the bureaucracy. When it is believed that the party in power will retain control for a considerable period, interest groups are more inclined to contact politicians. In addition, during times of government uncertainty, interest groups that are supportive of the governing party (or parties) are more likely to contact politicians and those that are less supportive will be more likely to contact bureaucrats. © 2013 Cambridge University Press

When do You Follow the (National) Leader? Party switching by subnational legislators in Japan

Publication based on research carried out in the framework of the European Union Democracy Observatory (EUDO) of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute.The journal issue has been produced in the framework of the PIREDEU Project, one of the projects carried out by the EUDO Public Opinion Observatory.In 1993, after 38 years of single-party control, more than 20% of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) House of Representatives members left the party to form new alternatives and create an anti-LDP coalition government. However, despite substantial popular support, the new parties attracted few subnational politicians. The effect of this lack of subnational party switching was substantial since the relatively small pool of subnational defectors meant that the new parties had difficulty forming the strong subnational bases of support that would help them to compete with the LDP in the future. In this paper, we consider why so few subnational politicians were willing to switch to these new party alternatives. Using case studies and conditional logit analysis of party affiliation pattern among prefectural assembly members in Japan, we find that party switching was most common among subnational politicians who had powerful patrons who had also left the LDP and had maintained especially good access to central government largesse. We also find that subnational politicians from urban areas, which depend less upon central government pork, were considerably less likely to switch parties, than their rural counterparts.1. Introduction 2. The literature on party switching: summary and areas for additional work 3. The Japanese context 4. Analysis 5. Discussion and conclusion Acknowledgments Appendix. Idiosyncratic exceptions to the prefecture-level patterns Reference

Social diversity affects the number of parties even under first-past-the-post rule

Nearly all systematic empirical work on the relationship between social diversity and the number of parties asserts the “interactive hypothesis”—Social heterogeneity leads to party fragmentation under permissive electoral rules, but not under single-member district, first-past-the-post (FPTP) rules. In this article, we argue that previous work has been hindered by a reliance on national-level measures of variables and a linear model of the relationship between diversity and party fragmentation. This article provides the first analysis to test the interactive hypothesis appropriately by using district-level measures of both ethnic diversity and the effective number of parties in legislative FPTP elections and considering a curvilinear relationship between the variables. We find that there is a strong relationship between social diversity and the number of parties even under FPTP electoral rules, thus suggesting that restrictive rules are not as powerful a constraint on electoral behavior and outcomes as is usually supposed.</jats:p