Although state transformation after the 1980s has been a major topic of debate in political science, the transformation of the Japanese state has not been fully explored, with the pluralist and rational choice approaches dominating within the Japanese politics literature. This article addresses the lacuna by exploring state transformation in Japan's antimonopoly regulation after the 1980s, focusing on the state at the macro level through analysing evolving power relations within the core executive in response to the challenges of governance. The case study reveals the flexible change of power relations within the core executive; the core executive retained its dominance within policy-making arenas through this adaptation, which is regarded as the reconstitution of the state. Drawing on that, the article argues that the nature of state transformation in Japan is the sustained dominance of the core executive as a collective group over the sector through reconstituting the state.

The former Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto is the focus of much public attention in Japan. He is a polarizing figure who is both liked and disliked in equal measures, and his political character, including his argumentative approach, has been widely discussed by the Japanese and international media, as well as within academic research. For example, the Japan Times labelled his speech style as ‘a Japanese version of Donald Trump and the former Tokyo mayor, Shintaro Ishihara, said Hashimoto's speech is like ‘Hitler's’. This study examines the differences between Hashimoto's rhetoric and that of other Japanese politicians. Of the various tactics involved in the argumentative strategy of Hashimoto, this study specifically focuses on his attacking of opponents, which is one of the common and important tactics used in political debate. This study analyses the three linguistic approaches used in political debate: the policies or character of the target; the evaluative meanings of attack, and negotiation used to reduce the assertiveness of attack. The data were drawn from a televised political debate, in which Hashimoto was required to debate with three opponents who opposed his points of view. This study demonstrates that the target and the evaluative meanings behind Hashimoto's attacks were not remarkably different from the other politicians. However, Hashimoto did not use negotiation and and he was more assertive in presenting criticisms while the other politicians’ criticisms were mediated by negotiation.

The article presents an overview of the electoral politics of Punjab as it has evolved since partition from the vantage point of Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), the oldest surviving state level party in India. It is argued that SAD has been the catalyst behind the major shifts in the politics of the post-partition state. Besides being the most successful party, apart from the Congress, since the state's reorganization in 1966, it has had statewide organizational presence. The Panthic party also receives attention, as it claims to be the legitimate custodian of the Sikh community's religious and cultural interests whenever they are perceived to be under threat, and not just their political interests. Post-militancy, the leadership of Badal has been instrumental in affecting a critical shift in the SAD agenda as it now seeks support based on its record at the front of development and governance rather than by evoking ethnic issues. Significantly, while SAD has retained its core social constituency of the rural Sikhs, it has also succeeded in reaching out to the urban Hindus, including the sizable dalits by following a regionalist populist agenda. Its long-standing alliance with the BJP, an urban Hindutva party, has helped the party broaden its support base. Emergence of AAP as the third credible alternative in what has long been a bipolar polity, with the political power remaining either with the Congress or with the SAD/BJP combine, has posed a fresh challenge to the long entrenched parties, most significantly the SAD which is no longer an ideologically driven cadre based driven movement party.

For voters with bounded rationality to emulate the formation of policy preferences under full information, party cues provide effective heuristics. Although the effect of party cuing has been robustly established in US-centered studies, the literature indicates that the characteristics of modern US politics, such as political polarization, magnify the effect of party cues. Therefore, the effect of party cues has been subject to only lenient empirical scrutiny, as empirical evidence exists primarily for the US. The present study aims to test the generalizability of the effect of party cues by focusing on Japan, where the ideological positions of parties have become increasingly vague. Furthermore, in light of the fact that the media system in Japan is more stable and ideologically polarized than its party system, we also test whether press cues (i.e. newspaper names) serve as substitutes for party cues. A survey experiment demonstrates that the effects of party and press cues in Japan are muted, and therefore these two types of cues do not serve as effective shortcuts in forming policy preferences. These results indicate that issue voting based on cognitive heuristics is difficult under an unstable multiparty system. Therefore, the extant literature on party cues that presupposes the US-style party system cannot be easily generalized to other political contexts.

The discovery of oil in commercial quantity in Nigeria in 1956 ushered in a period characterized by endemic crises of oil rents management and corporate insecurity. From 1999, democratic renewal, backed by excess oil rents returns, made the popular democratic control of oil wealth critical. The consequent rentier management of oil wealth, excluding the citizens and their huge expectations occasioned threats to national security, thus punctuating limited democratic control of oil wealth, or lack of it. Employing the ex-post-facto research design, primary data for the study were generated from focus group discussions with experts in the oil sector, while other sources were from observations of the Nigerian Navy, Nigerian Customs Service, Nigerian Police, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, National Bureau of Statistics, and the Central Bank of Nigeria. Logical induction was used to analyze the data. Anchored on a frustration-aggression conceptual and theoretical framework, the study found that deprivation of oil benefits to Nigerian citizens manifested in illegal oil bunkering, pipeline vandalization, cross-border smuggling of petroleum products, attacks on oil installations, kidnapping, and piracy, with attendant threats to national security.