This study examines Japanese reactions to neighboring countries’ behavior by addressing possible micro-motives, such as patriotism, the rational demand for national defense, and retrospective policy evaluation. This theoretical development leads to distinctive hypotheses from different motivations and directly tests them using macro-data (not survey data). This research will apply this framework to Japanese politics and will show that foreign threats stimulate patriotism in the public mind and enhance political support for national leaders. It will also demonstrate that the Japanese public has no optimistic view of the new prime minister and that the honeymoon effect in previous research may be confounded with the patriotic effect because the new leader is less experienced and is often challenged by foreign countries.

It has been argued that economic development and democracy create new opportunities and resources for women to access political power, which should increase gender equality in politics. However, empirical evidence from previous research that supports this argument is mixed. The contribution of this study is to expand the research on gender equality in politics through an in-depth examination of the effect of development and democracy on gender equality in cabinets. This has been completed through separate analyses that include most of the countries in the world across three levels of development (least-developed, developing, and developed) and across different types of political regimes (democracies, royal dictatorships, military dictatorships, and civilian dictatorships). The results demonstrate that economic development and democracy only affect gender equality in cabinets positively in a few environments. Accordingly, the context is important and there seem to be thresholds before development and democracy have any effect. Development has a positive effect in developed countries and in democracies, but it has a negative effect in dictatorships, and the negative effect is strongest in military dictatorships. The level of democracy has a positive effect mainly in dictatorships, and the strongest effect is in civilian dictatorships. The article demonstrates the importance of dividing samples into subsets to increase understanding of what affects women's representation in cabinets in different environments, and I ask scholars to subset samples and run separate analyses more often in comparative studies.

Former Prime Minister Koizumi's surprising victory within the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in 2001 and his subsequent popularity as prime minister led to increased interest in the study of populism in Japan. In addition to Ōtake Hideo's prominent contributions, several others have also employed populism as a prism to study Japanese politics. Compared to the major debates on populism and particularly on the populist radical right (PRR) in Western Europe over the last two decades, however, the study of Japanese populism seems to be at a less mature stage. Lessons may be learned from the European literature for the community studying Japanese populism. This paper first summarizes the studies on Japanese populism. Then, the main discussions and arguments presented in the academic literature on the PRR in Europe are discussed. Next, this study evaluates how arguments found in studies of European populism can be exploited in further research on populist politicians and parties in Japan. The author recommends further studies on conceptual definitions, on the classifications of politicians and parties, and on explaining the emergence and persistence of these parties and politicians. The findings in this paper encourage and support further research on populism in the Japanese political system.

How democratic is contemporary Indonesia? While analysts differ, Indonesian citizens, when asked in systematic public opinion surveys conducted regularly by the authors since 1999, consistently express strong support for democratic principles and also believe that their country's democratic performance is high. Support for democratic performance is highly correlated with support for government performance, as measured by perceptions of the condition of the national economy and political system. At the same time, higher levels of education and income, in Indonesia as in other countries, have created a considerable number of critical citizens, that is, citizens who value democracy but are critical of its performance. On our evidence for Indonesia, it is members of this group who are the most motivated and best prepared to demand a higher level of democratic performance from their elected officials.

The prevailing theory states that either Japanese voters have stopped ideologically distinguishing parties or that the main political parties in Japan have become more centrist in recent years. These arguments are based on survey questions asking citizens to locate parties on an ideological scale. However, these questions may suffer from noise caused by respondents who misinterpret the question wording or answer the questions inappropriately to mask their misunderstanding of the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’. To address this problem by extracting only the views of those who know the meaning of left–right terms, this article develops a mixture model. Applying the model to an opinion poll conducted after the 2012 Japanese general election, I confirm that those who comprehend the left–right terminology – slightly over half of all voters – largely perceived parties’ ideologies in the same way as experts. Additionally, I find that even these voters face difficulties in placing ambiguous or new parties on the political spectrum. This study has implications not only for understanding trends in Japanese political ideology, but also for survey design and analysis of heterogeneous survey responses.

In recent years, the impact of party leaders on voting behavior has attracted increasing attention, leading some scholars to identify a phenomenon of ‘presidentialization’. Many extant studies of this topic in Japan are limited to one or two electoral cycles. In order to trace long-term trends, this paper analyses longitudinal survey data to investigate the existence and magnitude of the effect party leader evaluations exert on vote choice in Japan. Empirical results show that while only dominant and forceful personalities substantially influenced voters' likelihood of supporting their parties in the 1980s and 1990s, by the 2000s assessments of most major party leaders had a significant impact on their parties' electoral performance. In short, party leaders affect vote choice due not to their personalities, but instead to the position they hold. We also test the hypotheses that the association between leader appraisal and voting behavior would be particularly conspicuous among voters who lack party identification and those who are most heavily exposed to media reportage. Analysis reveals that (1) independent voters are not more likely to vote on the basis of leader evaluations than partisans; (2) a leader effect is found more frequently among voters with greater exposure to election coverage on television.

Two lines of argument seem to stand solidly without seeing eye to eye with each other about the current world order. Steven Pinker, the American psychologist, writes about the steady reduction in human violence in settling disputes among humankind (Pinker, 2012). John Mearsheimer, the American political scientist, writes about the structurally almost inevitable conflicts of interest between great powers in the early twenty-first century in his analysis of hegemonic competition between the United States and China (Mearsheimer, 2005). It is not necessary to note that their arguments are made looking at conflicts of interest and use of violence from very different angles and time ranges. Yet their differences are stark and clear. Pinker says that the future is bright and shining due to the non-use of violence. Mearsheimer says that the future is dark and potentially devastating due to the consequences of the high tensions surrounding the conflicts of interest. The question posed at the outset is thus: Is the current era one of peace or war?

Since the middle of the twentieth century, the governance of the global system has been organized around the United States and the advanced industrial democracies. In the shadow of the Cold War, these countries established a wide array of global and regional institutions to manage economic, political, and security relations. The Bretton Woods institutions, GATT (and later the WTO), the United Nations, and various functional institutions provided the bulwark for an open and managed postwar world economy and global order. An American-led alliance system provided a structure for regional security in Europe and East Asia. When the Cold War ended, these far-flung institutions were extended into a more fully global multilateral system of governance. The United States dominated the global order. But, more so than did leading states in previous eras, it established its dominance through institutions. It was an American-led liberal hegemonic order.

This article examines the impact of the growth of multilateral and transnational governance on sovereignty and the diffusion of political authority. It begins by exploring the legacy of World War II and the building of the UN system. The rise of intergovernmentalism and transnational governance arrangements is examined followed by an assessment of some of the leading changes in the postwar global politics landscape. These issues are explored in greater depth across two cases: security and the environment. The article then examines a set of trends which can be characterized as a gridlock in leading institutions, and highlights the political uncertainty ahead at the global level.

Since the outbreak of the Great Recession triggered by the Lehman shock in 2008, writings on American decline have proliferated. World-renowned scholars and commentators have all pointed out that the American hegemony or empire is rapidly coming to an end, and that as a consequence the world is in greater turmoil than ever (for example, Zakaria, 2008; Friedman and Mandelbaum, 2011; Kupchan, 2012; Bremmer, 2012). Although there are differences among various works, most commentators predict a bleak prospect for the future.

What are the prospects for effective global governance? It is widely held that global governance is a public good, but what are the political factors that are likely to ensure its provision? Is the USA able or willing to able to provide it? Can international institutions, norms, or causal beliefs, in the absence of US leadership, fill in?

It seems that everyone has already realized that our world enters a period of fundamental changes and the formation of a new world order. Today, the question of how the modern world will develop is one of the most vital problems of international relations. Therefore, I want to once again prudently refer to the books by J. John Ikenberry and Acharya Amitav on the American World Order (AWO)? Both books represent a lucid, intelligent, and thought-provoking analysis of tectonic transformations in the world as well as a subtle foresight of certain trends.