Legislative scholars have debated what factors (e.g. divided government) account for the number of important laws a legislative body passes per year. This paper presents a monopoly model for explaining legislative production. It assumes that a legislature adjusts its law production so as to maximize its utility. The model predicts that socio-economic and political changes increase the marginal benefit of law production, whereas low negotiation costs and ample legislative resources decrease the marginal cost of law production. The model is tested in two ways. The first approach compares the legislatures of 42 developed and developing countries. The second analyzes Japanese lawmaking from 1949 to 1990, using an appropriate method for event count time series data. Both empirical investigations support the model's predictions for legislative production.

SNTV engenders incentives to vote strategically not only against probable losers but also against candidates seen as possible runaway winners. This paper uses survey and election data from the 2004 Taiwanese legislative election to argue that excessive strategic voting against the strongest candidates was at the root of coordination failures. Further, I argue that strong personal votes play a role in mitigating these failures by constructing a stable foundation of votes that is not subject to the wild swings produced by strategic voting.

The attainment of good governance is the question of the day in Bangladesh. This paper discusses the ‘bedrock of good governance’, parliamentary accountability, and assesses the effectiveness of the Bangladesh Parliament in ensuring governmental accountability and promoting good governance since 1991 when the country re-entered into parliamentary democracy. Considerable discrepancies between the expected role and practical performances are identified and the study further identified a number of problems that severely hinder parliament's accountability function. This paper primarily argues that Bangladesh vested excessive powers in the hands of the executive branch; it, therefore, lacks the proper checks and balances a strong parliament could provide.

The trade–conflict model claims that one state, designated ‘actor’, is deterred from initiating conflict against a trading partner, designated ‘target’, for fear of losing the welfare gains associated with trade. This paper extends the trade–conflict model to garner implications concerning trade and conflict interactions where third-party blocs are involved. The theoretical propositions supported by proofs are: (1) if the actor increases trade with a third-party who is a friend of the target, then the actor will decrease conflict toward the target; (2) if the actor increases trade with a third-party who is a rival of the target, then the actor will increase conflict toward the target. A 30-country sample from the Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB) is used and divided into three blocs, namely a Western bloc, a Middle Eastern bloc, and an Eastern bloc. The empirical analysis supports the hypotheses. A similar relationship is also discussed and tested for situations in which conflict increases or decreases between the actor and third-party bloc. In addition, the evidence shows that Western bloc countries play a central role in world political and economic relationships.

In the 1980s, a wave of new–extremely clever and detailed–studies revolutionized the Japanese politics field. The empirical findings of this ‘new paradigm’ literature remain the conventional wisdom on Japanese policy-making patterns under the ‘1955 System’. In this paper, we offer a critical reinterpretation of the new paradigm literature. We do not offer new empirical analysis, but, rather, reconsider this conventional wisdom by putting a new spin on the evidence previous authors utilized to analyze the policy-making process in Japan under the 1955 System. Contrary to the conventional view of strong central bureaucratic power, we argue that in the 1960s policy making was quite fragmented. In contrast to literature suggesting substantial politician influence in the 1980s, we argue that there was a decline in the influence of politicians in general in policy making.