The Assassination of Shinzo Abe: Political Struggle, Electoral System and the Unification Church Scandal

The purpose of the study is to get an idea of the implementation of firearms use for immigration officers using empirical normative-research methods with a constitutional approach, and a qualitative approach. Result of research has shown that immigration officer, and the civil servant investigator of immigration are the examples of law enforcement officer who have threat in carry out their duties. Therefore, allowed to be equipped with firearms in the performance of his duties as a martial arts device. But, facts in the immigration office (class I) of Tanjung Priok were found that there had been no use of firearms by immigration staff particularly immigration officers, and the civil servant investigator of immigration in performing duties of immigration law enforcement. As a fact there's only one person in the field who has a licensed for ownership firearms. The obstacle faced by immigration officers, and the civil servant investigator of immigration in the use of firearms, namely There is no chief of immigration office policy yet on which to plan the use of service firearms, There is no rule review of the service firearms ordinance in the Directorate General of Immigration, There are no have qualifications immigration officer and the civil servant investigator of immigration yet, are supported to have a permit, and the use of firearms, And facilities for storage, as well as the treatment of firearms.

The purpose of the study is to get an idea of the implementation of firearms use for immigration officers using empirical normative-research methods with a constitutional approach, and a qualitative approach. Result of research has shown that immigration officer, and the civil servant investigator of immigration are the examples of law enforcement officer who have threat in carry out their duties. Therefore, allowed to be equipped with firearms in the performance of his duties as a martial arts device. But, facts in the immigration office (class I) of Tanjung Priok were found that there had been no use of firearms by immigration staff particularly immigration officers, and the civil servant investigator of immigration in performing duties of immigration law enforcement. As a fact there's only one person in the field who has a licensed for ownership firearms. The obstacle faced by immigration officers, and the civil servant investigator of immigration in the use of firearms, namely There is no chief of immigration office policy yet on which to plan the use of service firearms, There is no rule review of the service firearms ordinance in the Directorate General of Immigration, There are no have qualifications immigration officer and the civil servant investigator of immigration yet, are supported to have a permit, and the use of firearms, And facilities for storage, as well as the treatment of firearms.

In the second half of 2022, the Japanese political world was shaken by a major scandal: in July 2022, former Prime Minister and a prominent member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party Abe Shinzō was killed at an election rally. The assassin, caught at the crime scene, declared that the murder was a revenge for the victim’s connection with the Unification Church, which, according to the perpetrator’s words, had led his family to financial ruin. Initially, this explanation seemed fantastical, but the investigation that followed revealed that both Abe Shinzō himself and many other Japanese politicians had been maintaining connections with the Unification Church for many years. This caused an uproar in Japanese society, especially given the rather controversial reputation of the Unification Church. On January 26, 2023, the Association of Japanologists and the research laboratory “Center for Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian Studies” of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO University) held a roundtable “Unification Church in Japan as a Sociocultural and Political Phenomenon”. The participants of the roundtable analyzed the situation around the Unification Church and its role in Japanese politics in detail, studied the specific features of the “new religions” in Japanese society, and considered the factors determining their influence on the political world of Japan.

(1997). From here to eternity? Continuing developments in Japanese party politics in light of the 1996 parliamentary election. Democratization: Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 172-196.

This chapter analyses democratic electoral systems and their impact on advancing democratic governance and development in Africa. This includes the dynamics and rationale for choosing a particular electoral system over the other(s) and the results of such decisions to the electoral and representative democracy. The electoral systems famous in political science are proportional representation (PR) and constituency based, as well as the mixed electoral system. In this chapter, various electoral systems have been deliberated on in the context of electoral democracy and its democratization process. Thus, considering the denial and exclusion of the majority to full citizenship and democratic governance during the colonial and apartheid regimes. The chapter uses country-based case studies to demonstrate the importance of the electoral democratic system in fostering democratic good governance and development in Africa.

One of the biggest storylines of the first half of this decade in Japanese politics has been the rise of “Third Force” parties. However, the 2014 election results winnowed the Third Force down to a single party. This is a significant development and it could, as we and Ethan Scheiner suggest in the Conclusion, be the beginning of a major transition in Japanese politics (back) to mostly two major party/bloc candidate competition in the districts. Complementing chapters on the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), and Komeito, this chapter will analyze developments in other Japanese political parties. Despite many twists and turns, we see the election results as de facto consolidation of the Third Force into a third party — one that did not exist until two months before the election.

The study of Japanese politics has flourished over the past several decades. This Handbook provides a state-of-the-field overview for students and researchers of Japanese. The volume also serves to introduce Japanese politics to readers less familiar with Japan. In addition, the volume has a theme of “evaluating Japan’s democracy.” Taken as a whole, the volume provides a positive evaluation of the state of Japan’s democracy. The volume is divided into two parts, roughly corresponding to domestic Japanese politics and Japan’s international politics. Within the domestic politics part, there are four distinct sections: “Domestic Political Actors and Institutions,” covering the Japanese Constitution, electoral systems, prime minister, Diet, bureaucracy, judiciary, and local government; “Political Parties and Coalitions,” covering the Liberal Democratic Party, coalition government, Kōmeitō, and the political opposition; “Policymaking and the Public,” covering the policymaking process, public opinion, civil society, and populism; and, “Political Economy and Social Policy,” covering industrial, energy, social welfare, agricultural, monetary, and immigration policies, as well as social inequality. In the international relations part, there are four sections: “International Relations Frameworks,” covering grand strategy, international organizations, and international status; “International Political Economy,” covering trade, finance, foreign direct investment, the environment, economic regionalism, and the linkage between security and economics; “International Security,” covering remilitarization, global and regional security multilateralism, nuclear nonproliferation, naval power, space security, and cybersecurity; and, “Foreign Relations” covering Japan’s relations with the United States, China, South Korea, ASEAN, India, the European Union, and Russia.

The task of this work is to identify the phenomenon of geographical favouritism in parties and electoral systems, which consists in the degree of the tendency of the latter to territorial differentiation. In our opinion, this is a mandatory step towards finding ways to take into account the degree of spatial distortion of the electoral and party systems of public choice, which in the future should enable multiple comparative electoral and geographical studies. Based on the analysis of all existing electoral systems, it is concluded that proportional elements reduce the potential of geographical favoritism of electoral systems, while majoritarian ones, on the contrary, strengthen it. In the article, electoral systems are distributed according to the level of potential geographical favoritism: it turns out to be the highest in majority systems, and the lowest in proportional and intermediate-average systems, respectively, in semiproportional and preferential ones. The effect of geographical favouritism in mixed (compensatory) systems is close to the result in proportional systems with several districts. In non-compensatory systems, it depends on the effect of the majoritarian component. In the work, the elements or properties of electoral systems are divided into two categories: those that strengthen or weaken geographical favouritism. Having estimated the number of certain elements or properties present in a particular electoral legislation, we can conclude about the degree of geographical favouritism of the electoral procedure used in the country. Two variants of calculating the index of geographical favouritism are proposed, which is necessary for comparative electoral-geographical research, since it allows comparing election results without correction for distortions of the regional distribution of votes. The first index is more suitable for analyzing more similar electoral processes, say, several cycles in the same state, and the second is for comparing fundamentally different electoral systems.

‘The second republic’ is how Asher Arian defined Israel's government in the 1990s, referring to the ‘new issues, new constitutional rules, new leadership’ that emerged at the beginning of that era....

The political history of Italy and Japan during the post-war period is strongly ­associated with two dominant parties: the Italian Christian Democrats (DC) and the Japanese Liberal Democrat Party (LDP). Notwithstanding this similarity, the electoral and party systems of the two countries differed. Italy had a fragmented and polarized multiparty system under proportional representation (PR), while Japan was known for the dominance of a single ruling party under the unusual single nontransferable vote (SNTV) system. However, in the 1990s, both countries experienced electoral system changes through the adoption of mixed electoral systems. Electoral reform was enacted first in Italy in 1993 and in the following year in Japan. Later in 2005, Italy switched from a mixed majoritarian electoral system (MMES) to a further “hybridized” electoral system, which gives a seat bonus to the party or coalition winning a plurality of votes, but in which seat allocation to coalition partners follows a proportional rule. In Japan, the MMES adopted in 1994 was changed as well, although in minor ways. For example, in the 1996 elections, the mixed system elected 300 MPs from single member districts (SMDs) and 200 from 11 PR districts; in the 2000 elections, the number of PR seats decreased from 200 to 180.KeywordsElectoral SystemParty SystemProportional RepresentationLiberal Democrat PartyCoalition GovernmentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The principles of popular sovereignty and democracy are the basic principles of Constitution and are also limitations to revision. Since the basic system that materializes this is the electoral system, the electoral system is very important in realizing popular sovereignty and democracy. In particular, an institutional mechanism that links the will of the sovereign people to the results without distorting it is an important element in securing democratic representation and proportionality through elections. The main issue of efforts to improve the electoral system promoted in the 20th and 21st National Assembly was to improve the problem of the sovereign people's will not being reflected in the results due to the single-member district system in the current district elections. In other words, the result of the winner-takes-all system, in which only one person is elected per district under the single-member district system, the resulting problem of resignations, and the disproportionality between the party approval rating and the number of seats secured, called for improvement of proportionality in election results. However, the plan to improve the electoral system adopted and implemented after discussion in the National Assembly was implemented by maintaining the existing electoral district system, contrary to the original intention of improving the electoral system, and the semi-linked proportional representation system agreed upon and implemented in the 20th National Assembly was implemented. It resulted in distorting the will of the sovereign people, such as by creating satellite political parties. The electoral system improvement plan decided and implemented in the 20th and 21st National Assembly failed to strengthen proportionality and representativeness and undermined the political efficacy of the sovereign people, similar to before the introduction of the improvement plan. Accordingly, this paper analyzes the issues of the electoral district system and proportional representation system, which were discussed as improvement plans for the electoral system in the 20th and 21st National Assembly, and presents limitations and improvement measures.

In 2009, the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) of Japan, which had successfully formed governments either alone or as the largest partner in a coalition government for all but a single year since 1955, suffered a devastating electoral defeat when the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) won nearly two-thirds of the seats available in the House of Representatives. The landslide DPJ victory was seen by many commentators and academics as the culmination of a decade-long trend toward two-party politics, driven in large part by party and voter adaptation to the electoral reforms of the 1990s, which introduced single-member districts as the means for electing a majority of members of parliament. The three books reviewed in this essay were written primarily in the two years following the 2009 DPJ victory, and each attempts, in quite distinct ways, to update our accounts of electoral and party politics and policymaking in Japan to account for the changes in Japanese politics in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Political corruption in Japan is a very important issue. According to the Global Corrup­tion Barometer 2009 survey Japanese perceived political parties, public officials and ci­vil servants to be the institutions which are the most affected by corruption. In addition, governmental measures against corruption are regarded to be ineffective and inadequ­ate to the real situation. Japanese have keen concern toward Japanese political parties, intransparent activity of politicians and preventive measures taken by government. The purpose of this research is to examine political corruption phenomena in contemporary Japanese politics. Research questions are what are the structure, scale, and causes of political corruption in Japan during 2001–2009. For answering to these research questions first of all it is discussed the concept and definition of political corruption itself. Article overviews previous political corruption studies in Japan from the time of Second World War to the recent times, including the report of the Transparency International National Integrity System. In third chapter of article the scale, the varieties and the main practitioners of political corruption in Japan are to be analyzed. It reveals the biggest political corruption scandals in Japanese poli­tics in given time-period. Last chapter focuses on the explanation of political corruption mechanism in Japan and in particular relationship with clientelism practises. Combination of primary and secondary sources led me to make the following conclusions on the main political corruption tendencies in Japan during 2001–2009. First, the Asahi Shimbun front page content analysis indicates that 2002 and 2007 are special years in the context of corruption studies because in those years published the largest number of political corruption articles and the biggest number of the new the­mes on the political corruption issue revealed. Second, the common point of the three most significant political corruption scandals during 2001–2009 is that all of them have the relationship with political finance issue and in particular a suspicion on the violation of the PFRL. This finding reaffirms the NIS statement that political finance is one of the top priority issues in Japanese corruption scheme. Third, illegal political donation and influence peddling are the most frequent types of corruption in Japan during the period of 2001–2009. Fourth, main practitioners of political corruption in Japan were the LDP members from the House of Representatives. In addition, in as many as nine cases the Diet member secretaries were involved in political corruption scandals. The Diet member secretaries play an important role in political corruption scheme because they are often responsible for the political fund management. Fifth, the most vulnerable institution to political corruption seems to be Ministry of Agri­culture, Forestry and Fisheries and Ministry of Construction. Finally, article conclu­des that political corruption in Japan, to some extent, could be explained through the analysis of political clientelism.

Following the recent explosion of new democracies, there has been a wave of constitution-building and electoral reform. The choice of the electoral system has been topic of debate among elites of the new democracies, knowing that this choice is an important one with different consequences. The effects of majoritarian and proportional electoral systems have been broadly investigated in the literature. Until recently, however, mixed electoral systems have attracted minimal academic attention. Although a growing number of new democracies have introduced hybrid types of electoral systems, which are neither proportional nor majoritarian, there are hardly any studies on the effects of these mixed electoral systems. This study explores not only the effects of majoritarian and proportional systems, but also the consequences of the mixed systems as compared to the two other systems. Not only 32 established democracies, but also 55 ‘new’ democracies are included in the multivariate regression analyses. Different measurements of the dependent variable (democratic quality) are taken into account, and some important control variables (especially human development) are incorporated in the analyses. It appears that it is important to differentiate between different types of electoral systems. The results show that such a distinction is crucial, since one particular type of mixed systems is associated with lower levels of democratic quality than the other types of electoral systems. In fact, they seem to combine the worst effects of both proportional and majoritarian systems.

The study of Japanese politics has flourished over the past several decades. This Handbook provides a state-of-the-field overview for students and researchers of Japanese. The volume also serves to introduce Japanese politics to readers less familiar with Japan. In addition, the volume has a theme of “evaluating Japan’s democracy.” Taken as a whole, the volume provides a positive evaluation of the state of Japan’s democracy. The volume is divided into two parts, roughly corresponding to domestic Japanese politics and Japan’s international politics. Within the domestic politics part, there are four distinct sections: “Domestic Political Actors and Institutions,” covering the Japanese Constitution, electoral systems, prime minister, Diet, bureaucracy, judiciary, and local government; “Political Parties and Coalitions,” covering the Liberal Democratic Party, coalition government, Kōmeitō, and the political opposition; “Policymaking and the Public,” covering the policymaking process, public opinion, civil society, and populism; and, “Political Economy and Social Policy,” covering industrial, energy, social welfare, agricultural, monetary, and immigration policies, as well as social inequality. In the international relations part, there are four sections: “International Relations Frameworks,” covering grand strategy, international organizations, and international status; “International Political Economy,” covering trade, finance, foreign direct investment, the environment, economic regionalism, and the linkage between security and economics; “International Security,” covering remilitarization, global and regional security multilateralism, nuclear nonproliferation, naval power, space security, and cybersecurity; and, “Foreign Relations” covering Japan’s relations with the United States, China, South Korea, ASEAN, India, the European Union, and Russia.