Political Traditions and Political Change: The Significance of Postwar Japanese Politics for Political Science

The extensive literature on postwar Japanese politics often stresses unique phenomena representative of Japanese exceptionalism, even though both Japanists and specialists on other areas of the world would profit from integrating Japanese political studies with broader comparative themes. This review seeks to correct a tendency toward scholarly isolation by addressing four themes in Japanese postwar experience and relating them to comparative political science research on other countries and regions. The four themes are styles of electoral mobilization, informalism and process as factors in party organization, power and performance in postwar policy making, and post-1993 electoral institution change.