Political parties are often faced with seemingly opposing goals when trying to secure members’ reelection and maintain party unity. On one hand, a party needs to fulfill members’ diverse electoral needs for their reelection, and on the other hand, the party must force members to vote in unison according to party lines for collective decisions. How does a party influence its members to take unified action while meeting their individual electoral needs? Through an analysis of the Japanese Diet, this study argues that parties attempt to achieve the reelection of their members and maintain party unity by manipulating legislative committee assignments and deliberations. In particular, the study demonstrates that a party shapes committees in a different way according to policy areas over which committees have jurisdiction. A party tends to accept its members’ requests for affiliation and allow their self-management in committees concerned with particularistic benefits so that they can deliver specific benefits to each electoral district. In addition, a party tends to assign members who have average policy positions in the party to committees concerned with general benefits to make policies that satisfy many constituencies.

In modern governing, a variety of actors in the public domain daily make decisions with consequences for the common good, but how these actors are held accountable to political representatives is not always clear. While representative democracy in most societies still functions as the traditional standard, deficits in democratic control are perceived. There is an exercise of power-without-corresponding-representation. At the same time modern citizens appear hard to engage in politics. Representation-without-corresponding-participation also appears. We address this dual problem, one of accountability and one of legitimacy, in terms of political theory. Various strategies are explored, indicating that some of them contribute to bringing democracy up to date more than others. In particular, it seems fundamental to rethink contemporary democracy by connecting it with the multi-dimensional character of governance. Functional participation by modern citizens can enhance the legitimacy of the exercise of power by making the latter accountable in a multi-local way.

Feminism and rational choice theory have both been hailed as approaches with the potential to revolutionize political science. Apart from a few exceptions, however, work utilizing these two perspectives rarely overlaps. This article reviews their main contributions and explores the potential for a combined approach. It argues that a synthesis of feminism and rational choice theory would involve attending to questions of gender, strategy, institutions, power, and change. The contours and benefits of this approach are illustrated with reference to one particular area of research: the adoption of electoral gender quotas. Despite a current lack of engagement across approaches, this example illustrates that the tools of feminist and rational choice analysis may be brought together in productive ways to ask and answer theoretically and substantively important questions in political science.

This paper deals with the often-observed complex relationship between the so-called old, ‘economic’ left/right alignment (egalitarianism) and the new, ‘cultural’ alignment. Many authors have observed that the less educated members of society occupy an apparently contradictory position, combining a leftist stand in favor of more equality and government intervention, with a rightist stand on minority rights, the treatment of criminals, and other aspects of democratic citizenship. Various explanations have been offered for this paradox. This paper proposes an explanation in terms of vulnerability and the way in which it is culturally processed. Less educated people are often vulnerable and long for more equality. The stronger their desire for equality, the greater their frustration when feeling vulnerable, and the greater the need to cope with that vulnerability. They do so, using particular narrative-coping strategies that create an affinity with the attitudes that form the new left/right alignment. One such coping strategy is based on feelings of relative deprivation. In the empirical part of the paper it is shown that relative deprivation completely explains the paradoxical position of the less educated, and that, when taking feelings of deprivation into account, the two left/right dimensions are in fact independent of each other at all levels of education, creating a situation that leads to tensions within parties that pursue egalitarian policies. The mechanism uncovered in this analysis reveals a tension at the heart of egalitarianism: the stronger the longing for equality among the vulnerable members of society, the more likely they are to opt for right wing positions on the new left/right dimension.

Does an increasing emphasis on individual freedom in mass values erode or revitalize democratic societies? This paper offers a new approach to this debate by examining it through the lens of Isaiah Berlin, and his distinction between positive and negative freedom. I show that, contrary to the common assumption among scholars who study mass values regarding freedom, these do not consist of one dimension but two: negative and positive freedom. I also show that, while valuing negative liberty clearly leads a person to become more morally permissive and more condoning of non-compliance with legal norms, valuing positive liberty does not seem to have the same effects at all; in fact, it shows the very opposite relationship with respect to some of these attitudes. Thus, it matters what kind of freedom people value. The results rely on confirmatory factor and regression analyses on World Values Survey data from ten affluent Western countries in 2005–2006.

Theoretical work on parliamentary government leads to the expectation that parties will defect from governing coalitions when they anticipate greater payoffs in replacement governments or after new elections; similarly, governments as a whole (or their prime ministers) will dissolve legislatures prematurely with the same expectation in mind. Surprisingly, however, very little empirical work has been done to assess the extent to which defectors from or dissolvers of coalition governments actually manage to profit from their actions. We also know very little about what happens to coalition members who engage in government-ending disputes. The purpose of this paper is to address these deficiencies by examining the fates of dissolvers, defectors, and disputers in West European democratic systems since 1945. The results show that parties generally end up no better off, and usually worse off, in terms of measurable benefits when they engage in these types of action.

Participation has undergone a communicative shift, which has favoured the organization of new participatory processes based on classic principles of deliberation theory. These experiments go beyond traditional protest: they include a communicative element with the aim of defining a public politics, which places them alongside models of deliberative governance. The present work sets out the characteristics of these new instruments (participatory budgeting, PB) in order to find out which problems deliberative governance initiatives are faced with. The conclusions tell us that the inequalities in participation are significant. Nevertheless, PB enables most participants to make effective use of their opportunities for deliberation. From this standpoint, the challenge for deliberative governance does not seem to be the deliberative capabilities of individuals, but rather the design of participatory procedures and the participation of individuals. We may question whether the administration can guarantee impartial political spaces that are as inclusive as possible.