The notion of governance: a multi-level phenomenon

There is a substantial literature on governance, but little agreement on precisely what it means, as a result of which the term is often used in different ways. A sophisticated and flexible formulation is offered by The Commission on Global Governance, which defines governance as ‘the sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs. It is a continuing process through which conflicting or diverse interests may be accommodated and cooperative action may be taken. It includes formal institutions and regimes empowered to enforce compliance, as well as informal arrangements that people and institutions either have agreed to or perceive to be in their interest’ (1995: 2).

This paper analyzes voter choice in selected House of Representatives elections during the past 30 years. I estimate multinomial probit models using data from the Akarui Senkyo Suishin Kyokai (Society for the Promotion of Clean Elections) surveys and use qualitative data gathered in focus groups. I argue that no gender gap exists in the votes garnered by the main parties because, first, influential people are not simply able to ‘deliver’ votes from their networks — most accounts of voter choice fail to discuss gender, an oversight considering that most networks are gender-based — and, second, ‘women's issues’ have no special relevance to women in their vote choice. Instead, women and men vote for the Liberal Democratic Party because they associate the Party with stability and increased standards of living, including substantial social provisions.

Few events have drawn as much interest from the academic community as the breakdown of Soviet-style socialism in Central and Eastern Europe and the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union itself in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This paper might be classified as yet another in a continuous flow of scientific contributions, inspired by the collapse of communism. And this is indeed the case, but only in an oblique way.

The M + 1 Rule, that at equilibrium there should be only one more candidate running than seats available, extended Duverger's Law to the cases of more than one seat per district. Both the M + 1 rule and Duverger's Law have been confirmed repeatedly, albeit always with qualification. Yet we have reached no consensus on the mechanism that produces these two empirical regularities. In this paper I use a simple simulation to test the hypothesis that the mechanism is that candidates retire after some fixed number of consecutive losses. I test the results of the simulation against several different empirical results and find a reasonably good fit. I also add a mechanism for increasing the number of candidates. These results suggest that the M + 1 rule and Duverger's law may be the result not of rational calculation but of some simple set of decision rules. The analysis also illustrates the usefulness of a simulation approach to hypothesis testing.

Analysts have generally offered two explanations for China's no-devaluation policy during the Asian financial crisis. The first is China's good economic fundamentals and the renminbi is not fully convertible. The second is China's foreign relations' imperative. China was endeavouring to seek favourable entry conditions into the WTO and improve relations with its Asian neighbours. At the same time it sought to exploit the undercurrent of resentment in Asia towards the role played by the US during the crisis. Policy making in China has become more institutionalized in the post-Deng era, but these explanations ignore the role of China's domestic bureaucratic actors in exchange rate policy making. This paper examines the exchange rate regime preferences of China's key economic ministries and their influences in exchange rate policy making and argues that Party leaders were able to adopt a no-devaluation policy throughout the crisis because China's key economic ministries actively supported or acquiesced to that policy.

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. (James Madison, 1788)

Democracy is not only a (polyarchical) political regime but also a particular mode of relationship between state and citizens, and among citizens themselves, under a kind of rule of law that, in addition to political citizenship, upholds civil citizenship and a full net work of accountability. (Guillermo O'Donnell, 1999b)

As Indonesia democratises, a key feature of the country's political life has been a mixture of turmoil, hope and uncertainty. When Suharto's authoritarian regime collapsed in May 1998, Indonesia was experiencing the worst political and economic crises in more than three decades. On the political front, Suharto's collapse was preceded by communal violence, political turmoil, and state terrorism. Economically, the financial crisis, which came to Indonesia in December 1997, brought down the foundations of growth and pushed the country on to the brink of economic collapse. All these problems, which found their roots in the absence of democracy and good governance, worsened after the fall of Suharto. As the country moved towards democratic transition, however, society was imbued with a sense of hope for a better future, and that hope continues to exist until today. In that context, resolving current uncertainty constitutes the biggest challenge facing Indonesia in fulfilling the people's hope for a democratic future.

Previous studies on economic convergence have been handicapped by the lack of sufficient serial data. Real GDP per capita are now available for 56 states. With some interpolation, we create series from 1870 to 1992 for Northern (developed countries) and Southern (lesser developed countries) aggregates. The data are explored by extending the leadership-long cycle perspective to deal with convergence. We find that North–South inequalities, at least those based on GDP per capita data, have been expanding. The corresponding growth rates reveal long waves, providing an important clue related to iterations of radical technological changes and their incomplete diffusion in explaining the North–South gap. We believe that convergence is unlikely any time soon without radical restructuring of global economic growth prospects.

The governance of Russia is important in a multiplicity of ways. As the successor state of the Soviet Union, it retains characteristics of a global superpower, including a nuclear arsenal and a permanent seat in the Security Council of the United Nations. As a country with land or sea borders extending from Japan and China across Central Asia to the boundaries of an enlarging European Union, Russian affairs concern neighbours across much of the globe. As a land rich in natural resources such as oil, gas and gold, controllers of these resources have significant assets in the international economy. As a political system that has made a massive turn from a post-totalitarian one-party state to a government holding free competitive elections, the Russian Federation is a leading example of a regime in transformation. Above all, as the primary institution affecting the lives of more than 140 million people, the governance of Russia is important to its citizens.

This essay responds to Yuen Foong Khong's (2002) spirited defence of his Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Khong, 1992). The author had earlier criticized Khong's overemphasis of agency over structure in his accounting of the 1965 US troop deployment decisions (Duffy, 2001). This essay points to several deficiencies in Khong's defence. Chief among them are (a) the inconsistency between Khong's conception of structure and his professed constructivism, and (b) the false dualism between agency and structure open which Khong's defence rests.

The concept of ‘contextual rationality’ proposed by Browne and Patterson seems to advance our understanding of rational nomination strategies under the Single Non-Transferable Vote. The plausibility of this concept hinges on the assumption of perfect information. However, perfect information not only cannot be obtained in practice, but is also impossible to obtain if we follow Browne and Patterson's approach. What their approach provides is a post hoc rationalization for parties' nomination strategies rather than a priori criterion against which whether parties make rational decisions can be judged. This approach therefore may be helpful to the study of whether parties are punished for inappropriate nomination strategies, but is far from providing the rationale for them.

Over a decade has passed since the heady days of 1989 and 1990 when communist governments fell one after the other and almost all political parties taking part in elections shared the same goals: Democracy, the Market, and Back to Europe. In December 2002, the efforts of the new leaders of these countries to ‘return to Europe’ bore fruit in an event that many had in 1989 regarded as too farfetched to imagine, the invitation of most of the countries in the region to join the EU in 2004 or 2007. The culmination of a decade-long process of harmonization and negotiation, this invitation symbolized the success of these countries in instituting political democracies and market economies. But how complete is this process, particularly in the political realm?

This paper reports the results of the latest in a series of expert surveys of party policy positions in Japan and considers some of the implications of these results for our understanding of party competition and government formation in recent Japanese politics.

Theories of governance and Chinese understandings

There is a vast and eclectic literature about many forms of governance, including markets, bureaucratic hierarchies, associations and different types of networks. The Commission on Global Governance, for example, defines governance as ‘the sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs. It is a continuing process through which conflicting or diverse interests may be accommodated and cooperative action may be taken. It includes formal institutions and regimes empowered to enforce compliance, as well as informal arrangements that people and institutions either have agreed to or perceive to be in their interest’. Thus, ‘at the global level, governance has been viewed primarily as intergovernmental relationships, but it must now be understood as also involving non-governmental organizations (NGOs), citizens' movements, multinational corporations and the global mass of dramatically enlarged influence’.

Books reviewed

Peter A. Hall and David Soskice (eds.), Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

J. Rogers Hollingsworth and Robert Boyer (eds.), Contemporary Capitalism: The Embeddedness of Institutions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Torben Iversen, Contested Economic Institutions: The Politics of Macroeconomics and Wage Bargaining in Advanced Democracies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Torben Iversen, Jonas Pontusson and David Soskice (eds.), Unions, Employers, and Central Banks: Macroeconomic Coordination and Institutional Change in Social Market Economies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

The fragmentation of Yugoslavia has wrought extensive political and social change in the Balkans and Europe more generally. After the collapse of communism and the breakup of Yugoslavia, many Balkan countries have transformed their political systems. European states have attempted to engage and manage this breakup on an individual and collective basis. The involvement of the international community, and above all of EU countries adjacent to the Balkans, has greatly influenced processes of conflict resolution and post-conflict reconstruction in the region.

In the post-Cold War era, instead of peace and stability, we have witnessed many instances of regional conflict, domestic chaos, and civil strife. Moreover, economic globalization and the growing importance of transnational institutions have eroded traditional bases of political power. As such, emerging patterns of governance should be seen as ‘institutional responses to rapid changes in the state's environment’ (Pierre 2000: 3). Governance is carried out by many economic and political actors at a variety of levels, encompassing national government, regional institutions, and networks of non-state actors.

Executive turnovers during the second Koizumi cabinet (September 2002-present, as of August 2003) register the lowest of all the cabinets since the Miyazawa cabinet (November 1991–August 1993). This is predictable from Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's pledge when he first became Prime Minister in April 2001. He promised to appoint one cabinet minister (not two ministers or more) for one agency during the tenure of one cabinet. Furthermore, he pledged that he would do so without receiving a recommendation from factions of the governing Liberal Democratic Party. His first pledge reflects primarily Koizumi's belief that his appointments should last the full tenure of the cabinet as they are presumably the best for the task. His second pledge reflects his belief that LDP factions should cease, and, as a matter of fact, they have recently ceased to be a major factor determining Koizumi's politics. Both factors are related to each other.