The organization of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party, arguably the most successful political party in the democratic world (1955-1993; 1994-2009), has rarely been studied as a factor in its success, or in its sudden loss of power in 2009. This paper uses an historical institutional approach to...

Paper prepared for delivery at The American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Toronto, Canada, September 3-6, 2009. Panel Title: Leadership and Policy Change in the Era of Complexity. In 1994 Japan instituted an electoral and campaign finance reform that changed its electoral...

How do interest groups choose across different venues of lobbying to influence policy? Why do some interest groups lobby politicians and others lobby bureaucrats? In contrast to the existing approaches that view lobbying as one-sided action by organized interest in an effort to influence a...

Faced with a formidable competitiveness problem, the American government chief executive appeared to offer a series of ad hoc responses in the 1980s. Contrarily, this article suggests that executive responses to foreign economic challenges follow a predictable pattern. Pointing to the...