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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.