The Japanese Diet: Parliamentary Groups and Lawmaking

By exploring specific incidents and parliamentary practices and reviewing how parliament operates across a typical year, this chapter highlights the significance of the negotiation between parliamentary groups, explaining how the Diet rules and procedures strongly influence parliamentary behavior. Representative democracy functions through the interconnection of the legislative and electoral systems, affecting the fusion and diffusion of powers. The constitutional fusion of power underlies the whole process of lawmaking in the Diet. However, one-party dominance makes the government and opposition relations permanently asymmetrical. Unless elections allow voters to choose a government, the majoritarian control to make the ruling party accountable will not work, and legislative activities will remain mismatched with electoral competitions.

The Happiness of Nations

This paper reexamines the concept and determinants of happiness within global society involving Western and comparable societies such as OECD countries. The review of the literature suggests that it leaves a certain void with respect to the bearing of types of contemporary societies on happiness and its societal conditions. The paper argues that a particular type of these societies, denoted as the combination of welfare capitalism and liberal democracy, tends to create the best societal conditions for a happier society than do other types, such as those described as the compound of oligarchic-plutocratic capitalism and illiberal ‘democracy’ and mixed social systems. It then presents varied evidence in strong support of the argument demonstrating that this type of society is the most successful in creating objective conditions for realizing the ideal of the ‘greatest happiness to the greatest number’ of its members compared to its opposite and mixed alternatives. The paper concludes that the evidence strongly confirms that welfare capitalism/liberal democracy functions as the strongest determinant and predictor of the happiness of societies today.

Political Parties

Political Parties, William Cross, The Canadian Democratic Audit series; Vancouver, UBC Press, 2004, pp. 218.Political Parties is part of the Canadian Democratic Audit series. The expressed aim of the series is to “examine the way Canadian democracy functions” using three benchmarks, “public participation, inclusiveness and responsiveness,” with the principle output being not so much a report card but the desire to “encourage ongoing discussion of how best to fashion Canada's democratic institutions and practices well into the new century” (http://www.mta.ca/faculty/arts-letters/canadian_studies/cda/pdf/demaudit_overview_15aug.pdf). Cross's short, readable volume achieves these objectives.