Electoral Systems and Party Personnel

This presentation introduces a new multi-year collaborative research project funded by the National Science Foundation of the United States commencing in July 2008. The Principal Investigators (PIs) are Ellis Krauss, Robert Pekkanen and Matthew Shugart. Our aim is to examine how electoral systems affect what we call “party personnel strategies” (encompassing both party nomination and ranking strategies as well as party and legislative organization). To do this, we employ analysis of eight countries—four of which experienced electoral system change (the other four are control or “steady-state” cases for us): Bolivia, Germany, Portugal, Japan, New Zealand, Ukraine, Lithuania and the United Kingdom. Because of the vast scope of the project, a number of collaborators will play a vital role in the project.

Robert Pekkanen is Chair of the Japan Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He holds a Ph.D. in political science (Harvard, 2002). He has published numerous articles on Japanese politics. His recent book on Japan’s civil society, Japan’s Dual Civil Society: Members without Advocates (Stanford, 2006) won the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize in 2008 and an award from the Japanese Nonprofit Research Association (JANPORA) in 2007. A Japanese translation by Hironori Sasada appeared in 2008 from Bokutakusha: 『日本における市民社会の二重構造：政策提言なきメンバー達』.