SOCIAL CHANGE AND VOTING BEHAVIOR IN POSTWAR JAPAN

Science, technology and society in postwar Japan

SHIGERU NAKAYAMA, Science, technology and society in postwar Japan, Japanese Studies Series, London and New York, Kegan Paul International, 1991, pp. xv, 259, £45.00 (0-7103-0428-5). Shigeru Nakayama's new book is a welcome addition to the literature available in English on Japanese science and technology. As the title suggests, the writer, a distinguished historian of science, has set himself ...

Effects of social norms and fractionalization on voting behavior in Japan

This paper uses prefecture-level panel data from Japan, spanning the period 1989–2003, to examine the influence of social norms and fractionalization on voting behavior. The key findings obtained from analysis via the fixed effects estimation, which controls for unobserved prefecture-specific fixed effects, are as follows: (1) the voter turnout is higher in close-knit communities, indicating th...

Law, Culture, and Conflict: Dispute Resolution in Postwar Japan

Voting Theory, Data Fusion, and Explanations of Social Behavior

The challenge of using communications infrastructure to stabilize other infrastructures is related to research on the collective communications systems in social animals, robots, and human-non-human interaction. In these systems, voting models can explicate patterns of observed behavior or predict collective outcomes. Developing more theoretical deductive explanatory power can increase our know...

Individual behavior, culture, and social change.

The principle of operant selection is examined as a prototype of cultural selection, and the role of the social environment is suggested as the critical element in the emergence of cultural phenomena. Operant contingencies are compared to cultural selection contingencies, designated as metacontingencies. Both of these types of contingency relations result in evolving lineages of recurrences tha...