[Part 3] Japan’s Weakly Rooted, Fragmented Left

Another component of the “55 System” was an opposition that was fragmented into four durable parties, with the largest among them, the Japan Socialist Party (JSP), winning roughly 20 percent of the vote. It is unlikely that opposition fragmentation contributed to LDP longevity, given that during this period, the median legislator and median voter was …

[Part 2] The Postwar LDP: More a Mini-Parliament Than a Party

Returning to a sentence from Part 1: "Explaining the 1955-93 period of LDP dominance requires investigating 1) how exactly the electoral system gave majorities to the LDP, 2) how the LDP stayed together, 3) how the LDP avoided voter backlash or fatigue, and 4) why the Left withered rather than surged." This post moves onto …

[Part 1] Did Institutions Manufacture LDP Dominance?

The research puzzle posed in the previous post begins with an exploration of the 1955-1993 period, during which the LDP governed continuously. Relative to its opponents, it was a “conservative” party in the sense of opposing major social change: they were skeptical of the changes imposed during the American occupation following World War II and …

[Intro] The Puzzle of LDP Dominance in Japanese Politics

In 2021, Japan held an election for the lower house as well as an election for the president of the governing party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). And although in a parliamentary democracy such as Japan, the election to the lower house is meant to be the most important election determining the country’s direction, it …

Thinking about Kyoto Transit

I've just gotten back from a trip to Kyoto, a gorgeous city that rightly gets attention from tourists around the world, but whose transit is really not up to the task. As a bit of background: the streets are on a grid, with major streets at regular intervals. Major destinations are scattered across the city, …

Future Montréal Metro, Redux Redux

I've done Future Montréal Metro maps in the past: a 2019 version here and a 2022 version here. The point of giving this yet another go is to 1) use the design language of the ARTM's new metropolitan map, and 2) add a city-centre tunnel that could transform the Exo lines into regional rail. Regarding …

Japan’s Railway Backbone

Japan is long and mountainous, and most of its major cities lie on a straight line along the Pacific coast. Through the centuries, the country has connected these cities with dirt roads, then normal trains, then high-speed trains, and now even faster trains (under construction). This stylized diagram depicts 2,150 km of high-speed rail and 2,833 km of standard rail, forming two unbroken lines of tracks spanning the whole country. Now, you can travel between any two points on here with, at most, five trains (three high-speed plus two connecting trains at each end).

Future Transit in the GTA

Following up on my previous post about the future of transit within Toronto, this is a map that includes all transit projects underway for the whole GTHA + Kitchener-Waterloo. "Underway" is, of course, a nebulous word, and there were a lot of judgment calls on what to include or not: Park Lawn GO is on …

How Canadian Party Coalitions Have Evolved (Or, Why We Are Still in the Fourth Party System)

(Initially written December 2022; updated in October 2023 with newer graphics.) More than two years ago, I wondered whether the Liberals were doomed to continue losing ground because of the West's faster population growth, and I did a bit of preliminary graphing to see how they have fared in each province since the 1960s. Now …

In Japan, an interesting debate (but it won’t matter)

Maehara (left) and Tamaki (right), proposing a policy to Prime Minister Kishida (centre). Japanese politics feels stuck as ever. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida leads a listless and unpopular government, its initial promises of a "new capitalism" having been watered down to nothing. And yet, no change in government appears forthcoming: as over the last decade, …