Japan has a new government and a new opposition. Now what?

Four years into writing sporadically about Japanese politics, the overall impression is that there’s a tremendous amount of noise, a steady drumbeat of events that look interesting and impactful at first glance but turn out to have meant nothing. Bureaucratic and cabinet-level scandals are common; election days are common (there’s a general election, upper house election, …

Political Pendulums: The 3+1 Rule of Re-Election

This is a half-baked "theory" that I've been pondering for a bit. There are plenty of holes, which I openly concede in the piece, but I'm sharing it in the hopes that some part of it might be interesting to someone, and a constructive discussion might follow. Canadian politics often follows what can be called …

Proportional representation: Why I’ve changed my mind

Another entry in my never-ending pontifications about majoritarianism vs. proportionality — though I have a much different take this time. Essentially, I think what happened is that I mistook disagreeing with certain arguments in favour of proportional representation with disagreeing with PR itself. As the Canadian government’s PR exploration came to a close, and the slew of …

What this election suggests about Canada’s parties

The last federal election occurred just weeks after I arrived in Canada for university, more or less by accident. In my mind, the parliament created by the election told me who Canada was and what it valued, and it became an integral component of the country I learned so much about over the next four …

[For MIR] European Elections 2019: Something at Stake?

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