H ow do electoral incentives affect legislative organization? Through an analysis of Japan's mixedmember electoral system, we demonstrate that legislative organization is strongly influenced not only by the individual legislators reelection incentives but also by their interest in their party gaining power and maintaining a strong party label. Electorally vulnerable legislators are given choice legislative positions to enhance their prospects at the polls, whereas (potential) party leaders disproportionately receive posts with greater influence on the party's overall reputation. Members of Parliament elected from proportional representation (PR) lists and in single member districts also receive different types of posts, reflecting their distinct electoral incentives. Even small variations in electoral rules can have important consequences for legislative organization. In contrast to Germany's compensatory mixed-member system, Japan's parallel system (combined with a "best loser" or "zombie" provision) generates incentives for the party to allocate posts relating to the distribution of particularistic goods to those elected in PR.

This article traces the effects of Japan's 1994 electoral reform on Japan's governing party, the LDP. Factions have lost their central role in nominating candidates and deciding the party presidency but remain important in allocating party and Diet posts. Unexpectedly, kōenkai have grown stronger because they perform new functions. PARC remains important but diminished by the enhanced policymaking role of party leaders in the coalition government. A central theme is unpredicted organizational adaptation-"embedded choice"since 1994. We speculate on how this flexibility of the LDP, adapting old organizational forms to new incentives, its "discreet charm," may affect Japanese politics and the LDP's potential longevity in power.

Studies of venue shopping have typically analyzed the case of an individual advocacy group or issue campaign rather than comparing venue strategies across multiple groups. Moreover, this literature focuses on interest groups and advocacy coalitions whose principal mandate is to influence public policy. Using original data, we test theories of venue selection among nonprofit organizations that report engaging in policy processes but the majority of which do not self‐identify as an advocacy group. Our analyses explore the “where” of nonprofit advocacy across three different venue types: branch (executive, legislative), domain (bureaucracy, elected officials), and level of government (local, state, federal). Like interest groups, we find that nonprofits shop among both executive and legislative branches and among elected and bureaucratic domains; however, they tend to specialize in one level of government. Geographic scope and revenue source predicted venue targeting, but most other organizational characteristics including age, capacity, and structure did not.

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The Japanese developmental state catapulted Japan into economic prominence. However, almost just as world attention focused on Japan's distinctive model, the era of the developmental state was drawing to a close. A generation of scholars has ably documented the story of Japan's developmental state by focusing on industrial policy. They chronicled how a strong bureaucracy buffered by insulation from politicians lay at the heart of the developmental state. As Joseph Wong points out in the introductory essay to this special issue, scholars have also argued that the developmental state contained within itself the seeds of its own dismantling.1Since the 1960s, formal powers had been stripped from the bureaucracy, leaving it increasingly dependent upon “administrative guidance” not legally enforceable.2By the late 1980s, the very success of the developmental state had eroded the powers of the bureaucracy to set industrial policy.