Michael Laver and Ikuo Kabashima, "Introduction: Political Change and the 1996 General Election in Japan," Party Politics, 4 (April 1998), 147-150.

First Paragraph:
This special issue of Party Politics presents a small part of the output of an ambitious new research programme linking Japanese and European scholars, arising from cooperation between the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) and the Japan Political Science Association (JPSA). After an initial exploratory meeting in Bordeaux, during the 1995 ECPR joint Workshop sessions, it was decided to form three working groups. Group 1, dealing with 'Domestic Political Change', is convened by Ikuo Kabashima and Michael Laver; Group 2, 'Comparative Political Economy', is convened by Hideo Otake and Stephen Wilks, and Group 3, 'Regional Integration', is convened by Matatoke lokibe and Richard Higgott. There are also plans to add a fourth workgroup, dealing with political theory in Europe and Japan. Preliminary workshop sessions were held in Dublin and Florence, leading to the first plenary meeting of the group in Kyoto in December 1996, and a second plenary meeting in Warwick in October 1997. A third plenary meeting is planned for Kumamoto in Novem-ber 1998.

Figures and Tables:
None.

Last Paragraph:
Overall, this special issue represents the first collection to be published as a result of an exciting new intercontinental collaboration between political scientists. A Japanese-language version is appearing in the journal Leviathan, and each of the other workgroups in the programme is generating an equivalent body of material. For our own workgroup, the next step is to broaden and deepen the type of analyses in the articles published here into a more comprehensive comparative exploration of the sources of domestic political change.