The most important long-term political forces operative in the Japanese political system are the interplay of decentralized community authority and the consolidation of that authority toward the top. The mura kyodotai (village community) concept is representative of both types of authority, neither of which has defined boundaries. An examination of the nature of indigenous community authority may provide the broad context for a valid understanding of Japanese decision making. Under the ideal of this order, Japanese political organization has valued the structure of Shinto: polytheistic local authority, plus conflated authority of church and state. Buddhism and Confucianism have provided direction and moral force to preserve traditional order.

This investigation is concerned with testing a causal model linking changes in a political system's socio-economic environment with alterations in political characteristics. The specific forces of interest are those relating to urbanization and industrialization, the development of that way of life called urbanism, and the effects of these environmental changes on voter participation and, ultimately, inter-party competition. The test model hypothesizes that the processes of urbanization and industrialization together create urbanism, which then affects party competition both indirectly by means of stimulating participation, and directly as well. To illuminate these processes, this study focuses on the American South of the last 30 years because it is in this region that the kinds of changes implicit in the test model have been observed, and thus the region offers the best arena for examining that model.

Studies of political parties in Latin America have often been descriptive and not directed to link a theoretical foundation about political parties with qualitative or quantitative empiricism. This was in part because parties in the region were usually perceived as rather unimportant in the political arena. This study attempts to correct this often unjustified proposition by focusing on the development of political parties in five Central American countries: Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The analysis focuses particularly on the relationship between party fragmentation, party polarization, the level of democracy, and socio-economic modernization. The quantitative analysis uses a cross-national longitudinal research design and tries to overcome shortcomings in prior descriptive approaches based on case studies. The overall findings show that party fragmentation and party polarization are positively related to the level of democracy in Central America.