Electoral Studies 23 (2004) 251–278 www.elsevier.com/locate/electstud Adaptive parties: party strategic capacity under Japanese SNTV 1 Andy Baker a,* , Ethan Scheiner b,c a Department of Political Science, University of Houston, 447 Philip G Hoffman Hall, 77204-3011 Houston, TX, USA b Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, CA, USA c University of California, Davis, CA, USA Abstract What shapes a party’s ability to act strategically? We address this question by examining nomination behavior under Japanese SNTV/MMD, a system offering data that overcome the shortcomings of measurement error and static analysis that plague empirical research on party strategy. We run a series of generalized event counts (GEC) to model the number of candidates each Japanese political camp nominated at the district level in eleven different elections. The number of nominees is a highly strategic decision under SNTV, resulting in a statistical anom- aly: an underdispersed event count variable. Based on the GEC results, our principal substan- tive finding is that parties are not as strategically capable as the existing scholarly literature claims. Even when parties are willing to act as a unified strategic group, informational uncer- tainty may leave them unable to do so. We also find that, despite factors that should have mitigated against strategic capacity, both ruling and opposition parties in Japan frequently responded to one another by seeking to take advantage of their opponents’ strategic errors.  2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Party strategy; Japan; SNTV; Uncertainty; Dynamic analysis; Generalized event count models * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-713-743-3905; fax: +1-713-743-3927. E-mail addresses: abaker@uh.edu (A. Baker); scheiner@stanford.edu (E. Scheiner). 1 Especially great thanks to Ken Greene, Rob Weiner, Steve Reed, Ray Christensen, Orit Kedar, Meg McKean, Susan Scarrow, Jun Saito, Masahiko Tatebayashi, John Brehm, Charles Franklin, Paul Johnson, and anonymous reviewers for many extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts of the article. Thanks also to Gary King, Curt Signorino, Bert Kritzer, Brad Palmquist, Brian Humes, Bernie Grofman, Sam Merrill, Hironaka Yoshimichi, Kobayashi Yoshiaki, Bonnie Meguid, Mark Berger, and Scott Seaman for very helpful suggestions and information. Special thanks to Greg Flemming and Bob Turner for their insights into the seats–votes relationship. 0261-3794/$ - see front matter  2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/S0261-3794(03)00039-8