Election

On Sunday, May 26, something quite remarkable happened in Kodaira city, western Tokyo: Over 50,000 citizens voted in Tokyo's very first local referendum (jūmin tōhyō) on the issue of whether a 50-year-old plan to construct a road should be reviewed or not. Unfortunately, the ballot ...

For most of its 34-year history, Iran has been run by clerics serving not just as supreme leaders, but also as elected presidents, their turban-clad figures becoming familiar worldwide as Iran's public face. However, the theocratic order, whose base is Qom, a dusty city about ...

India's Hindu nationalist opposition Bharatiya Janata Party on Sunday named controversial and polarizing leader Narendra Modi to head its campaign for the 2014 national elections, signaling that the pro-business politician may be the party's preferred candidate to lead the country if it wins. The appointment ...

Three years ago, newly elected British Prime Minister David Cameron was seen as a possible model for Republicans looking to update their party after losing the 2008 presidential election. Today, he provides an object lesson in the stumbling blocks that can lie in wait. Cameron, ...

Cory Booker has become one of the most famous mayors in the nation with the help of a careful political campaign that cast him as a unique talent willing to forgo better opportunities to save this crime-ridden and poverty-plagued city. His story has been enhanced ...

President Barack Obama's professed ignorance of the targeting of conservatives by one government agency and his support of tracking journalists' sources by another highlight one of the great paradoxes of his presidency: Sometimes he uses his office as aggressively as anyone who's held it; ...

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Sunday that the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly election in June will be a litmus test for the government he formed in December. "It's a battle in the capital and is almost as crucial as a national election," Abe told reporters in ...

Not just anyone is allowed to become president of Iran. But just about anyone can sign up to be considered, and the dozens of candidates who lined up to do so in Tehran on Tuesday offered a window into the uncertainty and confusion surrounding an ...

Winning a grass-roots political campaign in Pakistan or anywhere else depends on having committed, hardworking volunteers. Iftikhar Ali Mashwani, an aspiring provincial lawmaker, has come to realize that his supporters are neither. "When I go into the villages and the fields, I should see my ...