It feels like they're comparing different things though. In the US, they use voter registration / party identification as "membership", while they use actual membership in other countries. My grandmother always used to vote for the Social Democrats in Germany, certainly identified with them, but was never a member. She wouldn't show up as a party member here, but she would if she did the same in the US. It seems "true believers" would be the better metric to compare to the US party affiliation.

Also, it's amazing how bad that website is built. Thanks for the bread crumbs to follow.

Indeed, it’s meaningless to compare party “membership” in the US to being a real, card-carrying, dues-paying member of an organization in another country.

European parties can probably count on a higher level of active participation, but when it comes time to vote or donate, party membership definitely matters.

Party meetings in European political parties often involve checking you off against a membership register that in many cases is secret (not shared with the government in any way), and often e.g. requires you to be up to date with membership dues to have access to the meetings. Membership subjects you to rules, including behavioural, and commitment to a shared aim, restrictions on support for other parties, and the like. You can be subject to disciplinary hearings, and can be expelled. For many parties e.g. publicly expressing support for another party can be an expulsion ground. Some parties will do things like check your social media in advance of granting membership. Many have rules that requires a waiting time from you have been a member of another party before you can be admitted, etc.

You would not get more than a tiny fraction of the people who are registered Republicans or Democrats to subject themselves to that.

At the same time many of these parties certainly reach far outside their membership for donations, and none but the very smallest rely only on their members for votes.

I think they meant another dimension than you. I've looked into the underlying value systems in the US and Germany as part of my phd, and the underlying moral frameworks are essentially identical: there are two basic ideas of how a society should look like (the progressive and the conservative idea), and what each idea consists of is almost identical (modulo country-specific weights).

* criminal justice: redemption vs. retribution

* social safety: more of it, and collectively organized vs. less of it, and individually organized

* abortion/women's rights: pro women vs. contra abortion

* environmental protection: important vs. unimportant

* education: focus on equal opportunities for all vs. focus on elite institutions

and so on.

The actual parties differ of course, and the overton window of "mainstream" political views certainly do. But the underlying moral dualism has the same two poles.

But those can mostly be explained within each moral framework (e.g. social conservatism is keeping the us vs. them mentality: "no social benefits for immigrants" or similar).

Keep in mind these are not totally coherent, precisely defined theories, but instead are formed subconsciously by growing up in a particular social environment.

And to clarify, the main point of the article is that in Japan politics is not organised around how people stand on these moral questions, not that these debates don't happen. The article does not, for example, make the claim that in Japanese criminal politics there isn't a debate between redemption and retribution but rather that positions of the individual politicians in this debate will not correlate very much with their party allegiance.

Why? In my understanding the overton window is a sliding frame on an axis, so it makes no statement about the axis, only about the position on the axis.

> And to clarify, the main point of the article is that in Japan politics is not organised around how people stand on these moral questions, not that these debates don't happen.

Yes, that is what I have understood from the text, too. I find it hard to believe that there is no ideological consistency there (how are people able to make moral decisions without them, i.e. integrate their behaviour with their sense of identity?), though just as in the west the ideology and the actual political practice can obviously differ widely.

I guess it's a technical and semantic objection: A (one dimensional) window by necessity has two endpoints, and "pole" is a word that defines a point. Your use of pole is however more in the sense of direction rather than endpoint; an axis is a direction and as such can be defined by any two points along it and no set of points have such a privileged position that they warrant the label "pole".

> I find it hard to believe that there is no ideological consistency

Again, it's a statement about how parties are organised and not about how people in general believe the world works. Though I suppose this circumstance also implies there is a fairly dominant agreement on the essentials of the world-view.

It is a bit interesting to read such an outsiders perspective though, as an outside impression can be a useful basis for self-reflection.