Brazil has a multiparty system which encompasses parties on the right, left, center-right, and center-left and elections are done via open-list proportional representation so voters can cross party lines and have a great deal more discretion (though this often leads to many ignoring any sort of party label altogether).  The party system in this country is extremely fragmented since personal qualities of candidates are emphasized and state parties select candidates, thus majority alliances are hard to attain.  The major conservative parties are PFL/DEM, PL/PR, and PP, the major centrist parties are PMDB and PSDB, and the major populist parties are PT, PSB, PCdoB, PDT, and PPS, and there is not currently any party that has over 25% of seats in either house of congress.  Much like Brazil, India has a multiparty system, however they’ve actually got a dominant party.  The Bharatiya Janata Party is dominant and the Congress Party is the major opposition party, so there’s not a huge divide among a plethora of parties as in Brazil.
The major parties in India are: congress, BJP and Allies, Janata, United From, and Communists; regional parties tend to secure roughly half of the vote, with the majority often going to BJP or Congress.
Japan, on the other hand, is slightly different from both of the aforementioned countries.  The country has a stable predominant party system; the major parties are the Liberal Democratic Party, Democratic Party of Japan, Clean Government Party, Social Democratic Party, Japan Communist Party, and Japan Restoration party.  While it is still a multiparty system, one party maintains a predominant position and control for an extended amount of time in government.  For Japan, that party is LDP.  Similar to India, there are three separate ideologies that the parties align with: right, center, or left.  These parties are well defined and candidates tend to stick closely to familiar positions (positions that align with party ideology) on policy issues.  Elections are done rather differently; 295 lower-house members are elected in single-member districts (one representative is elected by the first-past-the-post method) and 180 are elected by a party-list proportional representation, then 96 members of the upper house are elected via a party list PR method and 146 are elected from prefectures.

India is divided into twenty-nine different states, but they were structured around language groups.  The parliament retains the right to dissolve states or create new ones via subdivision, declare a state of emergency, impose martial law on a given state, can impose unitary state or directly govern a state whereas states, despite the strictly controlled federalism, have their own education systems, police forces, development plans, agricultural policy, and transport.  Brazil has twenty-six states in addition to the Federal District; the state governments are responsible for the economy, infrastructures, and planning, and are given their own sources of funding because the constitution specifies the percentage of federal taxes that must be returned to the states (thus they have a great deal of autonomy).  The states are given much more autonomy than in India, though the federal government is still very influential as the states don’t have administrative capacity to do what is required of the central government.  Japan, on the other hand, starkly contrasts in that it’s a unitary state with no federalism.
