Assigning Responsibility on Education between the Private and the Public:

An Analysis of Public Opinion from a Social Space Approach

Abstract

In contemporary Japan, tuition-free education is discussed as a solution for social problems such as the growth of inequality or the low birth rate, and the cabinet has decided to promote a ‘new economic policy package’ including the provision of free early childhood education and free higher education. However, opinion polls reveal that there is no consensus on such a policy. Research on this topic also points out that there is no difference among social classes in terms of their agreement or disagreement. Furthermore, it shows that a respondent’s education makes no difference in their attitudes toward government responsibility. This seems to contradict a common view that higher education develops politically liberal values among its graduates.

However, it is difficult to discern ideological elements in an isolated question in an opinion poll. Instead, we should find a tendency among social classes in a combination of related questions. From this point of view, this paper analyzed a group of opinions about the relative importance of responsibility between the individual and the government both on the education of children and social security for the elderly and examined whether the social background of respondents had any effect. To this end, the paper used a Bourdieusian social space approach and applied a multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) to the data from JGSS-2012.

Various questions were also used to construct a space for opinions other than on the relative importance of responsibility. These were questions about economic inequality, the taxation system, atomic energy policy, family norms, social trust, social interest, political efficacy, and political identity. The principal component scores of the first two axes of MCA were mainly used to describe the relations among 52 modalities with 20 variables and then respondents’ demographic variables were located on a space through a supplementary procedure. The findings are as follows.

First, political attitudes could be described as a map with the two dimensions of economic adaptability and attitudes toward political participation. Second, we found the positive values of many opinions were located in the North-West and the negative values in the South-East of the map. This contrast reflected a gradient of social class and corresponded to the line of Bourdieu’s ‘capital volume.’ Third, although, from the idea of Bourdieu’s ‘capital composition’, an attitude toward a so-called ‘new politics’ was expected to stretch over both the North-East and the South-West, such a tendency could not be confirmed. Only opinions on the relative importance of responsibility formed such a contrast. In the same way, most occupations were located in a group on the line in that direction with the exception of a small contrast between traditional professionals and managers or proprietors. These facts mean that the idea of tuition-free education has not become a political argument in society as a whole. Finally, young people and students were found in the area characterized by individual responsibility. This fact also implies that they simply accept actual conditions without considering them to be controversial. On the whole, the usefulness of the social space approach in the analysis of political attitudes seems to be confirmed.