Abstract
Why so many legacy Diet members? This article estimates the effect of being legacy candidates on the “vote succession rate” (i.e. the ratio of citizens who vote for a candidate in an election to citizens who also will vote for the candidate's successor in the next election). This study proposes comparing legacy challenger with non-legacy challengers, not incumbents. This new statistical method estimates the effects of party and personal votes on the vote succession rate as well. We analyze the data of the Liberal Democratic Party candidates under the single member district system and find as follows: (i) the legacy challengers' advantage against non-legacy challengers is not less than the incumbents'; (ii) the effect of party votes is the same as that of legacy votes, but the effect of personal votes is not confirmed; and (iii) the legacy challengers' advantage emerges not because they are young or reelected many times.
