Abstract
This article examines a hypothesis that risk-averse voters are more likely to engage in split-ticket voting, using Japan as a case. A change in government leadership often brings about drastic policy changes, which may amplify social and economic uncertainty. Riskaverse voters who dislike such uncertainty will split their votes between different political parties/candidates to prevent a single party from holding a dominant status. The 2013 Japanese Upper House election is the best case to test this risk-management hypothesis. In this election, voters were faced with a decision of whether to give a majority status in the Upper House to the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that had already gained a majority status in the Lower House election just seven months before. Japanese Election Study V (JESV) data showed that LDP supporting, risk-averse voters were less likely to engage in straight-ticket voting for the LDP that had proposed to implement controversial policies such as unlimited quantitative easing for targeted inflation and enhancement of Japan's military capability.
