Abstract
Why did many Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) supporters vote for the Osaka Ishin’s candidates in the 2019 Osaka cross elections? This paper examines whether twisted party support, which is defined as the phenomenon in which voters support different parties in national and local politics, caused the split voting among LDP supporters or not. Inconsistency of electoral systems between national and local assembly elections in Japan provides greater autonomy to the federation of Osaka prefecture LDP branches (“Osaka- Jimin”). As a result, LDP supporters regard “Osaka-Jimin” as an independent organization and evaluate it differently from LDP as a national-level party. The results of the survey experiments in this paper support the twisted party support hypothesis. This implies that the operationalized definition of party support should be reconsidered, and that the inconsistency of electoral systems sophisticates the voter’s competence for party recognition in Osaka.
