Abstract
What issues are city council members talking about in contemporary Japan? Many studies focus on local politics after the decentralization reform. However, few of these studies analyze legislative behaviors or policy orientation of city council members because it is hard to get microlevel data of them. This article implements quantitative text analysis of committee debate and employs a structural topic model, which enables us to reveal which issue each member is likely to take up in the legislative arena. We find that, except for issues which is extraordinary salient among voters and politicians, the proportion of each policy issue to the whole committee debate is correlated to voters’ interest. It also examines whether partisanship of politicians or their personal traits, such as gender or age, influence their policy orientation expressed as committee speech. We find that there are four patterns of relationship between personal traits and partisanship across policy issues.
