Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between policy preferences, issue importance, and vote choice in the 2021 Japanese general election using online survey data collected in February 2022. Regarding policy preferences, unsupervised classification was applied to the integrated data of a candidate survey and this study’s survey, and the respondents were grouped into nine clusters. The results suggested that, though few people supported the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)’s positions broadly, the LDP obtained votes mainly from conservative voters on security and nuclear power issues, while liberal oppositions failed to garner votes from voters with policy preferences close to theirs. Regarding issue importance, the author conducted a conjoint experiment to determine which issues were important to each respondent. The results revealed that not only security and nuclear power but also consumption tax and same-sex marriage were important; furthermore, the latter issues were more important than the former.
