How Do Negative Evaluations of Past Social Movements Affect Political Participation? Explaining Japan’s Low Level of Political Participation

Abstract

Why is political participation among the Japanese at such a low level compared to other countries? Why has it continued to decline over the past 30 years? Why has nonconventional and protest participation other than voting also consistently declined, unlike in other countries? As a new theoretical explanation, this article focuses on the effect of the negative evaluations of past large-scale social movements on the level of political participation including volunteering and donations. We hypothesize that Japanese people may be averse to political participation due to the negative image of past social movements projected onto political participation in general, with the exception of voting participation. Through a quantitative analysis of our original survey data based on multiple imputation methods to address the missing value problem, this article finds that negative evaluations of the struggle against the 1960 revision of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty and the 2015 protests against the enactment of the Peace and Security Act are negatively correlated with the level of political participation other than voting. We conclude that negative memories of past social movements discourage Japanese people from participating in politics and civil society.