Is the “bad politician” image in political dramas projected onto real politics?:

Evidence from a survey experiment based on Hanzawa Naoki

Abstract

  This paper examines why and to what extent incidental contact with a fictional politician in a TV drama is projected onto distrust of the actual political space through a survey experiment using the drama Hanzawa Naoki. Previous research on the political effects of television has focused on content assumed to be “political,” such as political news or reports. However, these studies have not examined the causal effect of TV on political attitudes due to the problem of selective exposure. In this paper, we hypothesized that the image of a politician that people encountered in Hanzawa Naoki, a TV show that has extremely high viewership and is very well-known in Japan, could influence the real political space. We tested this hypothesis using a survey experiment. The results revealed that the exposure to the “bad politicians” depicted in Hanzawa Naoki aroused distrust of politicians in the real political world. However, in the population group that was politically indifferent, viewing Hanzawa Naoki had the reverse effect of increasing trust in politicians.