候補者の政策位置変更と代議制民主主義

抄録

This paper focuses on candidates’ policy positioning mechanism and its impact on vote fluctuation in the Japanese Lower House elections. In recent years, a serious fiscal crisis sometimes hits some democratic countries like Japan, the United States, and Greece. With regard to the crisis, Buchanan and Tullock have argued that contra-cyclical policies and rentseeking behaviors cause such fiscal problem in democratic countries. Then this paper analyzes the electoral relationship between whole voters and the candidates’ behaviors aiming at winning their seats and argues about the background of expansion and inefficiency of the Japanese government spending. Concretely, this paper has two kinds of analyses. One is to demonstrate the causal relationship between candidates’ position shifts (budget increase decrease on 13 policy areas) between the current and previous elections and its determinants the result of previous election (this is based on the Dynamic Responsiveness Theory / Fowler 2005), the gap of candidates’ numbers between the elections (Powell 1982), the number of successful elections (Instead of Incumbency / Powell 1982 Burden 2004), the candidates’ attributes, the urbanization level of each SMD, and party affiliation. The purpose of the second analysis is to investigate the effect of candidates’ positioning on their vote fluctuation. According to the results, the candidates who won in the previous election and have experienced party elites and local politicians tend to shift their positions to budget increase for the purpose of reelection. Moreover, candidates are inclined to take position on budget increase in case that they compete with more candidates in their districts than ever. DPJ candidates are more likely to shift than LDP. On the other hand, most voters select candidates not being affected by the candidates’ repositioning oriented toward budget increase. To summarize, voters do not always seek their self-interests when they vote, and to be blame may be the candidates who have shifted their positions toward an increase in order to get more votes. That is, representative democracy does not always cause the fiscal crisis in Japan. In addition, this paper also suggests that the Dynamic Responsiveness Theory works in Japan.