イデオロギーに着目した日本の青年の政治的成熟度の検討

抄録

　This study examines how politically mature Japanese adolescents are compared to adults and how political maturity increases in adolescence, focusing on the ideological consistency of issue attitudes and partisanship as a measure of voter competence. We conducted a pair of online surveys, one of which was for 15- to 22-year-olds and the other for the entire electorate, in 2017, and asked respondents their opinions about a variety of issues related to the left–right ideology. We analyzed the proportions of ideologically consistent attitudes using Dirichlet regression. The results indicated that, although young people have less ideologically consistent issue attitudes than older people, adolescents’ attitudes are more consistent than chance levels at the age of 15 and their consistency increases in adolescence. We also investigated the ideological proximity of partisanship by combining our data and that from an elite survey of the 2017 general election. The estimates of the sample-selection ordered probit model tell us that, among those who have partisanship, adolescents attach to parties that are ideologically close to them in the same manner as adults. Our results have implications for the discussion on lowering the voting age in Japan.