The concept of partisanship has been one of the central topics of the voting research in Japan as in other democratic countries. While whether the original concept of party identification developed in the U. S. is transportable to other countries is still under debate, the party support variable (measured by the question, “which party do you usually support?”) is often treated as functional equivalent to the party identification measure in Japan.
This review article reminds researchers of Japanese voting study of a need for a careful look at the party support variable. It does so by going “back to the basics.” It evaluates the party support variable against the four basic assumptions of the original party identification concept: the sense of identification, its stability, its unidimensionality, and its transitiveness.
Citing the existing works and drawing some new data, the article concludes that 1) the party support variable is not exactly measuring the sense of self-idenification with a party, 2) it is not as stable as its counterpart is assumed to be, 3) it is increasingly difficult to map the Japanese current political parties on the left-right uni-dimensional scale, and 4) whether its operational definition meets the transitiveness assumption is questionable.

View full abstract

This review article surveys the relevant literature of issue voting, namely the studies of the effects of issue attitudes on voting behavior. This subfield of voting behavior studies brought about the biggest controversy in the history of voting behavior or electoral studies in the United States.
The core of issue voting controversy is a question regarding whether an average voter (the general public) can understand policy issues at the time of an election and whether he/she can make vote decision based on his/her issue attitudes. The American Voter (Campbell, Converse, Miller, and Stokes, 1960) found that not so many American voters could cast their votes based on their rational judgment of public policy. In the 1970s, the “revisionists” found some contradictory evidences against the findings of The American Voter. Thus, the issue voting controversy developed.
In my view, the issue voting controversy reflected the difference in epistemological attitudes of the scholars between the Michigan school of voting behavior and the so-called the “revisionists” who criticized the Michigan school. The revisionists' efforts to respond to the criticism from those advocated “post-behavioralism”. On the other hand, the scholars of the Michigan school seem to have firmly devoted themselves in scientific rigor.
But, as the result of this big controversy regarding issue voting, the discipline of voting behavior could confirm the “rationality of the voters, ” which lead many students of political science to the rational model approach (or formal modeling approach), because this approach is based on an assumption of the rationality of an average man. Thus the issue voting controversy itself contributed to the development of political science.

View full abstract

This article critically reviews the literature on the voting in response to governmental past performance (“retrospective voting”) and short-run economic conditions (“economic voting”). A state of the art of research into the qestion of both whether and how a person votes, based on both aggregate time-series analyses and cross-sectional analyses of individual survey responses, are discussed. Further progress in these areas, I argue, requires comparative perspective and extensive treatment of systemic and contextual variables in the model.

View full abstract

Mathematical modeling of elections has progressed since the work of Anthony Downs. This research can be roughly divided into two types. The first asks, “What kind of policies will candidates offer?” and the second, “Will voters vote or not?”
The first type is called the “spatial theory of elections.” It places rationally-acting candidates into a hypothetical election under certain assumptions, and asks what policies will represent the maximum exercise of candidates' rationality. Recent research has built spatial theories addressing the two-step process of primary and general elections, and analyzed elections under the single non-transferable vote system, among other topics.
The second type of research tries to establish the conditions under which rationally-acting voters will vote or abstain. This work has so far identified the size of voting costs and of differentials in expected utility from different candidates' victories as key influences over voting participation.
There seem to be two trends ahead in the field. The first will be continued efforts to bring hypothesized election conditions closer to reality. The second will be the application of actual election data to various mathematical models in order to identify the best among them.

View full abstract

The general election held on October 20, 1996 was the first election after the 1994 electoral reform of the House of Representatives. The new electoral system combines two different electoral systems: a single-member constituency system (300 seats) and a proportional representation system (200 seats). Using locality-level aggregate data, this paper examined the impact of the new electoral system on voting behavior and campaign strategies, and identified a mechanism through which a voter's choice of candidates/parties in one system influences his/her choice in the other.

View full abstract

In recent years, both national and local elections have often recorded the worst voting turnout in Japan. In news articles, they say the battenness of choice in elections, which is caused by the convergence of Japanese political parties, is one reason for this decline in voting turnout.
By analysis of survey data in Sendai City in Japan, this paper attempts to examine this argument.
In this paper, it is shown that the electorate's cognition of party differentials declined suddenly from 1993 and it had an independent effect on voting turnout, even controlling party identification.

View full abstract

Political apathy has spread in Japan since the political reorganization ended in the winter of 1994. At the same time, the voting rates on national level has fallen. This paper reflects upon the relationship between them.

View full abstract

Former TV Asahi news executive Sadayoshi Tsubaki was the first journalist ever summoned to testify before the Diet in Japan. He was accused of slanting his network's coverage of the LDP in the 1993 General Election that led to the party's downfall.
In this paper, I analyzed the influence of that event on the TV news coverage of the 1996 Generaal Election by comparing with the TV news coverage of the 1993 General Election.
Content analysis made clear differences between two things. There was anti-LDP bias in the 1993 TV news coverage clearly, but in 1996 TV news offered more balanced information.

View full abstract

The 1996 general election was the first election after the new electoral system has adapted. When this elecoal system is justified, it is stressed that under the election system, selection would be party and policy centered. The aim of this paper is to answer whether the 1996 general election was party and policy centered or not, through an analysis of candidates' campaign pledge and voting behavior. Concretely, I investigate the cleavage of the parties, how the pledges of candidates are formed and whether or not the pledges affect the voters' behavior.
In the 1996 general election, the policies mentioned by many candidates were administrative reform, promoting welfare, saving protecting agriculture and objection to rising consumer tax and so on. Through factor analysis, the pledges have four dimensions. They can be interpreted as “administrative and fiscal reform”, “distributive policy”, “conservative or reformist” and “post-materialistic policy”. However, I cannot find any large difference in these dimensions among the candidates of different parties. Except the first dimension, these dimensions are not new one and from the first dimension, no cleavage can be found.
The main factor in forming the pledges is which party the candidates belong to. In some policy areas, the regional characteristics or candidates' career are significant. However, the degree of closeness of conpetion has no influence.
Finaly, I found the relation between the campaign pledges of policy package and voting behavior. But compared with oher factors of voting behavior, the pledges' influence is very small. So it is diffecult to say that the 1996 general election was a party and policy centered election.

View full abstract

In Japan, media politics have not prevailed because of several systematic reasons, such as oneparty rule by the Liberal Democratic Party for almost 40 years, peculiar election system, and so on.
But, some political reform, such as the public aid to the political party, the emergence of the other major conservative party (New Fronteer Party), the reform of the election system to the minor electoral district system, created the condition to encourage more media strategies.
In 1996 general election, many political advertisements appeared. Especially, New Fronteer Party invested far more campaign funds for political advertisements than Liberal Democratic party.
At first, New Fronteer Party focused on the issue about the consumer tax, and attacked the policy of Liberal Democratic Party, but Liberal Democratic party took the effective revenge by attacking the contradiction of the policy of New Fronteer Party about the consumer tax by the political advertisements.
This advertisement was magnified by the media coverage, and New Fronteer Party lost its reliability.
As a result, Liberal Democratic Party won in the general election, but both political parties increased the political distrust especially among the independent or the floating voters by going negative.

View full abstract

The influences of electoral forecasts on election results are called as “announcement-effects” in Japan. In this paper I examined indirect ways of “announcement -effect”, that is, how financial contributions to candidates or the morale boosting of campaign workers are affected by publication of pre-election poll results.
In the first part of this paper, the relationship between amounts of financial contributions for candidates and their positions in electoral poll results in the 1990-1993 general elections is examined by pass analysis, but it would be difficult to find such indirect announce-effects as a whole.
In the second section of this review, field research methods and questionnaire investigation are both used to study about morale changes of voluntary canvassing workers according to opinion poll figures in 1996 general election. In this inquiry, I could recognize that the enthusiasm for canvassing and intention to pay contributions of campaign volunteers are significantly increased when their candidate's position in polls is marginal.

View full abstract

The objective of this paper is to see if national election turnouts are significantly affected by local and national politicians' campaign efforts. I conducted a multivariate analysis, controlling for other factors that we know affect national election turnouts, and find the following results. First, I find that there is a statistically significant relationship between national election turnouts and local politicians' mobilization-related efforts. This relationship is more conspicuous in House of Councillors (HC) elections than in House of Representatives (HR) elections, implying that local politicians' mobilization-related efforts seem to play more pivotal roles in affecting the turnouts for HC elections than for HR elections, other things equal.
Second, I find a statistically significant relationship between national election turnouts and national politicians' mobilization-related efforts. I proxy national politicians' mobilization-related efforts as how much campaign money national politicians spend per eligible voter in each district. National politicians' mobilization-related efforts are positively correlated to turnouts for both houses' elections, meaning that spending campaign money boosts national election turnouts. Further, I find that money has more impact in HC than in HR elections.
Last, the occurrence of a double election increases the turnout for both houses' elections. Whenever the two houses' elections coincide, the average turnout is boosted by 3% for HC elections and 10% for HR elections.

View full abstract

Japanese local municipalities are facing the fiscal crisis. Using a survey dataset gathered in Japan, Korea and United States, this paper examines the linkage between the Japanese local political environment, especially mayoral election results, and the growth of the municipal expenditure.
The incumbent mayor wants re-election, and seeks several strategies for. Creating or keeping a good Mayor-Council relationship is a useful strategy. In election year, increasing expenditure is also important for re-election.
In Japanese local government, the less the mayor's political resources for re-election the more active the response to the council's needs. This result explains one cause for the growth of Japanese local expenditure, because most Japanese local councilors want to spend more. The local spending level is effected by the financial situation, and relates to the mayoral election year. The local budget tends to increase throught the mayoral election. However, the rate of budget increasing is more in the year after a mayoral election than in election year. The Mayor-Council relationship and the mayor's election result are important factors to determine local expenditure levels in Japan.
In addition, the mayor's political ideology relates to the mayor's financial preference toward spending a little in recent years. There are few differences between left, right, and “ainori” mayors' preferences. To explain local financial policies by party ideology is no longer impossible.

View full abstract

In 1994 Japan's electoral system was reformed and a new system, combining 300 single-seat districts and 200 seats under a proportional representation system, was introduced. The new system has been designed to facilitate the election of the candidate receiving the majority number of votes in most districts. The single-seat system is a first-past-the-post system. While the single-seat system places value on political integrity, stability and efficiency, the proportional representation system is supposed to reflect the public's overall will.
By their very nature, these contrasting systems create disparities in the voting results from each system. Accordingly, not only might it be unreasonable to describe election results as manifestations of the public will, but the legitimacy of the election itself is called into question.

View full abstract

Since 1928 in Japan, 24 times of general elections, except 1945, were carried out with constituencies returning several members but single vote. However the 1996 general election was fought under a mixed system. The new system consist of the 300 members elected in single-member constituency and the 200 proportionally distributed for parties in 11 blokes. The elector has two votes, one vote for a candidate in a constituency and anther for a party in a block. We could find some kind of mixed system in 19 century, but the proposal by Leon Bulum, in 1926, was first attempt in national election, in which 332 seats elected in single-member constituency and 212 divided proportionally in nation wide. But it was not adapted. Now a days, 18 countries out of 181 use mixed system. In this paper, we compare the systems of Japan, Germany, Italy, Hungary and a variation of Italian method, according to simulation by the Japanese, German and Italian election data. In a word, Japanese system are profitable for a big party as single-member constituency system, but it is insufficient to reflect minor opinion in Diet.

View full abstract

This paper will focus on the consequences of the 1982 amendments of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA).
As a result of congressional redistricting in fifty states according to congressional apportionment based on the decennial census held in 1990, more than fifty minority-majority districts including black-majority and Hispanic-majority dishing were created by the states. Why was a record number of minority-majority districts created in the 1990 round? This paper assumes the effect of the VRA 1982 amendments.
Numerous challenges against racially gerrymandered districting plans have been filed in federal courts pursuant to VRA and the Constitution. The United States Supreme court transformed its judicial standards to review whether unconstitutional “minority vote dilution” had existed in challenged districting plans from “result standard” to “intent standard” in 1980. It charged plaintiffs alleging discrimination with the burden of proof to show the existence of “legislative intent” of racial discrimination in the plan. To avoid the “intent standard” from VRA litigation, Congress passed the 1982 VRA amendment which prohibited states and political subdivisions from enforcing any change “in a manner which results” in discrimination, and provided “the extent minority has been elected to office” was “one circumstance” which would be considered to scrutinize alleged discrimination. Soon after passing the amendment, the Court withdrew the “intent standard”.
Section 5, which provided a “preclearance” clause that forced certain states from the get preclearance from the Department of Justice or a declaration judgement from the U. S. district court for the District of Columbia before implementing any change in voting practices, was given a more significant role under amended section 2. The department has a broad power to review the possibility of violation of section 2 in plans submitted by the states with avague standard. It construed section 2 to maximize the number of minority-majority districts, and directed several states to create more minority-majority districts to meet the requirement of section 2 in the 1990 round.

View full abstract

Yukio Ozaki (1858-1954), a member of the House of Representatives argued that time was not mature to enforce the universal election in Japan. After “Kome Sodo”, that was the riot broken out in 1918 because of a sudden rise in the prise of rice, he emphasized the necessity of the universal electiotion in 1919. He thought that it was necessary for the public to ecpress their opinion by means of voting.

View full abstract

The present paper is an attempt to review the progress of “World Wide Web” (WWW) and assess its potentials as the emerging election campaign and news madia. National elections took place in the United States and Russia in 1996 and in England and France in 1997. During the course of the presidential election in the United States, WWW emerged as The new election campaign and news media. As early as July of 1995, the first political website was set up by Internet, entitled “Political Site.” The first subscriber to the “Political Site” homepage was “The While House, ” followed by a presidential candidate, Lamar Alexander. Major mass media and several election-specific independent organizations in the United States were also quick to respond, each setting up a website and starting a special homepage exclusive to the presidential election. Taking the 1996 American and Russian presidential elections as example, this paper examines use of WWW as regards the location (address) of major websites exclusive to the presidential elections; the exten of coverage; the structure of web system; and social and political implications of WWW. It is concluded that WWW may be said to possess superior potentials as election campaign and news media. It has combined characteristics of TV (video-clips) and printed media (text) for election campaigning and news reporting; it offers a wider and greater freedom of information choice by “browsing” and “surfing”; and, above all these material features, it helps set the major “agenda” for the elections as do the conventional mass media; and it would encourage voters to participate in reciprocal communications with a wide variety of people and organizations, such as political parties, electoral candidates, election-spedific independent organizations, mass madia, and other voters as well.

View full abstract

The British general election in 1997 was an election in which so many record were broken. The Conservative share of the vote, 31.4%, was the lowest since the first modern election after the First Reform Act in 1832. This was the first time the Conservative returned no MPs in Scotland. It was the second time that the Conservative secured no seats in Wales.
The swing from the Conservative to the Labour was 10.0%. This was a second record after World War II. Blair could not beat the record of the Labour in 1945. But Blair was returned with 419 MPs and an overall majority of 179. This was the biggest in Labour's history. The Liberal Democrats experienced their best election for nearly 70 yeras. Their total, 46 seats, was last higher in 1929.
This paper analyzes the Labour's landslide victory from three points of view. The first is the analysis of regional voting behavior. The second is the analysis by social demographic factors. The impacts of the election system as well as the boundary changes on election result is finally analyzed. Some reasons for the Conservatives defeat and the Labour victory are explained in final part.

View full abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the canvassing which the Primrose League undertook in the late Victorian era in order to illustrate an important feature of election campaigns by the British Conservative Party in the present century. How did the Conservative Party, without surrendering its tradition, manage to maintain its grip on power despite changing political conditions in the late Victorian era? An answer to this question depends on the popular basis of Conservative support and its organization. According to Martin Pugh, however, the popular basis of Conservative support remains a relatively untrodden field. And the Conservative rank and file, as Stuart Ball suggests, has been curiously neglected in the study of modern British politics. Hence this paper offers an explanation by studying the activities and role of members of habitations, or branches of the League from 1883 to 1900.
The most important facts are as follows:
I. The Conservative candidates were able to depend on the canvassing of the League within the law at that time because the League mobilized its members as voluntary workers for the campaign.
II. The League systematically managed to make house-to-house visits, supported by Dames, Wardens and Sub-wardens of habitations.
III. The female members of the League took an active part in canvassing to assist the Conservative candidates.
On a survey of various historical materials this study shows the following conclusions:
The Primrose League formed the basis of campaign activity in constituencies and, above all, played a large part in modern Conservative politics as it gave importance to grass-roots activism. It is obvious from a historical point of view that constituency canvassing in present-day Britain has its beginning in the volunteer activities the League set about in the 1880s and 90s.

View full abstract

The article examines the 1996 Italian elections especially focusing on the transformation of the party system. Of the various changes in the Italian politics in recent years, the party system has experienced the most drastic change. The traditional parties such as Christian Democrats and Italian Socialist Party had formed the political system known as partitocrazia (partyocracy) but both the system and the parties have disappeared in the early 90s. New electoral systems for both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate introduced in 1993 accelerate the transformation of the party system. Under the new system, seventy five per cent of members are elected from single-member districts through a ‘first past the post’ system and twenty five per cent of them are elected through proportional system. This system was supposed to make the party system more competitive and to resolve the long-term Italian political problem the absence of alternation in government. This problem seems to be cleared, because after the 1994 elections, right wing coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi formed government and in the 1996 elections the center-left coalition under the symbol of Olive Tree with Communist Refoundation got a majority in both Houses. Does this truly mean that Italian party system is changing into the bipolar party system? Is the coalition the unit of recent Italian interparty competition? The formation of electoral coalitions indicates a tendency of bipolarization of parties, but it remains unclear that coalitions are the unit of competition because they are unstable and heterogeneous. If parties are the unit of competition, Italian party system is still far from being the two-party system, because it is too fragmented. It can be concluded that Italian party system after the 1996 elections is still unstable.

View full abstract

We usually choose one of two kinds of data on analyzing voting behavior in a certain area. One is survey data which is collected by researchers. The other is aggregate data which is prepared by using statistics. We know quite well the advantages of each. And selecting each data naturally leads to fixing some procedures and variables in many cases.
I intended to use both, and feed all 9 variables into a computer.
In this paper, I have aimed to predict an election in terms of three categories, that is, characters, local political activities, and political environment of the French deputies. I judged the most effective factors of these, which had controlled each other.
I calculated the following result of a logistic regression analysis: z=-1.6875+0.6308 (passed)+2.7082 (left)-0.1767 (long)+1.3034 (mayor)-0.9164 (prefect)+0.5869 (community)+0.4133 (decent.)-0.5868 (activity)-0.1108 (money) And r=0.2143 (passed), 0.1668 (mayors), 0.1370 (left), etc.
From these figures, it appears that the most important factors are characters of the French deputies. Compared with other elections, the 1997 French legislative election is not special. I think that we can apply this implication to other legislative elections in France.

View full abstract

The German electoral system is known as a system which combines the principle of proportionality with the relative-majority system of single-member constituencies. In the discussions on electoral reform in Japan, the German electoral system was regarded as an ideal model for the Japanese one. But does the German system really deserve to be admired as an ideal model?
In some constituencies in elections to the German ‘Bundestag’, where political parties are more familiar to voters than individual candidates, voters do not in fact choose a candidate from candidates of two major parties, but one of several candidates belonging to same party. For example, at a constituency in Land Baden-Württemberg, the ‘first vote’ means that a candidate from the CDU in this constituency is selected and that one of the candidates on the CDU party list is selected.
On the other hand there is a tendency in the proportional system for voters to select a party based not only on the party ideology and/or party program, but also on the candidate for Federal Chancellor. For that position the party leader of major parties is often selected. The election in 1990 was noted as a victory by the government parties (CDU/CSU/FDP), because both Chancellor Kohl and Foreign Minister Genscher greatly contributed to the German Unification.
But was it true? The Greens failed in the election due to the ‘5 percent clause’. One of the reasons for that was, that Lafontaine, the Chancellor candidate from the opposition party SPD, was popular among Greens supporters. He asserted that the environmental policy and peace movement, which were proposed by the Greens, are vital. The failure of the Greens increased the numher of ineffectual votes, consequently the shere of votes obtained the greatest parties, the CDU/CSU, rose.

View full abstract

The party system in India for about twenty years since independence was ‘one party dominance’ by the Congress party with the small parties around it. Since the end of the 1980s, the power of the Congress party has declined and the influence of non-Congress parties has increased. In recent years there is a strong tendency toward the multiparty system in India.
In this study, I analyzed the characteristics and the mechanism of the tendency toward the multiparty system in the House of the People in India. From the analyses of the results of eleven general elections from 1952 to 1996, I have discovered three matters. (1) The tendency toward the multiparty system has been confirmed by using the index of ‘Effective Number of Parties’ and by comparing the seats obtained by each party. (2) This tendency has been caused by the regional concentration of the power of each party. (3) Two kinds of parties have contributed to the regional concentration of the power of each party: the regional parties and the ‘nominal’ national parties.
It is possible to explain that the reason of this tendency is the change of the relationship between the society and the politics in India since the end of the 1960s. To examine ‘how’ these two variables are related will be the problem in the next study.

View full abstract