Japanese Journal of Electoral Studies

U.S. Presidential Election of 2016

Why Did Clinton Lose and Trump Win the Election?

Takayuki NISHIYAMA

2017 Volume 33 Issue 1 Pages 5-17
Published: 2017
Released on J-STAGE: March 01, 2020

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.14854/jaes.33.1_5

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Defying pundit and journalist expectations of a landslide victory for Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump actually won the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Why did such an unexpected thing happen? This paper points out some important factors that influenced the election results. The factors that caused Clinton’s election loss include the strategic failure of the Clinton campaign, her e-mail problem, the so-called "Sanders revolution, " and Clinton’s failure to consolidate minority voters like Latinos and female. Trump’s strategy of distinguishing social issues and economic issues played a significant role in his victory – i.e., while making extreme arguments on social issues to consolidate the support of single-issue voters, Trump took a moderate stance on economic issues to win moderate supporters who did not trust the establishment. The reason conservative white working-class voters supported Trump is also explained.

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How Campaigns Aﬀect Electoral Results?

An Examination on the 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaigns

Masahito WATANABE

2017 Volume 33 Issue 1 Pages 18-29
Published: 2017
Released on J-STAGE: March 01, 2020

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.14854/jaes.33.1_18

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One of the interesting aspects of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election from the perspective of political campaign studies is that the loser, Hillary Rodham Clinton, had signiﬁcantly stronger campaign infrastructures in terms of fundraising, experienced staﬀers, and new technologies than the winner, Donald Trump, had. Why and how did this happen? What is the implication for the future campaigns? After the advent of the candidate-centered election in the 1970s, American political parties developed diﬀerent campaign methods. But, when and how those campaigns could be really effective is not a fully answered question, especially with regard to the emerging new minority votes and the "data mining-centered campaign" . To address that conundrum presented in the literature, this study examines the campaigns of the 2016 Presidential election. By particularly focusing on the outreach strategies, which were targeted approaches to diﬀerent voting blocs, this paper discusses the importance of the candidate dynamic in maintaining party coalitions.

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2016 U.S. Presidential Election and the Media

Kazuhiro MAESHIMA

2017 Volume 33 Issue 1 Pages 30-40
Published: 2017
Released on J-STAGE: March 01, 2020

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.14854/jaes.33.1_30

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This paper focuses on the media during the 2016 presidential election in the United States. First, two important phenomenon should be addressed: one is people’ s distrust of existing media, the other is media polarization. Both phenomenon had reached their bottom in recent years. Many incidents regarding the media are closely related with the two phenomenon. Those include the fake news syndromes, the liberal bias criticism, the popularity of fact checks, and candidates’ dependency on Twitter. Finally, this paper suggests that there are many similarities in terms of candidates’ media strategies between the past and 2016 elections, but some are quintessential to the 2016 campaign, such as lack of dependency on the Super PACs.

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Estimating the Ideology of Japanese Politicians, Political Commentators, Political Parties, and News Media Using Twitter Data

Hirofumi MIWA

2017 Volume 33 Issue 1 Pages 41-56
Published: 2017
Released on J-STAGE: March 01, 2020

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.14854/jaes.33.1_41

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This study estimates the ideology of Japanese politicians, political commentators, political parties, and news media using Twitter data. While previous studies have utilized various methods to measure the ideology of political actors, the method using Twitter data has many advantages, one of which is that we can estimate the ideology of local politicians and political commentators. The statistical model adopted here assumes that general Twitter users prefer to follow the accounts of political actors whose position is close to theirs and estimates the ideal points of both the political actors and general users based on whether or not the general users follow the accounts of the political actors. I estimated the ideological positions of 70 members of the House of Representatives, 46 members of the House of Councillors, 10 parties and other political institutions, 6 newspaper companies, 39 local politicians and former politicians, and 41 political commentators. The estimation results can be considered to be valid because Twitter-based ideal points of the Diet members are highly correlated with their positions estimated by data from an elite survey.

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Cabinet Resignation in a Majority Situation

The Instability of Intra-party Support for Party Leadership

Akitaka KAMIJO

2017 Volume 33 Issue 1 Pages 57-70
Published: 2017
Released on J-STAGE: March 01, 2020

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.14854/jaes.33.1_57

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Why do cabinets resign in majority situations? Existing theories of cabinet termination cannot explain the occurrence of cabinet resignation when one party has more than half of the parliamentary seats. This is because the prior research focuses solely on the interparty bargaining. In this article, we develop a formal model which explains the cabinet resignation as the consequence of intra-party politics over leadership replacement. The model implies (1) that the resignation occurs when the prime minister loses the voter support and therefore backbenchers want a more electorally-promising leader; and (2) that the more centralized the majority party’ s organization is, the more likely the cabinet resigns. We evaluate our theory empirically using Japanese cabinet data for the period of 1960-2012. We ﬁnd that the Japanese cabinets in majority situation became more likely to resign after the political reforms when party organizations became more centralized.

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[title in Japanese]

2017 Volume 33 Issue 1 Pages 71-95
Published: 2017
Released on J-STAGE: March 01, 2020

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.14854/jaes.33.1_71

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