The 2021 general election was symbolic of the recent political situation in Japan, which should be called the “Neo 1955 system.” From the perspective of the party system, the Neo (and old) 1955 system is characterized by (1) one-party dominance and (2) ideological polarization of the ruling and opposition parties. The political reforms of the Heisei era aimed to change this pattern of interparty competition and increase electoral competitiveness, but they were not successful. In postwar Japanese politics, where the “constitutional issue” has been embedded, only conservative parties have been considered competent to govern, and opposition parties have been easily divided along ideological axes.

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In recent years in Japan, public support of opposition parties has tended to be extremely low. In the 2021 House of Representatives election, even among opposition parties, there were those, a traditional liberal opposition party such as the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, that lost seats while others, a new opposition parties such as the Japan Innovation Party got a large number of seats. Thus, even among the opposition parties, Japanese voter support is broadly divided into two camps. For this paper, I conducted an exploratory study in order to identify what kind of opposition party is desired by modern Japanese people via a vignette experiment. The results indicated that the Japanese voter prefers political parties formed of non-DPJ members of the Diet who seek a conciliatory party strategy with the ruling party and at the same time have a liberal party platform.

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For interest groups, electoral mobilization is an important political function, defining their relationship with political parties and being a source of political influence. In recent years, however, there has been a perceived decline in the mobilizing function of interest groups. Therefore, based on a questionnaire survey of members of labor unions, agricultural cooperatives, commercial and industrial organizations, and civic groups, this study attempts to understand the actual situation of electoral mobilization and voting behavior in the 2021 House of Representatives election. The analysis showed that there were not many cases in which group members were asked to vote by their organizations. When asked to vote, agricultural cooperatives, commercial and industrial organizations, and civic groups often ask for the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), while labor unions often ask for the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan. However, except for labor unions, requests from their affiliated organizations have not been linked to voting behavior. Although labor unions have mobilizing power, they are the most likely to vote for the LDP overall, and their partisan attitudes show no liberal orientation.

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This paper examines the relationship between policy preferences, issue importance, and vote choice in the 2021 Japanese general election using online survey data collected in February 2022. Regarding policy preferences, unsupervised classification was applied to the integrated data of a candidate survey and this study’s survey, and the respondents were grouped into nine clusters. The results suggested that, though few people supported the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)’s positions broadly, the LDP obtained votes mainly from conservative voters on security and nuclear power issues, while liberal oppositions failed to garner votes from voters with policy preferences close to theirs. Regarding issue importance, the author conducted a conjoint experiment to determine which issues were important to each respondent. The results revealed that not only security and nuclear power but also consumption tax and same-sex marriage were important; furthermore, the latter issues were more important than the former.

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