The Dynamics of the Party System in Postwar Japan: A Quantitative Content Analysis of Electoral Pledges and Manifestos
40 Pages Posted: 13 Aug 2009 Last revised: 28 Aug 2009
Date Written: 2009
Abstract
Existing research on partisan ideology in Japan has yielded a threefold puzzle that scholars have not yet been able to resolve. First, numerous qualitative accounts of Japanese party politics allude to the standard left-right spectrum, yet they invariably devote much more space to discussions of foreign policy differences than to socio-economic conflict. Second, existing quantitative estimates of Japanese party positions fail either to confirm the claims of the qualitative literature or to demonstrate any consistent basis for party differentiation at all. Third, the dominance of a single party, the Liberal Democrats (LDP), for all but a few months during the postwar period raises the question of why opposition parties could not find issue positions that would induce voters to switch their loyalties, and whether they even tried. In this study, we address these puzzles by applying the text scaling algorithm Wordfish to electoral pledges in order to estimate party positions in Japan on three major policy dimensions. Our quantitative analysis largely confirms the findings of the qualitative literature, but we also offer new insights about party movement over time and party system polarization.
Keywords: Japan, manifesto, party system
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