Open-Ended Questionnaire Regarding Voting Choices in Japan

While Japanese academic and political opinion is generally agreed that U.S.-inspired models of voter choice are imperfectly adapted to describe the ways in which the Japanese electorate makes its decisions, psephologists remain divided as to precisely how factors affecting Japanese voting patterns should be modelled. In this project we used a large-scale (N=501), open-ended survey to ask voters to describe freely and in detail how they allocate their votes, and how they believe that their fellow citizens make their own decisions. We found the influence of ideology to be so small as to be negligible. Instead, voters were influenced principally by politicians’ perceived managerial skills, past successes and ability to fit in with the spirit of the times. Rather than a grand ideological combat, the vast majority of respondents tended to see elections as being similar in nature to a company or civil service employee performance review.