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Party System Dynamics in Post-war Japan: A quantitative content analysis of electoral pledges

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0261-3794
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Electoral Studies, 2011, 30, 1, 114-124, Special Symposium on Electoral Democracy in the European Union
[EUDO Public Opinion Observatory]
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PROKSCH, Sven-Oliver, SLAPIN, Jonathan B., THIES, Michael F., Party System Dynamics in Post-war Japan: A quantitative content analysis of electoral pledges, Electoral Studies, 2011, 30, 1, 114-124, Special Symposium on Electoral Democracy in the European Union, [EUDO Public Opinion Observatory] - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/19985
Abstract
Qualitative accounts of Japanese party politics allude to the standard left–right spectrum, but they invariably devote much more space to discussions of foreign policy differences than to socioeconomic conflict. Quantitative estimates of Japanese party positions treat short party responses to newspaper interviews as if they were true manifestos, and fail both to confirm the claims of the qualitative literature and to demonstrate any consistent basis for party differentiation at all. We address both puzzles by applying a text scaling algorithm to electoral pledges to estimate Japanese party positions on three major policy dimensions. Our analysis largely confirms the findings of the qualitative literature, but also offers new insights about party movement and polarization over time.
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1. Introduction 2. The literature on the Japanese party system 3. Quantitative approaches to Japanese party politics 4. Data and methods: Kōyaku and Wordfish 5. Results 6. Conclusions Appendix. Supplementary information References
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Publication based on research carried out in the framework of the European Union Democracy Observatory (EUDO) of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute.
The journal issue has been produced in the framework of the PIREDEU Project, one of the projects carried out by the EUDO Public Opinion Observatory.
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