The conservative Liberal Democratic Party won overwhelming victories in the 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2016 elections in Japan. We discuss whether this reflected a rightward shift in the electorate, by examining how major parties and leaders are identified with particular ideological poles, and citizen government distance on a range of issues.

There is a large volume of studies on political participation, including motivations for citizens to become involved in various channels of engagement. Building on this extensive literature, the present study examines factors that affect participation, with particular attention on the linear (conservative vs. progressive) and curvilinear (moderate vs. radical) impact of ideological orientations, and also considers the influence exerted by political interest and partisanship. Utilizing data from Japan spanning nearly three decades, we analyze changes and continuities in patterns of participation in four categories of activities: election turnout; campaigning; system-affirming; and elite-challenging. Empirical analysis reveals that radicals take a more active part in campaigning than moderates, and progressives are more inclined toward elite-challenging activities than conservatives, while no consistent results are found for turnout. The study also discusses possible causes and consequences of a long-term decline in participation in Japan.

Ideological semantics have long served as a means of political communication and an informational shortcut between voters and political elites. As the usage of ideological labels spread to non-Western settings, questions have been raised concerning whether and how these concepts can reflect issue dimensions beyond the economic debates that have traditionally defined “left” and “right” in most Western democracies. The present study explores what issue dimensions citizens in Japan associate with ideological labels, and the degree to which ideological orientations and proximity to parties affect vote choice. We use longitudinal survey data covering a quarter-century to investigate (i) to what extent do citizens understand the ideological space in terms of foreign and security policy at the expense of other issue dimensions, as previous studies have documented
and (ii) whether ideological orientations have remained a relevant guide to voting behavior for four major parties in the past three decades.

In recent years, the impact of party leaders on voting behavior has attracted increasing attention, leading some scholars to identify a phenomenon of presidentialization'. Many extant studies of this topic in Japan are limited to one or two electoral cycles. In order to trace long-term trends, this paper analyses longitudinal survey data to investigate the existence and magnitude of the effect party leader evaluations exert on vote choice in Japan. Empirical results show that while only dominant and forceful personalities substantially influenced voters' likelihood of supporting their parties in the 1980s and 1990s, by the 2000s assessments of most major party leaders had a significant impact on their parties' electoral performance. In short, party leaders affect vote choice due not to their personalities, but instead to the position they hold. We also test the hypotheses that the association between leader appraisal and voting behavior would be particularly conspicuous among voters who lack party identification and those who are most heavily exposed to media reportage. Analysis reveals that (1) independent voters are not more likely to vote on the basis of leader evaluations than partisans; (2) a leader effect is found more frequently among voters with greater exposure to election coverage on television.

One of advantages of a CASI mode in conducting surveys is that it enables us to record and analyze people's response latency, a new type of dataset for survey researchers. Response latency data, which records seconds which it takes from the timing of interviewers' asking a question to the timing of respondents' answering it, is useful to explore processes to express answers in surveys that we cannot know through analyzing peoples' response only. By analyzing it, this study attempts to show possibilities for survey analysis. To do so, we investigate the relationship between people's ideology and a concept of political sophistication by comparing the survey answering process of perceptions of ideological positions with that of political knowledge. The results show that respondents answer questions of ideology and political knowledge, both of which are considered to be measurements of political sophistication, in very different cognitive processes; it takes longer time to correctly answer parties' ideological con ict, while correct answers for factual questions are expressed instantly.