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Identifying voter preferences for politicians' personal attributes: A conjoint experiment in Japan
Abstract
Although politicians’ personal attributes are an important component of elections and representation, few studies have rigorously investigated which attributes are most relevant in shaping voters’ preferences for politicians, or whether these preferences vary across different electoral system contexts. We investigate these questions with a conjoint survey experiment using the case of Japan’s mixed-member bicameral system. We find that the attributes preferred by voters are not entirely consistent with the observed attributes of actual politicians. Moreover, voters’ preferences do not vary when asked to consider representation under different electoral system contexts, whereas the observed attributes of politicians do vary across these contexts. These findings point to the role of factors beyond voters’ sincere preferences, such as parties’ recruitment strategies, the effect of electoral rules on the salience of the personal vote, and the availability of different types of politicians, in determining the nature of representation.
... Nevertheless, since age is a commonly used demographic factor, there has been a growing number of studies that include age in the tested profiles. These studies have been conducted in Japan (Eshima and Smith 2022;Horiuchi et al. 2020;Lim and Tanaka 2024) as well as in several other countries, such as Denmark (Dahl and Nyrup 2021), New Zealand (Magni and Reynolds 2021), Norway (Arnesen et al. 2019), Tunisia (Blackman and Jackson 2021), the UK (Magni and Reynolds 2021), and the USA (Hainmueller et al. 2014;Kirkland and Coppock 2018;Leeper and Robison 2020;Magni and Reynolds 2021;Ono and Burden 2019;Peterson 2017;Teele et al. 2018). As summarized in a meta-analysis by Eshima and Smith (2022), these studies have generally found that people prefer politicians of relatively "young" age to old politicians, while people also value politicians' prior political experience. ...
... For example, Horiuchi et al. (2020) examined ages 30, 42, 57, 64, and 79, along with other attributes such as experience, gender, level of education, hometown, parental political background, party, and prior occupation. They found that candidates aged 30 and 42 were preferred over those aged 57, 64, and 79, with a particularly large negative effect for age 79. ...
... Previous studies of voter preferences in Japan (e.g., Eshima and Smith 2022;Horiuchi et al. 2020) were consulted upon designing the profiles. However, I adjusted several aspects of the profiles to be specifically fit for this study, which focuses on candidates of youth ages. ...
The age of candidacy acts as a barrier that prevents youth from participating in politics as representatives. While the candidacy age has become a widely debated issue worldwide in recent years, little empirical research has examined how voters perceive youth politicians. What do voters think about very young politicians? This study investigates public attitudes toward the lower age limit for politicians. In Japan, simple public opinion polls have suggested limited support for reforming the candidacy age. However, using an experimental approach, this study finds a high level of public acceptance of youth politicians. Specifically, using a conjoint survey experiment, this study explores how candidate age influences Japanese voters’ preferences for politicians, with a particular focus on youth ages 19, 23, and 25. Participants were repeatedly presented with fictitious profiles of two candidates consisted of seven attributes including age and were asked to choose between them. While older candidates aged 79 and 66 were unpopular, voters generally accepted youth candidates—even those below Japan’s current age of candidacy—across all the three legislative bodies examined (the House of Representatives, 25; the House of Councilors, 30; and municipal councils, 25). Youth voters especially showed a strong preference for youth candidates. These findings support lowering the candidacy age in Japan from the perspective of public attitudes toward politicians, contributing to discussions on age reform. Furthermore, this article contributes methodologically to youth studies by offering an experimental approach to provide empirical evidence for policy- and law-making concerning youth political participation.
... Japan (Horiuchi et al., 2020), Ireland (Parker, 1982;Górecki & Marsh, 2014), New Zealand (Johnston, 1973), Estonia (Tavits, 2010), Poland (Górecki et al., 2022), and Norway (Fiva & Smith, 2017). -But why is this the case? ...
... The first category emphasizes that residents are more exposed to information about local candidates, which gives the candidates an electoral advantage. However, recent experimental studies have documented that the electoral advantage of local candidates persists when campaign activities and local contacts are held constant across candidates (Campbell & Cowley, 2014;Campbell et al., 2019;Horiuchi et al., 2020). These studies find that information about where candidates were born, where they grew up, and where they currently live affects voters' preferences for the candidate. ...
... The effects are larger than the effect of the other demographic cues that might otherwise be hypothesized to have an effect, such as the candidate's gender, occupation, and age. While differences in outcome measures and treatment wordings prohibit a direct comparison to previous studies from the United Kingdom and Japan, the effects seem to be of a similar magnitude (Campbell et al., 2019;Horiuchi et al., 2020). However, the effects are dwarfed by the effect of identifying with the same party as the candidate (25.5 percentage points, CI 22.9-28.0) ...
Political candidates enjoy a well-documented electoral advantage near their place of residence. But knowing that voters prefer candidates who live nearby does not explain why this is the case. What inferences do voters make about local candidates that make them so universally attractive? In this study, I distinguish two well-established theoretical explanations in a conjoint experiment conducted in Denmark. Do people prefer local candidates because of in-group favoritism, or do voters prefer local candidates because they expect them to favor their local area once in office? By independently varying signals of candidates’ (1) behavioral localism and (2) symbolic localism, I estimate the importance of each for voters’ preferences for local candidates. I find that voters’ preference for candidates who live nearby is driven in part by a preference for candidates who spend most of their time looking out for voters’ local interests. While I also find that voters prefer candidates who signal their commitment to the local in-group, these preferences appear to be unrelated to voters’ preference for candidates who live locally. Thus, I find that voters seem to prefer local candidates because of their behavioral localism, while I find no evidence that voters prefer local candidates because of their symbolic localism.
... It is, hence, possible to disentangle the role of a manager's gender, gender-related traits, and leadership styles in employees' preferences for a manager. Conjoint analysis, originating from marketing research, is increasingly being adopted in other research fields such as business and political science as well as in public administration (Hainmueller et al., 2014;Horiuchi et al., 2020;Jilke & Tummers, 2018;Ono & Yamada, 2020;Raghavarao et al., 2010;Rao, 2014). ...
... As the hypotheses assume that the effects vary depending on the sector of the respondent's employment, we estimate the AMCEs and ACIEs for the sub-sectors education and police and defense separately. We subsequently use a F-test to test the statistical significance of the difference between the results of these subgroups of respondents (Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2015;Horiuchi et al., 2020). For the estimation of the conjoint experiment data, we used the "cjoint" package in R (ver. ...
... 2.1.0) developed by Barari et al. (2018) and parts of the R-script from the replication package of Horiuchi et al. (2020). For the main analysis, we used a combined model to estimate both the AMCEs and ACIEs for the outcome variable "prefer." ...
This article examines the consequences of stereotypical beliefs regarding gender, traits, and leadership styles for manager preferences in public organizational contexts that differ as to the gender composition of their workforce. It is hypothesized that employee preferences for male, agentic, and/or transactional managers relative to female, communal, and/or transformational managers are stronger in male-dominated contexts than in female-dominated contexts. Hypotheses are tested through a conjoint survey experiment among 2,757 Dutch public sector employees in education, police, and defense. Findings show that there is a stronger preference for communal managers over agentic managers in both contexts, independent of the manager’s gender. In contrast, employee preferences for transactional leadership relative to transformational leadership are stronger in male-dominated contexts than in female-dominated contexts and vice versa, also independent of the gender of the manager. The article discusses the implications of the study’s findings for the study of gender and leadership preferences.
... These results serve as the benchmark information on dynastic politics in Japan. They are also distinct from the findings of existing studies that Japanese voters are neutral about whether a candidate is from a dynastic family in voting decisions (Horiuchi et al., 2020;Smith, 2018). ...
... However, we consider that this theoretical assumption needs to be empirically verified. 9 Empirically, Horiuchi et al. (2020) and Smith (2018) analyzed voters' perceptions of dynastic politicians in their general analyses of voter preferences. Using conjoint experiments, they reported that voters are "largely indifferent to dynastic ties" (Smith, 2018: 212) in their evaluation of fictitious candidates. ...
... A conjoint experiment allows us to "control" party labels by manipulating legacy status and party affiliation simultaneously. Horiuchi et al. (2020) implemented a conjoint experiment in a survey of Japanese citizens to determine the effects of candidates' personal attributes on voter support. They asked respondents to choose the more preferred candidate from a pair of hypothetical candidates. ...
Political family dynasties are a staple part of Japanese politics. According to one study, Japan has the fourth highest number of dynastic politicians among democratic countries, after Thailand, the Philippines, and Iceland. As a result, many scholars have qualitatively studied how these political families are born and managed. In contrast to the wealth of qualitative studies on this subject, however, few quantitative studies on Japanese political dynasties focus on how voters view them. To understand this question, we conducted two nation-wide surveys. Our major findings are that while the majority of respondents dislike dynastic candidates, they also value certain attributes of those candidates, such as their political networks, their potential for ministerial appointments, and their ability to bring pork projects to their constituencies. These results fill a gap in benchmark information on dynastic politics in Japan and are a departure from existing studies that show Japanese voters are neutral regarding whether a candidate is from a dynastic family in voting decisions.
... In democracies, there is the raising concern on factors responsible for candidate choice or preference by the electorate (Kurtbaş, 2015). Effort at understanding the reasons for candidate or party preference in elections encouraged diverse studies; Guber (2001), Singh (2009), Kurtbaş (2015), Dassonneville (2016), Horiuchi, Smith, and Yamamoto (2018), Ogbe (2018), and Chukwujekwu and Ezeabasili (2019) are some of the extant works which have systematically addressed the issues of voters' preference in election. Guber (2001) studied the significance of environmental issues to elections in the United State of America given the raising concern on the issues. ...
... Data were harvested from secondary sources. Revelation made by the study identified problem of multi-party system to include the existence of ethnic politics, lack of party ideology, the place of godfather in candidate selection, mass poverty resulting from high rate of unemployment, party defection, and politics as investment by the elite, etc. Horiuchi, et al. (2018) using conjoint survey experiment studied the Japan's mixed-member bicameral system. While agreeing to the fact that idiosyncratic attribute of politician remains a key factor in election outcomes, the study inquired the most relevant attributes shaping voters' behaviour towards the choice of candidate and also, aim at establishing if the attribute varies across electoral system. ...
... Dassonneville (2016) revealed that short term factors especially economic issues pose sway on choice of voters. Horiuchi, et al. (2018) established the importance of factors beyond voter's choice. Studies by Singh (2009), Dassonneville (2016) and Horiuchi, et al. (2018) refuted the findings of Agbalajobi, Nelson, Awofeso and Odeyemi. ...
Law makers on the legislative houses in Nigeria are elected by party member and the electorate. The members of legislative chambers are constituted through competitive periodic elections to represent different interests recognised by the electorate. Interest desiring representation has included gender, environment, economic, religion, political party, ethnic, and many more. While there are diverse interests requiring representation, the issue of gender representation forms the basic interest of the study. The reason is due to the observed predominance of male over female in gender representation in elective governmental positions while the constitution allows for equal opportunity in democracy. The study appraises the role of political parties in gender representation in the Nigerian legislative chambers, and gender preference by the electorate for political parties’ performance in legislative elections is analysed. The study, adopts qualitative research design in which data were sourced from secondary sources. The study reveals that political parties do not have any reservation for gender in the presentation of candidates for election. The study notes that the choice of voter is beyond gender. The study concludes that gender issues in election may be one of the many factors influencing voter’s decision.
... The available literature suggests that voters' behavior plays a key role in shaping election outcomes in many electoral systems (Buisseret & Prato, 2020;Caiani et al., 2022). More specifically, the personal attributes of electoral candidates have been identified as an important factor that determines the selections voters make (Horiuchi et al., 2020). Existing scholarship reveals a dearth of rigorous research that closely examines the personal attributes that influence voter preferences of certain political candidates according to specific electoral systems (Horiuchi et al., 2020). ...
... More specifically, the personal attributes of electoral candidates have been identified as an important factor that determines the selections voters make (Horiuchi et al., 2020). Existing scholarship reveals a dearth of rigorous research that closely examines the personal attributes that influence voter preferences of certain political candidates according to specific electoral systems (Horiuchi et al., 2020). ...
Qatar, a small Gulf Arab nation with a de facto absolute monarchy, held its first general elections ever for 30 Shura Council seats on October 2, 2021. This marked the first time in Qatar's history that citizens played a more direct role in government, moving beyond symbolic elections. This study aimed to examine the factors likely to have influenced voters' selection of candidates, the key issues that are significant to Qatari citizens, and the possible characteristics of candidates that are deemed essential. While informal conversations are the main method of data collection for this study, social identity theory, specifically group‐based models, was used to understand the influences that shape Qatari voters' choices of candidates. Findings indicate that tribe‐related and family‐connected attributes constitute important influences on voters' choice decisions. Moreover, voters were concerned about candidates' characteristics and the issues and policies candidates deemed important. Discussion and recommendations are provided.
... Studies on spatial voting patterns have focused mostly on the influence of local factors on voting. The "Friends and Neighbors" model (Key, 1949) explains the advantage of candidates running for office in the locality they are associated with Evans, 2012, 2014;Collignon and Sajuria, 2018;Horiuchi, Smith and Yamamoto, 2018;Jankowski, 2016;Hunt, 2020;Munis, 2021) and the "neighbor" effect helps to explains why votes spread. More recent studies found that the dispersion of votes decrease with distance (Put, Åsa von Schoultz and Isotalo, 2020; Arzheimer and Evans, 2012). ...
... Studies on spatial voting patterns have focused mostly on the local factors inuencing voting. The model of Friends and Neighbors (Key, 1949) explains the advantage of candidates running for oce in the locality they are associated with Evans, 2012, 2014;Collignon and Sajuria, 2018;Horiuchi et al., 2018;Jankowski, 2016;Hunt, 2020;Munis, 2021). Candidates would thus have key localities from which their votes would disperse. ...
How do votes disperse through a territory? Studies of spatial voting patterns have largely focused on the influence of local factors on voting. The “Friends and Neighbors” model (Key (1949)) explains the advantage of candidates running for office in the locality with which they are associated (Arzheimer and Evans (2012, 2014): Collignon and Sajuria (2018); Horiuchi et al. (2018); Jankowski (2016); Hunt (2020); Munis (2021)), and the “neighbor” effect helps to explain why votes spread. More recent studies have found that the dispersion of votes decreases with distance (Put et al. (2020); Arzheimer and Evans (2012)). However, we know little about how spatial patterns of voting emerge or the mechanism behind the neighbor effect. We argue that this effect depends on the neighbors’ access to information about a candidate, which is constrained by the way information flows. Although scholars have argued that information is a relevant driver explaining the dispersion of votes (Bowler et al. (1993); Arzheimer and Evans (2012); Evans et al. (2017); Campbell, Cowley, Vivyan, and Wagner (2019)), no research has examined the relevance of the network through which information flows. We propose that a spatial interaction model (Wilson (1971)) allows us to predict where this information flows or the voting pattern that will form. Taking advantage of a quasi-natural experiment in Brazilian legislative elections in 1974 and 1978, we show that votes spread through areas of influence created by a hierarchy of cities based on the flows of exchanges among them, including information. We then use our spatial interaction model to predict voting patterns in the elections of 1978 using data from the 1974 elections. Our findings show that the spatial interaction model results fit the data quite well and can help predict spatial patterns of voting.
... As expected the projected personal electoral strength and being a local to that district play a highly significant role in the nomination decisions in both samples. Obviously, both of these factors are often interdependent, as voters typically prefer local candidates over those parachuted in (Horiuchi et al., 2020). Yet, both exert a significant influence on the nomination of candidates independently of each other. ...
... Looking at the incumbents-only sample (model 1), results in predicted probabilities for local and non-local incumbents are still significantly different but differ only by around 8%-points. These findings echo the descriptive findings of Hirano (2006) on the geographically concentrated electoral support around candidates' hometowns and underscore the experimental findings on voters' preference for local candidates in Japan (e.g., Horiuchi et al., 2020). ...
How do parties and candidates react to electoral system reform? While the literature on causes and consequences of electoral reforms is receiving increasing attention, we lack a systematic micro-level account on how parties and candidates adopt to changes in electoral rules and district boundaries. This paper examines the case of the Japanese Liberal Democrats to explore how the party has managed to accommodate a surplus of incumbents to a reduced number of nominal tier seats following the 1994 electoral reform. By using micro-level data, I examine how the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has matched candidates based on their expected electoral strength and ideological positioning to new districts. Moreover, I investigate how the newly instituted party-list allowed the LDP to avoid its disintegration at the local level by systematically defusing local stand-offs through the handing out of promising list positions. My findings help to understand how the LDP could avoid its disintegration and could continue to dominate Japanese politics until today.
... Conjoint experiments are useful in situations of multidimensional choice or preference (Bansak et al. 2021;Hainmueller, Hopkins, and Yamamoto 2014). Arising from consumer studies, conjoint designs have gained popularity in political science because they provide a robust, parsimonious way of estimating relative contributions of relevant characteristics in contexts such as candidate choice (Bansak et al. 2021;Mares and Visconti 2020) and politician attributes (Eggers, Vivyan, and Wagner 2018;Horiuchi, Smith, and Yamamoto 2020).,. Our survey aimed to oversample racialized Canadians, including those of Chinese ethnicity. ...
... As a candidate characteristic, occupational background has been shown to influence citizens' vote intention. Survey experiments have demonstrated that voters prefer certain occupational profiles over others, such as salespeople over lawyers and business executives (Wüest and Pontusson 2022), doctors over political careerists (Campbell and Cowley 2014), and corporate employees over celebrities (Horiuchi, Smith, and Yamamoto 2020). Once elected, politicians' jobs continue to influence their standing. ...
Elected public officials often spend their time not only on their mandate but also other remunerated activities. This can affect citizens' trust in politicians. Whether and to what extent this happens depends on the public office. This study examines how characteristics of the elected public office shape citizens' attitudes towards politicians with non-political occupations. It uses data from a pre-registered survey experiment conducted in the context of Austrian local government (N = 1,937). The experiment measures citizens' reactions to day jobs as a function of differences between and within public offices. The results reveal that higher professionalisation of public offices corresponds to lower trust in politicians with day jobs. In contrast, there is no evidence that politicians with more decision-making power are less trusted by voters for having a day job. Overall, these findings highlight that social norms for elected officials can differ based on public office characteristics.
... For the Article attribute, we replicate the public treatments of the first survey: (1) "Was involved in the embezzlement of government funds" (Negative news); (2) "Contributed to securing significant central government funding for the city" (Positive news); and (3) No news. The basic setup of the conjoint experiment, particularly regarding the gender treatment, draws on previous related research using conjoint experiments (Kage et al. 2019;Horiuchi et al. 2020;Ono and Yamada 2020). However, as mentioned earlier, we include graphic imagery to increase the visibility of our gender treatment. ...
Previous studies on gender bias in the evaluation of politicians by voters have reported mixed results. We seek to understand these mixed findings by focusing on Japan, where female political representation is the lowest among advanced democracies and gender stereotypes are prevalent. We consider that gender stereotypes and the dearth of women in politics affect the evaluation of politicians via two distinct mechanisms: biased beliefs and weak priors. The two mechanisms are assumed to run counter to each other, thus leading to the null or mixed findings for gendered evaluation reported by previous studies. To test our argument, we conduct a series of survey experiments in Japan. Our findings conform to neither of the two mechanisms. Even in a society with low female political representation, we find no evidence of the gendered evaluation of candidates by voters. We suggest that rather than biasing voters’ evaluation of candidates, gender stereotypes dissuade women from aspiring to a political career and elite electoral gatekeepers from selecting female candidates.
... 1 More recent work has elaborated on these symbolic connections with the concept of "place identity", in which voters imbue their home places with personal sentiment, self-worth, and political meaning (Childs and Crowley 2011;Cramer, 2016;Munis, 2022;Sajuria & Collignon, 2018,). The result is a clear electoral preference for local candidates who share this place identity (Horiuchi et al., 2018;Munis, 2021). This is consistent with related findings on "context" effects showing that voters draw information from their local environments to inform their political behaviors (Enos, 2017;Newman et al., 2015). ...
Previous literature has demonstrated electoral advantages for candidates with backgrounds in the communities they represent, even amidst the trends of partisan polarization and the nationalization of elections. Here, we consider voter preferences for local candidates using a broader range of methods, jurisdictions, time periods, and populations than has previously been utilized. Our results leverage a survey experiment presenting respondents with pairs of fictional open-seat U.S. Senate candidates with varying degrees of local backgrounds. Voters consistently responded more favorably to locally-rooted candidates across different states. We also present novel evidence that local candidate effects are due largely to voters crossing party lines, and that the parties are asymmetrical in their responses to localism and carpetbagging, with Democrats benefitting from local ties more than Republicans. Observational data on real-life Senate candidates from 1960 to 2020 largely mirror our main experimental findings. Together, these findings demonstrate that local connections matter in more nuanced ways than have been previously considered.
... 8 A survey in India in 2014 found that an astounding 46% of respondents preferred to vote for a candidate from a political family (Vaishnav et al., 2014, cited in Chandra, 2016. Experimental data from Japan finds that voters are mostly indifferent to dynastic status (Horiuchi et al., 2020), implying that there are enough voters with positive feelings to balance out the voters with negative feelings. her reputation. ...
Candidates from established political families are more likely to win than their non-dynastic counterparts because their political inheritance often includes significant advantages in resources and reputation. Yet dynastic candidates also bring their own set of experiences and qualities to the game. Is it the case that their individual characteristics can explain their electoral success, or is their success due to their family legacy? Theoretically, how and when are political resources transferred to the new generation? We examine these questions by looking at non-incumbent candidates in city and county council elections in Taiwan from 2009 to 2014, drawing on unique data on politicians' backgrounds. The profile of dynastic candidates differs from that of non-dynastic candidates: they are younger, have less electoral experience and list experience in different sorts of organizations and jobs. However, these differences are not what drives their electoral success; indeed, they tend to win despite these qualities rather than because of them. Even after controlling for candidate quality, dynastic status remains a powerful predictor, conveying roughly a 20 percentage point increase in the probability of winning. This suggests that while dynastic candidates accrue some of their advantage long before they run for office, a large part of the inheritance is transferred during the campaign.
... According to the experimental studies on voters' perceptions about candidates in elections, the compositional bias in legislatures cannot be attributed to discriminatory attitudes of voters (Oosten, Mügge, and Pas, 2024;Schwarz and Coppock, 2022). Regarding voters' preferences for candidates in Japan, the experimental studies show that Japanese voters do not reveal a clear preference for male candidates over female candidates; they either disfavor or are at least indifferent to hereditary and elderly candidates versus their nonhereditary or younger counterparts (Eshima and Smith, 2022;Horiuchi, Smith, and Yamamoto, 2020;Miwa, Kasuya, and Ono, 2023). This is surprising because, while it is well known that dynasties and middle-aged male lawmakers prevail in Japan, these studies show that voters' preferences are not necessarily compatible with this view. ...
Lottocracy and epistocracy have received deeply insightful attention as political regimes. Herein, by conducting an experiment using an online survey, we explored the extent to which public opinion is receptive to political decisions under various regimes regarding two environmental policies: education policy and environmental tax policy. By doing so, we examined whether the presence of tax burdens affected the acceptability of political regimes, i.e., electoral democracy, lottocracy, and epistocracy. Our results revealed that decisions based on lottocracy and epistocracy were significantly less acceptable than those based on electoral democracy. Nevertheless, lottocratic and episocratic decisions were more acceptable regarding the issue of environmental tax policy. The difference was mainly attributed to people's rejection of environmental tax policy offsetting their rejection of lottocracy and epistocracy. This suggests that on one hand, while decisions based on electoral democracy increase policies' acceptability if they do not involve taxation, the status of whether or not a decision is electoral does not significantly affect policy acceptability if taxation is involved, whereas on the other hand, people are sensitive to differences between the regimes if the policy does not involve taxation.
... While we are unaware of any studies specifically concentrating on voter preferences toward young candidates, some studies have included age as a variable within their analyses using conjoint experiments to assess voter preferences more broadly concerning candidate attributes (Arnesen et al., 2019;Clayton et al., 2019;Horiuchi et al., 2020;Kirkland & Coppock, 2017;Ono & Burden, 2019). Nevertheless, these studies have not particularly focused on age as a key demographic characteristic, with the exception of Eshima and Smith (2022), who examine preferences toward elderly candidates. ...
Why do elected officials tend to be much older than most of their constituents? To understand the mechanisms behind the underrepresentation of young people in public office, we conducted two novel survey experiments in Japan. We asked voters in these experiments to evaluate the photos of hypothetical candidates while altering candidates’ faces using age regression and progression software. Contrary to the observed age demographics of politicians, the voters in our experiments strongly disliked older candidates but viewed younger and middle-aged candidates as equally favorable. Voters saw young candidates as less experienced but also more likely to focus on many policy issues over a longer period, including education, childcare, climate change, anti-corruption measures, and multiculturalism. Young voters especially liked young candidates, suggesting that greater youth turnout could increase youth representation. Conversely, elderly candidates were universally panned, seen as the least competent, least likely to focus on most policy issues, and least electable. Voter biases thus do not seem to be a driving factor behind the shortage of young politicians. To the contrary, voters appear perfectly willing to cast their ballots for young candidates.
... Scholarly evidence on the impact of education is mixed. Voters tend to slightly prefer candidates with higher and elite education (Herrmann and Tepe 2018;Horiuchi et al. 2020;Magni and Reynolds 2021a;2021b), with liberals in particular perceiving eliteeducated politicians as more competent (Gift and Lastra-Anadón 2018). The penalty for candidates with lower education, however, may not be very strong (Carnes and Lupu 2016). ...
Pete Buttigieg’s candidacy in the 2020 Democratic primaries caught fire more than most predicted. An openly gay man, Buttigieg is also a veteran and a Christian. Did voters penalize Buttigieg for being gay and in a same-sex relationship? Did his other traits offset voter negative bias? We conducted a survey with over 6000 likely voters during the primaries. We included a priming experiment that manipulated the salience of Buttigieg’s identity traits. We then asked respondents how much they liked Buttigieg and who they would support in a match-up between Buttigieg and Trump. Overall, voters penalized Buttigieg for being in a same-sex relationship. The penalty surprisingly increased when his religiosity was highlighted. In contrast, Buttigieg’s military background mitigated voter discrimination when he was presented as a veteran married to a man. This article reveals how double standards and heterosexism penalize gay candidates, and contributes to discussions on minority candidates and electability.
... More recently, research in the UK shows that voters care far more about candidates' localness than about their biological sex (Campbell and Cowley 2014), class, religion, and race (Cowley 2013) 3 . Similar evidence is found in Japan (Horiuchi, Smith, and Yamamoto 2018), Canada (Blais and Daoust 2017;Roy and Alcantara 2015), Estonia (Tavits 2010), and Norway (Fiva, Halse, and Smith 2018). ...
Who gets represented in legislatures, and how does this depend on electoral institutions? Others have asked this question from the perspective of gender, race, and class. We focus on space, asking whether MPs disproportionately come from some places rather than others and how this depends on electoral rules. Using data on over 13,000 legislators in sixty-two democracies, we developed a new measure to determine whether the spatial distribution of MP birthplaces matched the spatial distribution of the citizens they represented. Contrary to received wisdom, single-member district systems do not have more geographically representative parliaments than multi-member district systems, while mixed-member systems perform significantly better than both. We attribute the higher spatial representativeness of mixed-member systems to the contamination effects in their single-member tier. We present evidence for this explanation from a within-country analysis of elections in Italy, the UK, and Germany.
... We expect based on Lavezzolo and colleagues' (2021) work that people will first and foremost prefer someone who has both expertise that is relevant to their portfolio and experience courting voters in the political arena. However, based on the literature which emphasises the importance of partisan cues in shaping political attitudes, behaviours (Achen and Bartels, 2016;Campbell et al., 1960;Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier, 2007), as well as the relevance of political experience for ministerial positions (Carnes and Lupu, 2016;Horiuchi et al., 2020;Lavezzolo et al., 2021), we can reasonably expect that people would opt for the partisan expert (technopol) instead of non-partisan expert (technocrat). However, this might not be the case if the partisan expert has ties to a party they dislike. ...
The literature on technocracy has shown that expertise is a crucial factor in driving support for technocrats. However, the literature has not investigated yet what happens when technocrats are opposed to partisan experts. In this article, we want to fill this gap by analysing the support for two potential ministers of health with relevant expertise for their portfolio but with a different relationship to partisan politics. For this purpose, we run a novel survey in 14 European countries with more than 20,000 respondents. Our main results show that non-partisan experts are preferred over partisan experts across Europe, both when citizens have a high sympathy and a low sympathy for the party appointing the minister. However, in the latter case, the effect is more evident.
... On the other hand, this finding comes with the caveat that the gender gap in representation might actually be the smallest among young parliamentarians aged 35 years or under of all age groups (see Stockemer and Sundström 2019a, 2019bStockemer et al. 2020). 13 The studies they analyse are rarely interested in age per se (but see Horiuchi et al. 2020). 14 Belschner (2022) also report considerable variation in how well Tunisian parties comply with their youth quotas. ...
People in political decision-making across the globe tend to be much older than the average voter. As such, parliaments and cabinets are unrepresentative of the larger population. This has consequences: it risks favouring policies geared towards the interests of older cohorts, it might alienate youth from voting and could push parties to appeal (even more) to older voters. In this review, we synthesize the growing literature on youth representation. We do so by: (1) delineating the group of young politicians, (2) discussing why youth ought to be present in politics, (3) empirically depicting the state of youth representation, and (4) illustrating the factors that help or harm youth to enter politics. This synthesis shows the degree to which young people are absent from decision-making bodies across the national, subnational and supra-national levels and attempts to make sense of the reasons why there is such a dearth of youth as candidates and representatives. We conclude by discussing gaps in research and suggesting several avenues for future work.
... The design has since been applied to further studies of immigration elsewhere (e.g. Duch et al. 2022;Marx and Schumacher 2018), but also to other political contexts, such as preferences for political candidates in Japan (Horiuchi et al. 2020) and support for supreme justice nominations (Sen 2017), or support for environmental policies (Huber et al. 2019;Wicki et al. 2020). ...
Intended to combine the best of two worlds – the ability to estimate causal effects and to generalize to a wider population – survey experiments are increasingly used as a method of data collection in politics and international relations. This article examines their popularity over the past decades in social science research, discusses the core logic of survey experiments, and reviews the method against the principles of the total survey error paradigm.
... Politicians, like sports teams, often expect and receive hometown support. Research on elections has uncovered a local electoral advantage in Canada (Blais et al., 2003), Finland (Raunio, 2005), Ireland (Marsh, 2007), Italy (Katz & Bardi, 1980), Japan (Horiuchi et al., 2017), and the UK (Evans et al., 2017). A similar advantage appears in the Global South. ...
The literature on democracies in the developing world paints a picture of rampant vote buying. A growing research field has shed light on how politicians decide whom to target, how individuals view vote buying, and the consequences of such practices. Yet, most research compares support for candidates offering handouts to those who do not. It fails to explore how offering handouts compares to other campaign strategies – promising future targeted goods or community goods, explicitly eschewing vote buying campaign tactics, or garnering support based on ethnic or local social ties. In this study, we employ a conjoint experiment fielded in Malawi (n = 1,166) to examine the relative power of vote buying versus other campaign tactics. Our experimental results reveal that respondents view candidates who promise community service provision or criticize vote buying more positively than those who offer handouts. We also find that the magnitude of the effects for community service provision and anti-vote buying campaigns are greater than that of platforms associated with coethnicity and local social ties. These findings are both substantively and theoretically important. Policymakers and practitioners engaged in voter education efforts may counter vote buying by informing candidates of the potential electoral benefits to championing anti-vote buying platforms and providing community services. Likewise, scholars can better understand elections, representation and democracy by further exploring how different types of voters respond to various campaign appeals in Africa.
... 17 exposed and 13 unexposed citizens.16 See Franchino & Zucchini (2015),Mares &Horiuchi et al. (2020) for examples of other conjoint experiments that evaluate voters' electoral preferences.17 Having been a mayor does not mean that the candidate is the incumbent because the two main politicians in this municipality were the current mayor and the previous mayor, and both actually ran in the subsequent election. ...
Can natural disasters affect voters’ electoral choices, and in particular, ideological voting? Even as climate change has increased concerns about the frequency and intensity of disasters, the effects of these negative events on voter behavior are not yet fully understood. Though ideological labels are known to be informative heuristics, the literature has thus far overlooked their role after natural hazards. Might affected citizens become more likely to select candidates with an ideology that can be associated with what victims need after a disaster? Answering this question is difficult since disaster damage can be correlated with multiple victims’ unobserved characteristics. To address this challenge, I use a natural experiment created by the floods that occurred in Chile in 2015 to take advantage of random variation in citizens’ exposure to a disaster. I then capture voters’ electoral choices using a conjoint survey experiment. The findings show that material damage caused by this disaster increased the probability of voters selecting left-wing and independent candidates. Qualitative evidence from interviews helps to illuminate the causal mechanisms underlying these results.
... We can therefore infer which attributes matter the most. Moreover, this experimental design is less susceptible to social desirability bias as respondents are not asked directly about their attitudes, which are instead inferred by their choice of profile (Horiuchi, Smith, and Yamamoto 2020). ...
Across Europe, citizenship is traditionally attributed at birth through descent only. As immigrant populations grow, policy-makers have come under pressure to extend citi- zenship rights to the children of immigrants born in the country. While such inclusive measures often counter political opposition, public attitudes on this question remain remarkably underexplored. In this study, we report on the results of an original choice- based conjoint survey experiment designed to examine which parental attributes affect respondents’ willingness to grant citizenship to newborns. We implement the survey experiment in Italy, where over one million children do not have Italian citizenship, yet reform proposals have so far been unsuccessful. In line with our pre-registered ex- pectations, we find that respondents are more likely to support birthright citizenship for children born to parents who are economically, legally and socially integrated in society. These attitudes vary by political background, education, and age-category of respondents. Our findings suggest that incorporating immigration-related condition- ality in birthright citizenship proposals is key to convincing sceptical publics of the legitimacy of such measures.
... Kirkland & Coppock 2018, Horiuchi et al. 2020 or policies(Bechtel et al. 2017, Tellez 2019, Heinrich & Kobayashi 2020, our question design features only one difference (duration) in the pair, which might overly prime survey-takers. In emergency situations, especially in the early phases of a crisis, governments tend to frame a policy response and legislation granting it additional powers almost exclusively in terms of their urgency and effectiveness in dealing with the situation at hand. ...
Liberal governments around the world have taken unprecedented emergency measures in the fight against COVID-19. Concerns abound that these newly-authorized measures could fundamentally challenge core liberal values, but citizens strongly supported empowering their governments. How concerned are citizens about the potential entrenchment of these powers? Did they provide strong support because they view these rights restrictions as temporary measures and not as a long-lasting government empowerment? We answer these questions with two analyses of original data during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, one from a cross-country survey in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, and another from a survey experiment in the United States. In contrast to findings in other but related contexts, we find that the duration for which the government would hold powers plays an important role in shaping public support. These findings imply that citizens are indeed wary of prolonged changes to government-citizen power relations. Our study also helps explain the initial surge in public support for rights-restricting policies in response to external threats with broader implications for the literatures on public support for emergency declarations as well as for debates on sunset clauses of legislation .
Gender disparities in Japanese government are consistently high, but evidence of voter bias against female politicians is mixed. We argue that this discrepancy arises because some researchers measure Japanese voters’ first-order preferences (who they personally support) while other researchers measure Japanese voters’ second-order preferences (who they expect other voters to support). We call this gap between voters’ own preferences and expectations regarding others’ preferences the preference-expectation gap. Since this gap is a key mechanism of strategic discrimination, we test our argument using an experimental design modelled after research on strategic discrimination in the 2020 US Democratic primary elections. Based on two online conjoint survey experiments in Japan, our findings demonstrate the presence of a preference-expectation gap in Japanese public opinion on female politicians. Exploratory analyses of moderation effects reveal that female participants and those with more liberal views toward gender roles have larger preference-expectation gaps.
In bicameral legislatures, gender representation varies significantly between chambers. Historically, Japan's upper house has maintained a proportion of women twice that of the lower house. However, electoral systems alone cannot fully explain this disparity. We argue that seemingly gender‐neutral legislative institutions influence both voting behavior and candidates' willingness to run, contributing to significant disparities in gender representation in bicameral legislatures. To test this argument, we conduct two survey experiments exploring the underlying mechanisms from the perspectives of voters and candidates. Our findings suggest that informing voters about the upper house's subordinate role increases support for female candidates in upper house elections. Furthermore, women display a greater willingness to pursue office when assured of job security in the upper house, while men exhibit less interest when made aware of its limited authority to appoint the prime minister. This study enhances our current understanding of the effects of asymmetrical institutions between chambers from a gender perspective.
Can qualifications help candidates from historically marginalized groups win over out-group voters? We help answer this question with an original conjoint experiment fielded on a face-to-face survey conducted in three Afghan provinces between 2016 and 2017. The conjoint asked over 2,400 Afghan respondents to rank and choose between profiles of hypothetical candidates with varying gender, ethnic and educational attributes. We explore whether candidate qualifications – as measured by educational attainment – can amplify respondents’ support for hypothetical candidates from two social groups traditionally underrepresented in Afghan politics: women and Hazaras, a predominately Shi’a ethnic minority group. We find that higher qualifications consistently increase male (non-Hazara) respondents’ ranking and likelihood of choosing profiles with female (Hazara) candidates. These gains, however, do not completely offset male (non-Hazara) respondents’ in-group biases. Qualifications help but are not enough to dismantle voter preferences for in-group candidates.
Every year, Americans elect hundreds of thousands of candidates to local public office, typically in low-attention, nonpartisan races. How do voters evaluate candidates in these sorts of elections? Previous research suggests that, absent party cues, voters rely on a set of heuristic shortcuts – including the candidate’s name, profession, and interest group endorsements – to decide whom to support. In this paper, we suggest that community embeddedness – a candidate’s roots and ties to the community – is particularly salient in these local contests. We present evidence from a conjoint survey experiment on a nationally representative sample of American voters. We estimate the marginal effect on vote share of candidate attributes such as gender, race, age, profession, interest group endorsements, and signals of community embeddedness – specifically homeownership and residency duration. We find that voters, regardless of political party, have strong preferences for community embeddedness. Strikingly, the magnitude of the residency duration effect rivals that of prior political experience.
Background
Millions of Americans live with chronic health conditions and disabilities. While disability and disabling conditions are common in the United States, the number of politicians and candidates with disclosed disabilities or chronic health conditions remains extremely low.
Objectives
This study examines what drives the lack of descriptive representation of individuals with disabilities or chronic health conditions. In particular, it examines whether disability bias, or more specifically ableism, drives voter bias against politicians with health challenges and disabilities.
Methods
The analysis relies on two original surveys with samples of American respondents that match Census quotas on key indicators. The first survey was administered to more than 1800 U.S. respondents in 2018. The second survey was administered to 6345 U.S. respondents in 2020. The approach combines observational and experimental data, as well as quantitative and qualitative analysis.
Results
The findings reveal that voters are significantly less likely to support candidates with disclosed disabilities or health conditions. Mental illness and HIV face the strongest discrimination, while physical challenges due to birth conditions like wheelchair usage and dwarfism are the least penalized. A combination of prejudice, negative character assessment, and electability concerns drive voter bias.
Conclusion
Understanding the barriers to the election of politicians with disabilities and chronic health conditions is crucial to improve the representation of marginalized communities, as descriptive representation improves public policy outcomes for marginalized communities.
Recent studies in democratic countries suggest that voters generally prefer candidates with specific personal attributes, such as being female and young. However, some of these patterns cannot necessarily be explained by voters’ expectations of candidates’ competence. Building on a growing body of literature that addresses populist attitudes as an important factor influencing voters’ political preferences, this study hypothesizes that candidates’ personal attributes shape voters’ perceptions of their populist attitudes and that such perceptions mediate the relationship between personal attributes and voter preferences. A conjoint experiment conducted in Japan showed that several personal attributes substantially influenced candidates’ perceived anti-elitism and people-centrism. An additional experiment to disentangle causal mechanisms suggested that, albeit inconclusive, young candidates were more likely to be preferred because of voters’ expectations of their populist tendencies. Methodologically, this study illustrates advancements in the conjoint experiment design to elucidate causal mechanisms, with a careful discussion of necessary assumptions.
Objectives
Given the distinct political landscape of Japan, this study aims to explore the impact of gender on the parliamentary behavior of Japanese legislators.
Methods
Utilizing a self‐constructed data set covering the 44th–48th Diets (2005–2021), this study examines the individual‐level parliamentary activities of male and female legislators in Japan. Key metrics analyzed include the frequency of speeches delivered in both plenary and committee sessions, alongside the submission of memorandums to the Diet.
Results
The findings indicate that on the whole, gender exerts only a minimal effect on parliamentary activities. However, upon closer examination of members belonging to opposition parties during specific time periods, female legislators emerge as more active in terms of questioning and memorandum submission compared to their male counterparts.
Conclusion
This study unveils a noteworthy trend wherein women legislators in Japan demonstrate equal or greater engagement in parliamentary activities than their male counterparts. These findings underscore the importance of exploring gender dynamics within political systems beyond the Western sphere. Moreover, they emphasize the necessity for ongoing research into gender representation and participation within Japan's political arena.
Understanding which political candidates are elected for office is fundamental to democracy and political science. Whereas there is much agreement that party affiliation is one of the most important candidate characteristics to voters, evidence regarding the gender and race of the candidate is mixed. We suggest voters have lexicographic preferences, meaning they rank their preferences and focus primarily on the candidate's party affiliation. Second-order preferences such as gender and race are mostly necessary when there is a tie in first-order preferences when voters choose between two same-party candidates or have no party information. We show how conjoint experiments can be used to test for lexicographic preferences and use data from a US-representative sample and a pre-registered replication to confirm that in the United States, gender and race are second-order preferences. Lexicographic preferences provide a theoretical lens explaining some of the mixed results of gender and race in the candidate literature.
In Brazil, police officers have increasingly competed in elections, mirroring expanded roles in government for coercive agents in cases such as the United States, the Philippines, and Mexico. In this paper, I develop a theory of how voters perceive these candidates. The symbol of the police officer represents the abstract idea of order and stability, more than just a crime fighter. Corruption scandals and insecurity in Brazil and Latin America have given rise to “order” in response to the chaos of politics as usual as a compelling electoral brand. I therefore expect that voters associate police officer candidates with strong, decisive leadership, social conservatism, a strong commitment to the rule of law, honesty in government, and a weak commitment to democracy. An image-based conjoint experiment fielded to a representative sample of Brazilian voters ( N = 3,098) finds support for the theoretical framework, but respondents did not perceive the police officer candidate as less democratic than other professional profiles. The results help to inform our understanding of electoral politics in post-transition democratic regimes, demonstrating how armed agents of the state might remain popular and influential within the context of a consolidated democracy.
Do nomination rules shape how voters evaluate their representatives? Some scholars argue that, in places where trust in political parties is low, primary elections can be an electoral asset by improving how politicians are regarded by voters. Yet, this claim has received little empirical scrutiny. A survey experiment in Mexico, where parties have employed several nomination rules in recent years, allows us to assess this argument. We find that, by and large, providing information about the method by which a politician was nominated to office—relative to not providing such information—has virtually no impact on how voters evaluate the politician. At the same time, we uncover evidence of a relative advantage of primary elections over more centralized nomination rules. Specifically, learning that a politician was nominated in a primary election—relative to learning that they were appointed by party elites—improves voter perceptions of politician quality and increases their reported willingness to vote for the politician in the future. Our results have important implications for political parties in many developing countries and new democracies, where intraparty democracy is increasingly popular.
In Europe, more and more parties and governments are led by a pair of leaders. What consequences does the presence of duos have on voter preferences? I argue that voters have less discriminatory preferences against untraditional candidates when they choose two leaders instead of only one. However, discriminatory preferences do not entirely vanish; rather, traditionally excluded candidates are often relegated to secondary positions, and there exists a certain threshold of tolerated ticket diversity. Through a novel combined conjoint experiment, I find relative support for this conjecture, especially in the case of ethnic minority candidates. In view of the increasing number of new types of leadership, the results of this study have important implications for the study of political behaviour and elite diversity.
Intro
This article examines whether descriptive norms affect voters’ intention to vote in national elections in Japan and whether the impact of descriptive norms is moderated by the anticipated level of electoral competition. Social psychological research suggests that one's chance of voting is higher if they learn that many others are voting. On the other hand, knowing many others vote could make one think that their vote is not needed for influencing the election outcome, leading them to abstain.
Method
To test these competing expectations, I conducted a survey experiment in Japan in June 2022, presenting a hypothetical condition of the Lower House election and asking the respondents’ intention to vote in the hypothetical contest. I used a 2 × 2 design that varied (1) anticipated voter turnout (high turnout, low turnout) and (2) anticipated level of competition (high competition, low competition).
Results
I find that the descriptive norm of high voter turnout is positively associated with the chance of voting only when the expected level of competition is high.
Conclusion
These are not consistent with the prior research demonstrating the strong influence of descriptive norms and the ones finding that the descriptive norm of nonparticipation leads to greater willingness to participate by generating the sense of threat.
Little research has focused on how legislative candidates’ personal electoral support develops over time and why. This study examines the vote trajectories of individual candidates and how they vary according to candidates’ personal vote-earning attributes. Longitudinal data on over 1700 candidates who between 1999 and 2019 participated in two or more parliamentary elections in the Finnish open-list proportional representation system are analysed. The findings show that the average legislative candidate’s personal support increases more rapidly in the beginning of his or her electoral career and then slows down gradually over time. However, there is large heterogeneity in vote trajectories depending on candidates’ socio-demographic characteristics and personal vote-earning attributes. Some candidates enjoy instant success (local councillors and celebrity candidates), others do not win more votes initially but manage to build loyal personal followings in their district and receive positive returns from repeated candidacy (young, women, and locally rooted candidates).
Young people are underrepresented in most political institutions, and Japan’s House of Representatives is no exception. While a few young challengers managed to capture national headlines by defeating much older incumbents, the 2021 election otherwise featured the fewest candidates and elected members of parliament under 40 years old in decades. In this chapter, I explore the causes and consequences of this decline in young people running for office. Most notably, I find that candidates under 40 were significantly more likely than older candidates to say that they would prioritize education, childcare, and employment if elected; more supportive of strengthening Japan’s defense capabilities; and more positive toward enacting bills to recognize gay marriage and promote LGBT awareness. These patterns suggest that reforms aimed at increasing the number of young legislators could have significant consequences for the policies that get debated and ultimately implemented by the parliament.
This chapter examines women’s representation in the Japan. In the economic realm, Womenomics implemented under the Abe regime made several meaningful improvements in women’s labor participation, especially those who have children. However, little progress was in the gender wage gap and the gender disparity in quality job employment. The COVID-19 pandemic also had a disproportionate impact on women, parents, and those with non-regular jobs. This, in turn, led to lower trust and confidence in the government and its policy responses to the pandemic. The latter half of this chapter considers gender representation in politics. The 2021 general election saw a decrease in the number of women representatives. As with previous elections, the ruling party, Liberal Democratic Party, had the smallest share of female candidates and elected women legislators. This chapter examines both supply- and demand-side factors in order to explain the lack of women representation in Japan.KeywordsGender representationGender inequalityWomenomicsCOVID-19Japan
This paper explores how Japan's aging population impacts the politics of monetary policy. Previous research suggests that the elderly have a variety of distinct policy preferences. Given that elderly voters also have higher voting rates, the rapid greying of the population could have significant effects on distributive struggles over economic policy across much of the developed world. In Japan, aging is advancing rapidly, and the central bank has engaged in massive monetary stimulus to induce inflation, which existing work suggests the elderly should oppose. Analyzing results from three surveys, this paper has three central findings: (1) the elderly tend to have higher inflation aversion, (2) the elderly display some opposition to quantitative easing (QE), and (3) despite such policy preferences, the concentration of elderly in electoral districts has no significant effect on the preferences either of legislative incumbents or candidates. The third finding is attributable to the fact that elderly opposition to QE is moderated by their partisan identification. Elderly Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) voters have systematically lower opposition to QE, likely reflecting that these voters have aligned their preferences with the LDP's policies.
Political scientists frequently interpret the results of conjoint experiments as reflective of majority preferences. In this article, we show that the target estimand of conjoint experiments, the average marginal component effect (AMCE), is not well defined in these terms. Even with individually rational experimental subjects, the AMCE can indicate the opposite of the true preference of the majority. To show this, we characterize the preference aggregation rule implied by the AMCE and demonstrate its several undesirable properties. With this result, we provide a method for placing bounds on the proportion of experimental subjects who prefer a given candidate feature. We describe conditions under which the AMCE corresponds in sign with the majority preference. Finally, we offer a structural interpretation of the AMCE and highlight that the problem we describe persists even when a model of voting is imposed.
This study examines what kind of candidates political parties nominate and what determines parties’ strategy. Local candidates can earn more personal votes and thus contribute to securing the party’s seats, while they are more likely to dissent from the party line. Therefore, parties face the dilemma of whether to secure seats by nominating a local candidate or maintain party unity by nominating a non-local candidate. While previous studies have shown electoral systems are a critical determinant of who are nominated, this study looks at variations in the type of candidate parties nominate under the same electoral systems through a focus on their district-level electoral performance. Specifically, it argues that while parties prioritize securing seats by nominating local candidates in districts where their candidates were defeated in the last election and are expected to struggle in the forthcoming election, they seek to maintain party unity by nominating non-local candidates in districts where their candidates won by a larger margin. An empirical analysis of the Liberal Democratic Party’s nomination in House of Representatives elections supports this argument.
How can we elicit honest responses in surveys? Conjoint analysis has become a popular tool to address social desirability bias (SDB), or systematic survey misreporting on sensitive topics. However, there has been no direct evidence showing its suitability for this purpose. We propose a novel experimental design to identify conjoint analysis’s ability to mitigate SDB. Specifically, we compare a standard, fully randomized conjoint design against a partially randomized design where only the sensitive attribute is varied between the two profiles in each task. We also include a control condition to remove confounding due to the increased attention to the varying attribute under the partially randomized design. We implement this empirical strategy in two studies on attitudes about environmental conservation and preferences about congressional candidates. In both studies, our estimates indicate that the fully randomized conjoint design could reduce SDB for the average marginal component effect (AMCE) of the sensitive attribute by about two-thirds of the AMCE itself. Although encouraging, we caution that our results are exploratory and exhibit some sensitivity to alternative model specifications, suggesting the need for additional confirmatory evidence based on the proposed design.
Most formal models of valence competition add a single, separable and unweighted component to the standard one-dimensional utility function of voters. This article presents the results of a conjoint analysis experiment in which respondents were asked to choose between two candidates whose profiles vary along five attributes. Four of these traits behave like valence or policy issues as expected, but one, which has been employed in recent formal and empirical works, does not. Moreover, policy and valence are not separable. They interact at least in some cases, taking a competency form whereby the marginal impact of valence on voters’ choice is conditional on candidates’ policies. This result lends support to recent studies that have found more extensive valence voting under ideological convergence. Finally, policy trumps valence in awkward choices. Respondents even prefer corrupt candidates with similar policy views to honest ones with different opinions, despite integrity being declared the most important attribute.
Significance
Little evidence exists on whether preferences about hypothetical choices measured in a survey experiment are driven by the same structural determinants of the actual choices made in the real world. This study answers this question using a natural experiment as a behavioral benchmark. Comparing the results from conjoint and vignette experiments on which attributes of hypothetical immigrants generate support for naturalization with the outcomes of closely corresponding referendums in Switzerland, we find that the effects estimated from the surveys match the effects of the same attributes in the behavioral benchmark remarkably well. We also find that seemingly subtle differences in survey designs can produce significant differences in performance. Overall, the paired conjoint design performs the best.
We investigate the origins of voters' expectations of greater female competency on ''compassion'' issues, such as dealing with poverty or the aged, and greater male competency on military and defense issues. We contrast two alternative explanations: gender-trait stereotypes, emphasizing a candidate's gender-linked personality traits; and gender-belief stereotypes, placing greatest importance on the differing political outlooks of male and female candidates. We test contrasting predictions from these two approaches with data from an experiment in which 297 undergraduate participants were randomly assigned to hear about a male or a female candidate with typically masculine or feminine traits. Overall, there was stronger support for the trait approach. Warm and expressive candidates were seen as better at compassion issues; instrumental candidates were rated as more competent to handle the military and economic issues. Moreover, masculine instrumental traits increased the candidate's perceived competence on a broader range of issues than the feminine traits of warmth and expressiveness. Finally, there was some limited support for the belief approach with gender-based expectations about the candidates' political views affecting their rated competency on compassion but not other types of political issues.
Most political observers agree that incumbent legislators have a considerable advantage over nonincumbents in modern congressional elections. Yet there is still disagreement over the exact source of this advantage and the explanation for its growth over time. To address this debate we utilize a unique set of historical elections data to test for the presence of an incumbency advantage in late-nineteenth-century House elections (1872–1900). We find a modest direct effect of incumbency and a substantial candidate quality effect. Moreover, the cartel-like control of ballot access by nineteenth century political parties created competition in races that the modern market-like system simply does not sustain. Our results suggest that candidate quality is a fundamental piece of the puzzle in understanding the historical development of the incumbency advantage in American politics.
To explain the gender gap in legislatures, scholars have identified several socio-economic, political, and cultural factors that undermine women’s representation. One explanation focuses on electoral institutions. Proportional representation systems with higher district magnitudes have been shown to increase the percentage of women in legislatures.The authors contend that solely concentrating on district magnitude ignores other critical electoral rules that will affect women’s representation. To better understand electoral system effects, scholars must understand how electoral rules beside district magnitude create incentives for candidates to obtain personal votes.The authors argue that those systems with weak incentives for personal votes (party-centered systems) increase women’s representation in comparison with systems that feature strong incentives for personal votes (candidate-centered systems). Using a data set of 57 countries between 1980 and 2005, the authors show that party-centered systems are more conducive to women’s representation.
Survey experiments are a core tool for causal inference. Yet, the design of classical survey experiments prevents them from identifying which components of a multidimensional treatment are influential. Here, we show how conjoint analysis, an experimental design yet to be widely applied in political science, enables researchers to estimate the causal effects of multiple treatment components and assess several causal hypotheses simultaneously. In conjoint analysis, respondents score a set of alternatives, where each has randomly varied attributes. Here, we undertake a formal identification analysis to integrate conjoint analysis with the potential outcomes framework for causal inference. We propose a new causal estimand and show that it can be nonparametrically identified and easily estimated from conjoint data using a fully randomized design. We then demonstrate the value of these techniques through empirical applications to voter decision-making and attitudes toward immigrants.
This paper proposes entropy balancing, a data preprocessing method to achieve covariate balance in observational studies with binary treatments. Entropy balancing relies on a maximum entropy reweighting scheme that calibrates unit weights so that the reweighted treatment and control group satisfy a potentially large set of prespecified balance conditions that incorporate information about known sample moments. Entropy balancing thereby exactly adjusts inequalities in representation with respect to the first, second, and possibly higher moments of the covariate distributions. These balance improvements can reduce model dependence for the subsequent estimation of treatment effects. The method assures that balance improves on all covariate moments included in the reweighting. It also obviates the need for continual balance checking and iterative searching over propensity score models that may stochastically balance the covariate moments. We demonstrate the use of entropy balancing with Monte Carlo simulations and empirical applications.
In 2009, women are still dramatically underrepresented in elected office in the United States. Though the reasons for this
are complex, public attitudes toward this situation are no doubt of importance. While a number of scholars have demonstrated
that women candidates do not suffer at the ballot box because of their sex, we should not assume that this means that voter
attitudes about gender are irrelevant to politics. Indeed, individual attitudes towards women’s representation in government
and a desire for greater descriptive representation of women may shape attitudes and behaviors in situations when people are
faced with a woman candidate. This project provides a more complete understanding of the determinants of the public’s desire
(or lack thereof) to see more women in elective office and support them in different circumstances. The primary mechanism
proposed to explain these attitudes is gender stereotypes. Gender stereotypes about the abilities and traits of political
women and men are clear and well documented and could easily serve to shape an individual’s evaluations about the appropriate
level and place for women in office. Drawing on an original survey of 1039 U.S. adults, and evaluating both issue and trait
stereotypes, I demonstrate the ways in which sex stereotypes do and do not influence public willingness to support women in
various electoral situations.
KeywordsWomen candidates-Gender stereotypes-Descriptive representation
Democracy is supposed to be the antithesis of hereditary rule by family dynasties. And yet “democratic dynasties” continue to persist in democracies around the world. They have been conspicuously prevalent in Japan, where more than a third of all legislators and two-thirds of all cabinet ministers in recent years have come from families with a history in parliament. Such a high proportion of dynasties is unusual and has sparked concerns over whether democracy in Japan is functioning properly. This book introduces a comparative theory to explain the causes and consequences of dynasties in democracies like Japan. Members of dynasties enjoy an “inherited incumbency advantage” in all three stages of a typical political career: selection, election, and promotion. However, the nature and extent of this advantage, as well as its consequences for elections and representation, varies by the institutional context of electoral rules and candidate selection methods within parties. In the late 1980s, roughly half of all new candidates in Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party were political legacies. However, electoral system reform in 1994 and subsequent party reforms have changed the incentives for party leaders to rely on dynastic politics in candidate selection. A new pattern of party-based competition is slowly replacing the old pattern of competition based on localized family fiefdoms.
Representative democracy entails the aggregation of multiple policy issues by parties into competing bundles of policies, or “manifestos,” which are then evaluated holistically by voters in elections. This aggregation process obscures the multidimensional policy preferences underlying a voter’s single choice of party or candidate. We address this problem through a conjoint experiment based on the actual party manifestos in Japan’s 2014 House of Representatives election. By juxtaposing sets of issue positions as hypothetical manifestos and asking respondents to choose one, our study identifies the effects of specific positions on the overall assessment of manifestos, heterogeneity in preferences among subgroups of respondents, and the popularity ranking of manifestos. Our analysis uncovers important discrepancies between voter preferences and the portrayal of the election results by politicians and the media as providing a policy mandate to the Liberal Democratic Party, underscoring the potential danger of inferring public opinion from election outcomes alone.
What effect do candidates with local ties have on voter turnout and party support? A considerable challenge within the existing literature on the personal vote, including that part which derives from local ties, is disentangling it from the party vote using observational data. We exploit the unique institutional context of Norway's historical two-round system, and data measured at the municipality level, to evaluate the mobilizational impact of voter attachment to parties versus (local) candidates. Under this system, entry into the second round was unrestricted, with the number and identity of candidates determined by elite coordination decisions. In municipalities where coordination at the district level between rounds resulted in the withdrawal of a candidate with local ties, we document a strong negative effect on both turnout and party support, which highlights the value of the personal vote for mobilization, and the potential trade-offs that confront parties and coalitions in nomination decisions.
In most democracies, lawmakers tend to be vastly better off than the citizens who elect them. Is that because voters prefer more affluent politicians over leaders from working-class backgrounds? In this article, we report the results of candidate choice experiments embedded in surveys in Britain, the United States, and Argentina. Using conjoint designs, we asked voters in these different contexts to choose between two hypothetical candidates, randomly varying several of the candidates’ personal characteristics, including whether they had worked in blue-collar or white-collar jobs. Contrary to the idea that voters prefer affluent politicians, the voters in our experiments viewed hypothetical candidates from the working class as equally qualified, more relatable, and just as likely to get their votes. Voters do not seem to be behind the shortage of working-class politicians. To the contrary, British, American, and Argentine voters seem perfectly willing to cast their ballots for working-class candidates.
We ask whether the birthplaces of Italian members of Parliament are favoured in the allocation of central government transfers. Using a panel of municipalities for the years between 1994 and 2006, we find that municipal governments of legislators' birth towns receive larger transfers per capita. Exploiting variation in birthplaces induced by parliamentary turnover for estimation, we find that this effect is driven by legislators who were born in a town outside their district of election. As a result, we argue that our findings cannot be a consequence of re-election incentives, the usual motivation for pork-barrel policies in the literature. Rather, politicians may be pursuing other personal motives. In line with this hypothesis, we find that the birth town bias essentially disappears when legislative elections are near. We explore several possible mechanisms behind our results by matching parliamentarians to a detailed dataset on local level administrators.
Despite its democratic structure, Japan’s government has been dominated by a single party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) since 1955. This book offers an explanation for why, even in the face of great dissatisfaction with the LDP, no opposition party has been able to offer itself as a credible challenger in Japan. Understanding such failure is important for many reasons, from its effect on Japanese economic policy to its implications for what facilitates democratic responsiveness more broadly. The principal explanations for opposition failure in Japan focus on the country’s culture and electoral system.
Electoral Systems and Political Context illustrates how political and social context conditions the effects of electoral rules. The book examines electoral behavior and outcomes in countries that use “mixed-member” electoral systems – where voters cast one ballot for a party list under proportional representation (PR) and one for a candidate in a single member district (SMD). Based on comparisons of outcomes under the two different rules used in mixed-member systems, the book highlights how electoral systems' effects – especially strategic voting, the number of parties, and women's representation – tend to be different in new democracies from what one usually sees in established democracies. Moreover, electoral systems such as SMDs are usually presumed to constrain the number of parties irrespective of the level of social diversity, but this book demonstrates that social diversity frequently shapes party fragmentation even under such restrictive rules.
Looking at women's power in the home, in the workplace, and in politics from a political economy perspective, Torben Iversen and Frances Rosenbluth demonstrate that equality is tied to demand for women's labor outside the home, which is a function of structural, political, and institutional conditions. They go on to explain several anomalies of modern gender politics: why women vote differently from men; why women are better represented in the workforce in the United States than in other countries but less well represented in politics; why men share more of the household work in some countries than in others; and why some countries have such low fertility rates. The first book to integrate the micro-level of families with the macro-level of national institutions, Women, Work, and Politics presents an original and groundbreaking approach to gender inequality. © 2010 by Torben Iversen and Frances Rosenbluth. All rights reserved.
This paper uses a regression discontinuity design to estimate the degree to which incumbents scare off challengers with previous officeholder experience. The estimates indicate a surprisingly small amount of scare-off, at least in cases where the previous election was nearly tied. As Lee and others have shown (and as we confirm for our samples) the estimated party incumbency advantage in these same cases is quite large—in fact, it is about as large as the average incumbency advantage for all races found using other approaches. Drawing from previous estimates of the electoral value of officeholder experience, we thus calculate that scare-off in these cases accounts for only about 5-7 percent of the party incumbency advantage. We show that these patterns are similar in elections for US House seats, statewide offices and US senate seats, and state legislative seats.
Descriptive representation within legislatures is often held to be important because of its assumed effects on public policy. The research to date on the descriptive representation of women has generally focused on elite attitudes rather than on policy outcomes, and there is little agreement on the relationship between the increased representation of women and improved policy outcomes. We investigate the form of this relationship and whether the scope for a translation of descriptive representation into substantive representation is greatest during periods of policy innovation. We use a statistical analysis of child-care coverage in Norwegian municipalities in 1975, 1979, 1983, 1987, and 1991 to model the relationship between female representation and the provision of child care. We find that descriptive representation does affect policy outcome and that this relationship varies both according to the level of female representation and over time.
There are two distinct bodies of research on candidate gender. The first argues that voters are not biased against female candidates. These studies are usually based on aggregate analyses of the success rates of male and female candidates. The second body of research argues that voters employ gender stereotypes when they evaluate candidates. These studies are usually based on experiments which manipulate candidate gender. This study seeks to unite these literatures by incorporating gender stereotypes and hypothetical vote questions involving two candidates in one model I argue that many voters have a baseline gender preference to vote for male over female candidates, or female over male candidates. Using original survey data, I find that this general predisposition or preference can be explained by gender stereotypes about candidate traits, beliefs, and issue competencies, and by voter gender. I also argue that this baseline preference affects voting behavior.
There has been extensive research into the extent to which voters utilise short cuts based on gender and race stereotypes when evaluating candidates, but relatively little is known about how they respond to other background characteristics. We compare the impact of candidates' sex, religion, age, education, occupation and location/residence through a survey experiment in which respondents rate two candidates based on short biographies. We find small differences in the ratings of candidates in response to sex, religion, age and education cues but more sizeable effects are apparent for the candidate's occupation and place of residence. Even once we introduce a control for political party into our experimental scenarios the effect of candidate's place of residence continues to have a sizeable impact on candidate evaluations. Our research suggests that students of electoral behaviour should pay attention to a wider range of candidate cues.
The growing literature on personal vote assumes that candidates with strong local ties should be more successful electorally and more likely to break party unity in parliament. Using unique data from Estonia on candidates' personal vote-earning attributes, such as local birthplace and local-level political experience, this research note offers the first direct test of both of these assumptions. I find that candidates with local-level political experience tend to be electorally more successful, and, once in parliament, they are more likely to behave independently and break party unity. Local birthplace has no effect on either personal vote or party unity. These findings have clear policy implications for the electoral and legislative strategies of political parties.
Seat allocation formulas affect candidates' incentives to campaign on a personal rather than party reputation. Variables that enhance personal vote-seeking include: (1) lack of party leadership control over access to and rank on ballots, (2) degree to which candidates are elected on individual votes independent of co-partisans, and (3) whether voters cast a single intra-party vote instead of multiple votes or a party-level vote. District magnitude has the unusual feature that, as it increases, the value of a personal reputation rises if the electoral formula itself fosters personal vote-seeking, but falls if the electoral formula fosters party reputation-seeking.
The loss of power by the Liberal Democratic Party after more than half a century of dominance was the most obvious outcome of Japan’s 2009 election, but together the 2005 and 2009 elections demonstrate significant shifts in both the foundations of party support and the importance of national swings in support for one party or another. Since 2005, urban-rural differences in the foundations of the leading parties have changed dramatically, and Japan has moved from a system dominated by locally based, individual candidacies toward a two-party system in which both party popularity and personal characteristics influence electoral success or failure.
This article presents evidence that electoral institutions affect the geographic distribution of both candidate electoral support and government resources. The author exploits two electoral reforms in Japan to identify the effect of institutional incentives: (1) the 1994 electoral reform from a multimember single nontransferable vote (SNTV) system to a mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) system with a single-member district (SMD) component and a proportional representation component; and (2) the 1925 electoral reform from a predominantly SMD system to a multimember SNTV system. Using several new data sets, the two main findings of this article are that (1) Japanese representatives competing in multimember SNTV districts had more geographically concentrated electoral support than those competing in SMDs and that (2) intergovernmental transfers appear to be more concentrated around Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) incumbents' home offices under the multimember SNTV system than under the MMM system. The findings in this article highlight the connection between institutions and geographic patterns of representation.
Analysis of both district-level and aggregate time-series data from postwar House elections supports the thesis that strategic political elites play a pivotal role in translating national conditions into election results and therefore in holding members of Congress collectively accountable for the government's performance. More high-quality candidates run when prospects appear to favor their party; they also win significantly more votes and victories than other candidates in equivalent circumstances. Thus, strategic career decisions both reflect and enhance national partisan tides. The electoral importance of strategic politicians has grown over time in tandem with the trend toward candidate-centered electoral politics. This has rendered the effects of national forces less automatic, more contingent, thus threatening the capacity of elections to enforce some degree of collective responsibility
Proportional representation systems affect the extent to which elected legislators exhibit various attributes that allow them to earn a personal vote. The sources of variation in personal vote-earning attributes (PVEA) lie in informational shortcuts voters use under different electoral rules. List type (closed or open) and district magnitude (the number of legislators elected from a district) affect the types of shortcuts voters employ. When lists are closed, legislators' PVEA are of decreasing usefulness to voters as magnitude (and hence the number of candidates on a list) increases. When lists are open, legislators' PVEA are increasingly useful to voters as magnitude increases, because the number of candidates from which voters must choose whom to give a preference vote increases. As predicted by the theory, the probability that a legislator will exhibit PVEA—operationalized as local birthplace or lower-level electoral experience—declines with magnitude when lists are closed, but rises with magnitude when lists are open.
If voters are biased against female candidates, only the most talented, hardest working female candidates will succeed in the electoral process. Furthermore, if women perceive there to be sex discrimination in the electoral process, or if they underestimate their qualifications for office, then only the most qualified, politically ambitious females will emerge as candidates. We argue that when either or both forms of sex-based selection are present, the women who are elected to office will perform better, on average, than their male counterparts. We test this central implication of our theory by studying the relative success of men and women in delivering federal spending to their districts and in sponsoring legislation. Analyzing changes within districts over time, we find that congresswomen secure roughly 9% more spending from federal discretionary programs than congressmen. Women also sponsor and cosponsor significantly more bills than their male colleagues.
According to the minority empowerment thesis, minority representation strengthens representational links, fosters more positive attitudes toward government, and encourages political participation. We examine this theory from a cross-national perspective, making use of surveys that sampled minorities in the United States and New Zealand. Both countries incorporate structures into their electoral systems that make it possible for minority groups to elect representatives of their choice. We find that in both countries descriptive representation matters: it increases knowledge about and contact with representatives in the U.S. and leads to more positive evaluations of governmental responsiveness and increased electoral participation in New Zealand. These findings have broad implications for debates about minority representation.
Carey and Shugart (1995) offer a four component composite index of “incentives to cultivate a personal vote.” We argue that this index, while tapping important aspects of electoral system choice, is best regarded as encompassing two distinct dimensions: degree of party-centeredness of the electoral system, on the one hand, and incentives for “parochial” behavior on the part of legislators, on the other. Also, while we have no problem with the three indicators used by Carey and Shugart to measure party-centeredness; to measure parochial incentives we prefer to use a new measure, E (Grofman, 1999a) of the size of a legislator's electoral constituency, rather than using district magnitude, m, as a proxy for a the size of a legislator's geographic constituency, as Carey and Shugart do. In the conclusion to the paper we argue that the degree of similarity between any two electoral systems will depend upon the research question at issue, and that the expected degree of proportionality of election results is only one of the many political consequences of electoral laws to which we ought to be paying attention.
All polities may be judged against an ideal of electoral “efficiency” defined as responsiveness to the collective-goods preferences of the majority of the electorate. An index of efficiency permits a visual representation of where any democratic system falls in each of two dimensions, interparty and intraparty. Deviation from the “efficient” ideal encourages politicians to cater to parochial interests at the expense of broad policy preferences. Recent electoral reforms in four countries (Italy, Japan, New Zealand and Venezuela) represent moves away from electoral systems that represented different extreme deviations from efficiency.