Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T12:42:38.340Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Intensity of Government–Opposition Divide as Measured through Legislative Speeches and What We Can Learn from It: Analyses of Japanese Parliamentary Debates, 1953–2013

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2018

Luigi Curini Open the ORCID record for Luigi Curini [Opens in a new window] ,
Airo Hino  and
Atsushi Osaka
Luigi Curini*
Affiliation:
Luigi Curini, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy
Airo Hino
Affiliation:
Airo Hino, Faculty of Political Science and Economics, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan
Atsushi Osaka
Affiliation:
Atsushi Osaka, Rissho University, Tokyo, Japan
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Through the analysis of legislative speeches made by prime ministers and party representatives in parliamentary sessions in Japan from 1953 to 2013, we argue that it is possible to place parties according to a dimension that captures their confrontational nature within a parliamentary democracy and its evolution over time. Using this dimension extracted via a well-known scaling algorithm (Wordfish), we develop an index of the intensity of the government–opposition divide that is directly related to the dynamics of the electoral cycle of Japanese politics. We then show how this new index greatly facilitates the investigation of two important aspects of Japanese legislative politics (the survival rate of governments and the speed of passage of cabinet bills) compared to a situation in which we focus on more traditional measures capturing the ideological position of the parties alone.

Keywords

legislative speechesgovernment and opposition divideJapanideologyWordfish
Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , April 2020 , pp. 184 - 201
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2018. Published by Government and Opposition Limited and Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

The original version of this article was published with an incorrect author surname. A notice detailing this has been published and the error rectified in the online and print PDF and HTML copies.

References

Bäck, H and Debus, M (2016) Political Parties, Parliaments and Legislative Speechmaking. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Becker, R and Saalfeld, T (2004) The Life and Times of Bills. In Döring H and Hallerberg M (eds), Patterns of Parliamentary Behaviour. Aldershot: Ashgate: 57–90.Google Scholar
Benoit, K and Laver, M (2003) Estimating Irish Party Positions Using Computer Wordscoring: The 2002 Elections. Irish Political Studies 17, 97–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blossfeld, H, Golsch, K and Rohwer, G (2007) Event History Analysis with Stata. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Budge, I, Klingemann, H, Volkens, A, Bara, J and Tanenbaum, E (2001) Mapping Policy Preferences. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Catalinac, A (2016) Pork to Policy: The Rise of National Security in Elections in Japan. Journal of Politics 78, 1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Curini, L and Hino, A (2012) Missing Links in Party-System Polarization: How Institutions and Voters Matter. Journal of Politics 74, 460–473.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Curini, L and Zucchini, F (2012) Government Alternation and Legislative Party Unity: The Case of Italy, 1988–2008. West European Politics 35, 826–846.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Curtis, GL (1988) The Japanese Way of Politics. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Curtis, GL (2013) The Logic of Japanese Politics: Leaders, Institutions, and the Limits of Change. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Dalton, RJ (2008) The Quantity and the Quality of Party Systems. Comparative Political Studies 20, 1–22.Google Scholar
Dewan, T and Spirling, A (2011) Strategic Opposition and Government Cohesion in Westminster Democracies. American Political Science Review 105, 337–358.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Esaiasson, P and Narud, HM (2014) Between-Election Democracy: The Representative Relationship after Election Day. Colchester: ECPR Press.Google Scholar
Fukumoto, K (2000a) Naikaku Rippou no Shingi Katei no Rekishiteki Bunseki (1947–1998). Koukyou Seisaku (Public Policy), www.ppsa.jp/pdf/journal/pdf2000/2000-01-005.pdf.Google Scholar
Fukumoto, K (2000b) Nihon no Kokkai Seiji: Zen Seifu Rippou no Bunseki. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press.Google Scholar
Grimmer, J and Stewart, BM (2013) Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts. Political Analysis 21, 267–297.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herzog, A and Benoit, K (2015) The Most Unkindest Cuts: Speaker Selection and Expressed Government Dissent During Economic Crisis. Journal of Politics 77, 1157–1175.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hix, S and Jun, H-W (2009) Party Behaviour in the Parliamentary Arena. Party Politics 15, 667–694.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hix, S and Noury, A (2016) Government-Opposition or Left-Right? The Institutional Determinants of Voting in Legislatures. Political Science Research and Methods 4(2), 249–273.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hjorth, F, Klemmensen, R, Hobolt, S, Ejnar Hansen, M and Kurrild-Klitgaard, P (2015) Computers, Coders, and Voters: Comparing Automated Methods for Estimating Party Positions. Research and Politics 2, 1–9, https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168015580476.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jou, W and Endo, M (2016) Generational Gap in Japanese Politics. London: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, G, Alt, JE, Burns, NE and Laver, M (1990) A Unified Model of Cabinet Dissolution in Parliamentary Democracies. American Journal of Political Science 34(3), 846–871.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krehbiel, K and Peskowitz, Z (2015) Legislative Organization and Ideal-Point Bias. Journal of Theoretical Politics 27, 673–703.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lauderdale, BE and Herzog, A (2016) Measuring Political Positions from Legislative Speech. Political Analysis 24, 374–394.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laver, M (2006) Legislatures and Parliaments in Comparative Contexts. In Weingast B and Wittman D (eds), Oxford Handbook of Political Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 121–138.Google Scholar
Laver, M and Schofield, N (1990) Multiparty Governments: The Politics of Coalition in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Laver, M, Benoit, K and Garry, J (2003) Extracting Policy Positions from Political Texts Using Words as Data. American Political Science Review 97, 311–331.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lowe, W (2015) Austin: Do Things With Words. Version 0.2.2, http://github.org/conjugateprior/austin.Google Scholar
Marcus, GE (2000) Emotions in Politics. Annual Review of Political Science 3, 221–250.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, LW and Vanberg, G (2008) Coalition Government and Political Communication. Political Research Quarterly 61, 502–516.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Masuyama, M (2000) Is the Japanese Diet Consensual? Journal of Legislative Studies 6, 9–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Masuyama, M (2004) Reply to Fukumoto’s Discussion: Time and Influences in Law-making. The Leviathan 35, 160–163 (In Japanese).Google Scholar
Masuyama, M (2007) The Survival of Prime Ministers and the House of Councillors. Social Science Japan Journal 10, 81–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mayhew, DR (1974) Congress: The Electoral Connection. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Monroe, BL and Schrodt, PA (2008) Introduction to the Special Issue: The Statistical Analysis of Political Text. Political Analysis 16, 351–355.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Polsby, NW (1975) Legislatures. In Greenstein FI and Polsby NW (eds), Handbook of Political Science. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley: 257–319.Google Scholar
Proksch, S-O and Slapin, JB (2008) A Scaling Model for Estimating Time-Series Party Positions from Texts. American Journal of Political Science 52, 705–722.Google Scholar
Proksch, S-O and Slapin, JB (2009) How to Avoid Pitfalls in Statistical Analysis of Political Texts: The Case of Germany. German Politics 18, 323–344.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Proksch, S-O and Slapin, JB (2012) Institutional Foundations of Legislative Speeches. American Journal of Political Science 56, 520–537.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Proksch, S-O and Slapin, JB (2015) The Politics of Parliamentary Debate: Parties, Rebels and Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Proksch, S-O, Slapin, JB and Thies, MF (2011) Party System Dynamics in Post-war Japan: A Quantitative Content Analysis of Electoral Pledges. Electoral Studies 30, 114–124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saalfeld, T (2008) Institutions, Chance and Choices: The Dynamics of Cabinet Survival. In Muller WC, Bergman T and Strøm K (eds), Comparative Politics: Cabinets and Coalition Bargaining. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 327–368.Google Scholar
Sieberer, U (2016) The Politics of Parliamentary Debate: Parties, Rebels and Representation. West European Politics 39, 903–904.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strøm, K (1990) A Behavioral Theory of Competitive Political Parties. American Journal of Political Science 34, 565–598.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, AJ (2014) Bill Passage Speed in the US House: A Test of a Vote Buying Model of the Legislative Process. Journal of Legislative Studies 20, 285–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Warwick, PV (1994) Government Survival in Parliamentary Democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Warwick, PV (2011) Voters, Parties, and Declared Government Policy. Comparative Political Studies 44, 1675–1699.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Luigi et al. supplementary material

Luigi et al. supplementary material 1

Download Luigi et al. supplementary material(File)
File 58.6 KB