Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T18:53:03.887Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Measuring Voters’ Multidimensional Policy Preferences with Conjoint Analysis: Application to Japan’s 2014 Election

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 March 2018

Yusaku Horiuchi ,
Daniel M. Smith  and
Teppei Yamamoto
Yusaku Horiuchi
Affiliation:
Professor of Government and Mitsui Professor of Japanese Studies, Department of Government, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA. Email: [email protected], URL: https://sites.dartmouth.edu/horiuchi/
Daniel M. Smith
Affiliation:
Associate Professor, Department of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Email: [email protected], URL: https://sites.google.com/site/danielmarkhamsmith
Teppei Yamamoto*
Affiliation:
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. Email: [email protected], URL: http://web.mit.edu/teppei/www
*
*Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

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.

Keywords

electionrepresentationmanifestoconjoint analysisJapan
Type
Articles
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , April 2018 , pp. 190 - 209
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology. 

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

Authors’ note: Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2015 Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association; the 2015 Meeting of the American Political Science Association; and seminars at Dartmouth, Penn, MIT, Keio, Harvard, Doshisha, Stanford, Hiroshima, Yale, and GRIPS. We thank Mayumi Fukushima for her excellent research assistance, and Faisal Ahmed, Eric Beerbohm, Simon Chauchard, Kyle Dropp, Noam Gidron, Jane Green, Karen Jusko, Joshua Kertzer, Ellis Krauss, Kuniaki Nemoto, Brendan Nyhan, Steven Reed, Kay Shimizu, Arthur Spirling, Luke Swaine, Seiki Tanaka, and other conference and seminar participants for helpful feedback. Replication materials for this article are available at the Political Analysis Dataverse as Horiuchi, Smith, and Yamamoto (2017).

Contributing Editor: Jonathan N. Katz.

References

Alvarez, R. M., and Nagler, J.. 1995. Economics, issues and the Perot candidacy: voter choice in the 1992 presidential election. American Journal of Political Science 39(3):714–744.Google Scholar
Alvarez, R. M., Nagler, J., and Bowler, S.. 2000. Issues, economics and the dynamics of multi-party elections: the British 1987 general election. American Political Science Review 94(1):131–149.Google Scholar
Bechtel, M. M., Hainmueller, J., and Margalit, Y. M.. 2014. Preferences for international redistribution: the divide over the Eurozone bailouts. American Journal of Political Science 58(4):835–856.Google Scholar
Bechtel, M. M., and Scheve, K. F.. 2013. Mass support for global climate agreements depends on institutional design. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110(34):13763–13768.Google Scholar
Benoit, K., Conway, D., Lauderdale, B. E., Laver, M., and Mikhaylov, S.. 2016. Crowd-sourced text analysis: reproducible and agile production of political data. American Political Science Review 110(2):278–295.Google Scholar
Benoit, K., and Laver, M.. 2006. Party policy in modern democracies . New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bertrand, M., and Mullainathan, S.. 2001. Do people mean what they say? Implications for subjective survey data. American Economic Review 91(2):67–72.Google Scholar
Budge, I., and Farlie, D. J.. 1983. Explaining and predicting elections: issue effects and party strategies in twenty-three democracies . London: George Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
Conley, P. H. 2001. Presidential mandates: how elections shape the national agenda . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Dalton, R. J. 2017. Party representation across multiple issue dimensions. Party Politics 23(6):609–622.Google Scholar
Dalton, R. J., Farrell, D. M., and McAllister, I.. 2011. Political parties and democratic linkage: how parties organize democracy . Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dewan, T., and Shepsle, K. A.. 2011. Political economy models of elections. Annual Review of Political Science 14:311–330.Google Scholar
Downs, A. 1957. An economic theory of democracy . New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Fowler, J. H., and Smirnov, O.. 2007. Mandates, parties, and voters: how elections shape the future . Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Franchino, F., and Zucchini, F.. 2015. Voting in a multi-dimensional space: a conjoint analysis employing valence and ideology attributes of candidates. Political Science Research and Methods 3(2):221–241.Google Scholar
Gabel, M. J., and Huber, J. D.. 2000. Putting parties in their place: inferring party left-right ideological positions from party manifestos data. American Journal of Political Science 44(1):94–103.Google Scholar
Green, J., and Hobolt, S. B.. 2008. Owning the issue agenda: party strategies and vote choices in British elections. Electoral Studies 27(3):460–476.Google Scholar
Hainmueller, J. 2012. Entropy balancing: a multivariate reweighting method to produce balanced samples in observational studies. Political Analysis 20(1):25–46.Google Scholar
Hainmueller, J., Hangartner, D., and Yamamoto, T.. 2015. Validating vignette and conjoint survey experiments against real-world behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112(8):2395–2400.Google Scholar
Hainmueller, J., and Hopkins, D. J.. 2015. The hidden American immigration consensus: a conjoint analysis of attitudes toward immigrants. American Journal of Political Science 59(3):529–548.Google Scholar
Hainmueller, J., Hopkins, D. J., and Yamamoto, T.. 2014. Causal inference in conjoint analysis: understanding multi-dimensional preferences via stated preference experiments. Political Analysis 22(1):1–30.Google Scholar
Hastie, T., Tibshirani, R., and Friedman, J.. 2009. The elements of statistical learning: data mining, inference, and prediction . 2nd edn. Springer.Google Scholar
Hoerl, A. E., and Kennard, R. W.. 1970. Ridge regression: biased estimation for nonorthogonal problems. Technometrics 12(1):55–67.Google Scholar
Horiuchi, Y., Smith, D. M., and Yamamoto, T.. 2017. Replication data for: measuring voters’ multidimensional policy preferences with conjoint analysis: application to Japan’s 2014 election. Harvard Dataverse, V1, doi:10.7910/DVN/KUMMUJ.Google Scholar
Ito, T.2013. Abenomics: early success and prospects. Japan Spotlight (September/October) 4–7.Google Scholar
Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., and Tversky, A.. 1982. Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases . New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Klingemann, H.-D., Hofferbert, R. I., and Budge, I.. 1994. Parties, policies, and democracy . Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Kramer, G. H. 1977. A dynamic model of political equilibrium. Journal of Economic Theory 16:310–334.Google Scholar
Krosnick, J. A. 1999. Survey research. Annual Review of Psychology 50(1):537–567.Google Scholar
Lupia, A., and McCubbins, M. D.. 1998. The democratic dilemma: can citizens learn what they need to know? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Manin, B., Przeworski, A., and Stokes, S. C.. 1999. Elections and representation. In Democracy, accountability, and representation , ed. Przeworski, A., Stokes, S. C., and Manin, B.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 29–54.Google Scholar
McFadden, D. 1973. Conditional logit analysis of qualitative choice behavior. In Frontiers in econometrics , ed. Zarembka, P.. New York: Academic Press, pp. 105–142.Google Scholar
Mutz, D. C. 2011. Population-based survey experiments . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Noble, G. W. 2016. Abenomics in the 2014 election: showing the money (supply) and little else. In Japan decides 2014: the Japanese general election , ed. Pekkanen, R. J., Reed, S. R., and Scheiner, E.. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 155–169.Google Scholar
Otake, H. 1999. Nihon seiji no tairitsujiku . Tokyo: Chuko Shinsho.Google Scholar
Petrocik, J. R. 1996. Issue ownership in presidential elections, with a 1980 case study. American Journal of Political Science 40(3):825–850.Google Scholar
Popkin, S. 1991. The reasoning voter: communication and persuasion in presidential campaigns . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Powell, G. B. Jr.. 2007. Aggregating and representing political preferences. In The Oxford handbook of comparative politics , ed. Boix, C. and Stokes, S. C.. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 653–677.Google Scholar
Roemer, J. E. 1998. Why the poor do not expropriate the rich: an old argument in new garb. Journal of Public Economics 70(3):399–424.Google Scholar
Royed, T. J. 1996. Testing the mandate model in Britain and the United States: evidence from the Reagan and Thatcher eras. British Journal of Political Science 26(1):45–80.Google Scholar
Schattschneider, E. E. 1942. Party government . New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.Google Scholar
Scheiner, E., Smith, D. M., and Thies, M. F.. 2016. The 2014 Japanese election results: the opposition cooperates, but fails to inspire. In Japan decides 2014: the Japanese general election , ed. Pekkanen, R. J., Reed, S. R., and Scheiner, E.. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 22–38.Google Scholar
Smets, K., and van Ham, C.. 2013. The embarrassment of riches? A meta-analysis of individual-level research on voter turnout. Electoral Studies 32(2):344–359.Google Scholar
Thomson, R. 2001. The programme to policy linkage: the fulfilment of election pledges on socio-economic policy in the Netherlands, 1986–1998. European Journal of Political Research 40(2):171–197.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Horiuchi et al. supplementary material

Horiuchi et al. supplementary material 1

Download Horiuchi et al. supplementary material(File)
File 721.8 KB