Constituency Candidates Versus Parties in Japanese Voting Behavior

Most studies of Japanese elections have seen constituency candidates and their campaigns as the major factor in electoral mobilization. In order to explore the effects of candidate campaigns and voters' images of candidates, as well as party identifications, party images, partisan issue opinions, and past voting, I develop models portraying these effects upon the vote, both separately and together, and test the models using survey data. The results show that partisan attitudes are the dominant force in Japanese parliamentary voting. The most plausible explanation for the importance of partisan factors lies in the electorate's being exposed regularly to information about parties but only intermittently to information about candidates. The plausibility of an information-based explanation of the importance of robust partisan attitudes in Japan suggests in turn that comparative differences in voting may reflect systemic variations in information processes.