The Political Economy of Election Outcomes in Japan

The scholarly literature dealing with the effects of economic conditions on government support and election outcomes in advanced industrialized democracies is extensive.The bulk of this research relates government support and vote choice to objective economic conditions or subjective perceptions of those conditions in order to establish whether and to what extent such a relationship exists. For overviews, see Michael Lewis-Beck, Economics and Elections: The Major Democracies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988); Peter Nannestad and Martin Paldam, ‘The VP-Function: A Survey of the Literature on Vote and Popularity Functions After 25 Years’, Public Choice, 79 (1994), 213–45. Based on the so-called reward–punishment (or responsibility) hypothesis, empirical studies of economic conditions and government support often find that voters punish those incumbents who perform badly and reward those who do a good job.Lewis-Beck finds a general consensus among scholars that ‘when economic conditions are bad, citizens vote against the ruling party’ (Michael Lewis-Beck, ‘Introduction’, in Helmut Norpoth, Michael Lewis-Beck and Jean-Dominique Lafay, eds, Economics and Politics: The Calculus of Support (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), p.2). See also V. O. Key, The Responsible Electorate (New York: Vintage Books, 1968); Gerald Kramer, ‘Short-Term Fluctuations in US Voting Behavior, 1896–1964’, American Political Science Review, 65 (1971), 131–43. The reward–punish hypothesis states that the mass public holds the incumbent government accountable for the state of the economy. When the economy performs well, the government can take credit, but when there is a slump, the executive or the governing parties are blamed by the voters. Other hypotheses that have been tested are the issue-priority and the stability hypotheses (see Harold Clarke, Euel Elliott, William Mishler, Marianne Stewart, Paul Whiteley and Gary Zuk, Controversies in Political Economy: Canada, Great Britain, the United States (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992)).,Although frequently supportive of the general conclusion that the economy affects politics, the evidence for economic effects on government popularity or vote choice is not always conclusive or straightforward. Several authors have explored why economic conditions do not seem to affect popularity or vote choice all the time and under all circumstances. See, for example, Martin Paldam, ‘How Robust is the Vote Function? A Study of Seventeen Nations over Four Decades’, in Norpoth, Lewis-Beck and Lafay, eds, Economics and Politics, pp. 9–31; Christopher J. Anderson, ‘The Dynamics of Public Support for Coalition Governments’, Comparative Political Studies, 28 (1995), 350–83. In fact, over the years the notion that governments in democratic polities are in some way or another judged by how they perform at managing the economy has almost taken on the ring of a social scientific fact.