Party Switching and Policy Disagreement: Scaling Analysis of Experts' Judgment
Party Switching and Policy Disagreement: Scaling Analysis of Experts' Judgment
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政党转换和政策分歧：专家判断的尺度分析
DOI：
10.1017/s1468109922000160
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发表时间：
2022
影响因子：
1
通讯作者：
Tomoko Matsumoto and Kentaro Yamamoto
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Hiroki Kubo;Tomoko Matsumoto and Kentaro Yamamoto
在什么条件下政策分歧会导致政党分裂？2017年日本议会选举前夕，第一大在野党民信党分裂，主要在野党分裂为3党。关于国防政策的分歧被新党“希望”的创始领袖迅速政治化。一些成员被激励转投希望党，分裂民信党。为什么长期存在但不活跃的国防政策分歧会成为导致重大分歧的问题？为了回答这些问题，我们使用了Aldrich-Mckelvey和Blackbox转置尺度来分析来自专家调查的关于问题立场和政党政策显著性的数据。还审查了专家回答的差异，以考虑各方是否一贯和明确地区分其政策立场。两党在国防政策上的立场明显不同，并显示出分裂党派之间的分歧。但是，在环境、地方分权等政策上，两党的立场在二维空间上明显趋同，显示出主要在野党的统一。此外，不同项目功能（DIF）分析显示，国防政策的问题显著性具有较高的方差（即负权重），表明其在分裂前立即政治化。总体结果表明，国防政策的政治化削弱了政党凝聚力，党内存在分歧。这意味着政党转换是由政策分歧引起的，但也关键取决于哪项政策被政治化为政党团结的问题。
Under what conditions do policy disagreements cause parties to split? Before the general elections in 2017 in Japan, the Minshin, the largest opposition party, split, and the major opposition camp collapsed into three parties. Disagreement about defense policy was rapidly politicized by the founding leader of a new party, Hope. Some members were motivated to switch to Hope and split the Minshin. Why did the disagreement about defense policy, which had long existed but was inactive, become an issue that led to a major split? To answer these questions, we used Aldrich–Mckelvey and Blackbox transpose scalings to analyze the data from an expert survey about issue positions and the salience of party policies. The variance in experts' responses was also examined to consider whether parties consistently and clearly distinguish their policy positions. Party positions on defense policy were clearly distinguished and revealed a split among splinter parties. However, the party positions clearly converged on the environment, decentralization, and other policies in a two-dimensional space, which indicated the unity of the major opposition camp. Moreover, different item functioning (DIF) analysis revealed a high variance (i.e., negative weight) on the issue salience of defense policy, which indicated its politicization immediately before the split. Overall results indicated that the politicization of defense policy contributed to weakening party cohesion and the party was split over disagreement about it. This implies that party switching is caused by policy disagreement but also hinges critically on which policy is politicized as an issue for party unity.