The Critical Factors of the Vote Action in Japan and the U.S..

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This research focuses on vote action in Japan and the United States through social psychological factors such as trust and assurance. Vote action is a group behavior. However, if each elector is selfish, there is no incentive for the elector to vote. On the other hand, in the field of study on social capital in political participation theory as well as on trust in social psychology, they discuss about logics with which people perform cooperative action in a group behavior in recent years. Especially the research conducted from social psychological aspects by Yamagishi (1998) characterizes the Japanese society as assurance-based society and the American society as trust-based society when he compares Japan-U.S. societies. In Japanese society, people are more expected to take cooperation action because they consider profit from their relationship as important. On the contrary, in the American society where they can trust on others more, they are more likely to take cooperative action. If … More we apply this argument to study on vote action, we expect that when people in Japan see the profit from the commitment relationship, they take vote action. Although in the US, we see people don't vote in such case when they trust on others. In order to verify this finding, we have conducted empirical analyses on the difference mentioned above with data from JES in Japan and GSS in the United States. Organizational affiliation is considered as a venue where people produce feeling of trust to general others in society. We have analyzed the mechanism of the organizational affiliation affecting vote action and have found that, in more stable commitment relationship environment in Japanese societysuch as living in small scale town with long year, voters' turnout was high. Also about organizational affiliation, peoplewho belong to the organizations such as agricultural, forestry, and fishery organizations in specific commitment relationship with a certain candidate tend to vote. We have also found that, on the other hand, in the American society, the trust to others in general related vote action. We cannot observe anything related to scale in town where subjects live nor to living years. Finally, we have found the patterns that organization affiliation influences a vote action through the trust to the general others in some kinds of organizations and confirmed our results supports the argument over social capital. Less