The Impact of New Electoral System on Political Change--US-Japan Joint Study on Japanese Voters

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This project was organized as a US-Japan joint work on investigating impacts of the new electoral system on political change in late 1990s in Japan. The project succeeds to a prior research called "JEDS"(Japanese Election and Democracy Study) supported by the National Science Foundation in US (SBR-9632113). Consisted of the same members as the current project, the JEDS team conducted a national sampling survey all over Japan in the 1996 General Election. The current study started to do a panel survey using the same respondents by targeted to the 1998 House of Councilors Election. The panel data worked well to grasp of the essence of the changes after the electoral system renovation. The papers using the data as is shown in references showed how the political upheavals in the late 1990s are influenced by voters'psychological orientation, Japanese political cultural characteristics as well as institutional changes. The JEDS survey data is accessible in WWW (http : //www.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp /pages/ssjda-e/)). It is open to the ICPSR member institutions in English. The data is valuable in the context that Japanese election surveys are not very well available in English. The project proceeded to get snowball samples in 2000. Because of flourishing explorations into the role of "social capital" to produce better democracy, our team tried to catch several aspects of social capital in Japan. As the base of the capital, we assumed social networks surrounding the voters play the crucial role, which necessarily, by using the snowballing technique, to capture exactly in what kind of networks and groups or how they are imbedded. Analyses on the data are still in progress and will be presented in the 2001 American Political Science Association meeting and the 2001 Japanese Society for Election Studies meeting.