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

本项目为美日联合项目，旨在调查1990年代末日本新选举制度对政治变革的影响。该项目继承了先前由美国国家科学基金会（SBR-9632113）支持的一项名为“JEDS”（日本选举与民主研究）的研究。JEDS小组的成员与目前的项目相同，他们在1996年的议会选举中对日本进行了全国抽样调查。目前的研究以1998年的众议院议员选举为对象，对相同的受访者进行了小组调查。小组数据很好地把握了选举制度改革后变化的本质。使用参考文献所示数据的论文揭示了90年代末的政治动荡如何受到选民心理取向、日本政治文化特征以及制度变迁的影响。jds调查数据可在WWW （https://www.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp /pages/ ssjdae-/）中访问。它以英文向ICPSR成员机构开放。在日本选举调查没有很好地提供英语的背景下，这些数据是有价值的。该项目于2000年开始收集雪球样本。由于对“社会资本”在产生更好的民主中的作用的探索正在蓬勃发展，我们的团队试图捕捉日本社会资本的几个方面。作为首都的基础，我们假设选民周围的社会网络起着至关重要的作用，这必须通过使用滚雪球技术来准确地捕捉到什么样的网络和群体，或者他们是如何嵌入的。对这些数据的分析仍在进行中，并将在2001年美国政治科学协会会议和2001年日本选举研究学会会议上发表。

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.