Opposition Fragmentation and Turnout in Contemporary Japan

A central puzzle in contemporary Japanese politics is the electoral dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party despite the electorate’s preference for opposition party policies. The Japanese politics literature has suggested that depressed turnout leads to opposition electoral weakness, but the mechanism of this phenomenon remains understudied. In this talk, the argument will be made that opposition fragmentation leads to opposition electoral weakness: when the opposition fragments, it becomes difficult for voters to believe that any one party can unseat the incumbent, thus making it less likely that opposition supporters turn out to vote. Evidence will be provided from a survey experiment conducted around the most recent lower house election in Japan.

Image

Hikaru Yamagishi received her PhD in Political Science from Yale in 2022, and is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Her research focuses on democratic institutions and electoral competition, with a special interest in the case of Japan.