Voters, Politicians and Public Policy: How Voters’ Interests Turn into Public Policy?

How politicians represent voters has been one of the main themes in political science. As Lijphart’s important study defines, the democratic world can be divided into two categories: Majoritarian and Consensus. Japan experienced the electoral reform in the 1990s and introduced the electoral system with the mixture of SMD and closed-list Proportional Representation. On the one hand, SMD promotes majoritarian style democracy. On the other hand, PR with closed list encourages consensus style democracy. Therefore, we need to investigate which direction Japan is moving toward by analyzing policy making process.
To examine this, we will explore the following questions. How do voters choose politicians? Then how do elected politicians behave in policy making process? This panel will investigate these issues with four presentations which focus on politicians in the Diet of Japan.
First, Nakamura explores how voters with little interest in policy can be encouraged to consider and engage with policy matters. Specifically, he examines the impact of non-policy political experiences and personal relationships between voters and politicians on voters' policy attitudes through a laboratory experiment.
Second, Hakiai examines the electoral cooperation between the LDP and Komeito, focusing on an empirical analysis of how conditions at the district level affect legislators' policy preferences and parliamentary activities.
Third, Kido tries to fill a gap in the existing research by analyzing politicians’ career paths in Japan before they become national parliament members, specifically focusing on their past careers in local politics. His paper will examine how many politicians transition from the prefectural and/or municipal levels to central politics and how they behave in the Diet of Japan.
Finally, Shimizu and Woo examine conditions that lead voters to support open refugee policies utilizing a survey experiment on Japanese voters, who are generally regarded as restrictive against overall immigration. They conduct an experiment combining framing and conjoint.
Kido, who is one of the presenters, will also chair the panel. We will have two discussants, Jang and Nakamura, for this panel. Both are specialists in Japanese Politics who are appropriate to discuss our presentations.