Paper short abstract:

This study estimates the ideologies and dimensions of conflic for subnational elections in Japan through the content analysis of campaign manifestos for national and gubernatorial candidates.

Paper long abstract:

Partisan conflict and ideologies in Japan’s subnational politics have largely been interpreted within the national conservative-progressive cleavage dimension. Following two decades of substantial decentralization and growing autonomy of local governments, however, recent research has paid greater attention and discovered more uniquely “local” dimensions and issues. These include phenomena such as populist neo-liberal chief executives in large cities, rising regionalist identity politics in certain regions like Fukushima and Okinawa, and various policy conflicts between central and subnational governments that go beyond national partisan divides. Despite expanded awareness of such complexities, there is still no systematic understanding of how Japanese subnational politics diverges from the national level in its ideological dimensions. This paper begins to fill this gap by applying content analysis of electoral campaign manifestos (senkyo kōhō) of nearly 400 national and gubernatorial candidates. The unique data set is analysed through two approaches. First, through a supervised learning method, the paper seeks to estimate the closeness of different types of subnational candidates to eight ideological groups (economic/cultural left and right, nativist, populist, feminist, and ecologist) generated from referent manifestos at national level. Second, through an unsupervised learning method, the paper seeks to capture dimensions of conflict in different types of gubernatorial and mayoral elections, comparing those with the national level. Our findings point to the existence of traditional progressive-conservative cleavage, as well as other dimensions which differ by population size of local governments. We also point out the existence of a wide range of ideological positions (including feminist, ecologist, and nativist) among subnational candidates, with differences between subnational candidates based on gender, incumbency, and electoral success.

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