Abstract
This chapter focuses on the policy preferences of the 2017 election candidates, mainly with regard to free education and national security, two of Prime Minister Shinzō Abe’s key rationales given for the early Diet dissolution and election. The authors find that most candidates basically follow their party’s policies on both issues. However, party unity varies somewhat depending on the issues, and the least united party is the Party of Hope. Candidates from the coalition parties, the LDP and Kōmeitō, share the same views on most issues, apart from the issue of revision of Article 9 of the Constitution.
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Notes
- 1.
Shinzō Abe, Press Conference, September 25, 2017, available at https://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/97_abe/statement/2017/0925kaiken.html (accessed on December 31, 2017).
- 2.
This survey was conducted with the cooperation of Professor Ikuo Kume at Waseda University and Associate Professor Kiichiro Arai at Tokyo Metropolitan University.
- 3.
A violin plot is a combination of a box plot and a kernel density plot, which means it is quite useful when the data distribution is multimodal. The white dot is the median, the thick bar represents the inter-quartile range, and the thin line represents the 95% confidence intervals.
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Arai, K., Nakajo, M. (2018). Survey of Candidates’ Policy Preferences. In: Pekkanen, R., Reed, S., Scheiner, E., Smith, D. (eds) Japan Decides 2017. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76475-7_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76475-7_9
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