Sociotropic and Pocketbook Politics in Polling in Japan

Abstract

Those perspectives developed to see the angles and motives of voting are used to see how much confidence survey respondents have in institutions: They are (1) prospective perspective (i.e., assessment of prospective macro-economic conditions); (2) retrospective and sociotropic perspective (i.e., assessment of macro-economic conditions and social weather in the recent past), (3) retrospective and pocketbook perspective (i.e., assessment of macro-economic conditions and one’s own pocketbook in the recent past); and (4) affiliated group (i.e., voter’s identification with a certain socio-economic group). Using the Asia-Europe Survey data carried out in 2000 in both 8 countries in Asia and in 9 countries in Europe (in total 15,607 respondents) on such institutions as parliament, parties, government, courts, leaders, police, civil service, military, big business, and mass media, most importantly I have empirically validated the primacy of the retrospective and sociotropic perspective followed by the prospective perspective among 15,607 respondents. Secondly, I have discovered the non-democratically and meritocratically recruited institutions such as courts, police, civil service and military enjoy the high confidence: i.e., having positive responses larger than negative responses from all the four perspectives.

The original version of this chapter was revised. An erratum to this chapter can be found at DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2305-7_13