Japan Decides 2017 by Robert J. Pekkanen Steven R. Reed Ethan Scheiner & Daniel M. Smith

Author:Robert J. Pekkanen, Steven R. Reed, Ethan Scheiner & Daniel M. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Note: Standard errors in the parentheses. Party-fixed effects are included but not shown. *p < 0.1; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01

There can be a couple of potential counterarguments. First, parties may have both short-term and long-term perspectives. In the short term, parties may like to nominate candidates in as many districts as possible. In the long term, as we have already seen, parties may like to nurture DNLWs as pseudo-district incumbents to challenge invincible opponents and eventually defeat them. Second, parties may think of accumulative effects. Table 10.2 suggests stationing a DNLW for the three years between 2014 and 2017 increases the party’s list vote share by 1.8 percentage points. This means that if a DNLW is able to survive at least on the list component for several rounds of elections, then the effects could be bigger. In other words, DNLWs can be parties’ long-term assets in local areas, even though their short-term list contamination effects may be small.

To sum up, the analysis here offers evidence that parties decentralize list campaigning to nominal candidates and the presence of a candidate is effective in mobilizing support for the party in the list tier. The effect, estimated to be around 4.7% in the simple OLS estimations and 2.0% in the more conservative panel design, may look fairly small, but parties may have long-term perspectives. That is, in the long term, parties may wish to station DNLWs in local districts to expand supporters between elections. Some of the DNLWs may mobilize additional list votes in the subsequent rounds of elections, while others may eventually win nominal districts.

Let us look at how the presence of DNLWs in a given district affects competition patterns. This second set of analyses uses the effective number of candidates at the district level to measure the level of two-party competition.11 Now the observation unit is simply district in 2017. Note that as in the previous analysis, the 91 redistricted districts were excluded from the sample.

The primary independent variable of interest is the number of DNLWs running in a district. Two dichotomous dummy variables, no DNLW and two DNLWs, will be included in the models to capture the incumbency contamination effect, meaning that the baseline is the case in which there is only one DNLW. The argument above suggests that districts with no DNLW should have the smaller number of candidates, while districts with multiple DNLWs should result in the oversupply of candidates.

Other potential variables that might affect the effective number of candidates should include urbanization and open seat. Urbanization is meant to capture social heterogeneity, which should affect the number of candidates in a district. Although Japan is a highly homogeneous society across the 289 districts in terms of culture, religion, and ethnicity, it should be expected that more urban areas should show more heterogeneity, since they face a wider range of political issues than rural areas.12 Whether a district is open should also affect fragmentation at the district level. The absence of a district incumbent might make

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